Did you know? One-third of the world's available food never makes it from farm to table.
That's enough food to feed all the 1.2 billion hungry or undernourished people on the planet. And it’s a practice that is unsustainable given that 2 billion more people are expected to live on the planet by 2050.
That's why The Rockefeller Foundation teamed up with Feedback to take food waste #OffTheMenu.
Over the past two weeks, more than 10,000 meals were served in New York and Washington, D.C. from food that would otherwise be wasted.
Feeding the 5000
New York City
On Tuesday, May 10, Feedback brought Feeding the 5000 to Union Square in New York City in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation and a coalition of organizations including City Harvest, NRDC, the NYC Mayor's Office of Sustainability, and the NYC Office of the Food Policy Director.
Top food tastemakers like chef Dan Barber, chef Jason Weiner, and chef Evan Hanczor joined Feeding the 5000 to cook more than 5,000 meals for hungry New Yorkers. The chefs served Root-atouille and Quick Pickle Salad made from locally-sourced surplus ingredients.
The event was an effort to shed light on food waste in the U.S. and around the globe, and how consumers can help bring sustainable solutions to the table.
"Supermarkets, in particular, must recognize that it's no longer acceptable to discard food in dumpsters and cause farmers to waste crops while people go hungry. It's up to us—the public—to recognize that every forkful, trip to the fridge, or visit to a grocery store is an opportunity to take a stand against food waste." – Tristram Stuart, Founder of Feedback
During the event, Rockefeller Foundation Vice President Zia Khan discussed how we can change consumer mindset around food waste.
"Programs like Feeding the 5000 push us to take a reckoning of our relationship with food and our understanding of waste, creating something delicious and nutritious out of what we carelessly toss away." – Dr. Zia Khan,
The Rockefeller Foundation
Chew on this:
- 1.2 billion people around the world are food insecure—roughly double the population of Europe.
- Every year, food loss and waste cost the global economy more than the 2015 profits of the Fortune 500, combined.
- The third highest producer of greenhouse gas isn't a country—it's food waste.
Feeding the 5000 New York showed thousands of consumers how food waste negatively impacts our people, profits and planet, and encouraged them to pledge to take food waste off the menu.
Feeding the 5000
Washington, D.C.
On Wednesday, May 18, Feeding the 5000 moved to Woodrow Wilson Plaza in Washington, D.C. The Rockefeller Foundation once again joined Feedback and local partners including DC Central Kitchen, The Campus Kitchens Project, EPA, USDA, and United Nations Environment Programme to bring the event to life.
Local chefs José Andrés and Spike Mendelsohn joined the event to cook up tasty solutions to food waste.
From a giant paella to a vegetable curry, more than 5,000 meals were served using ingredients that would otherwise be wasted.
Feeding the 5000 D.C. showed consumers in our nation's Capital how to tackle food waste at every level, whether at home, while dining out, within retail supply chains, and across many other sectors.
What are we serving up next?
The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored these Feeding the 5000 events as part of our broader efforts to tackle food security in the U.S. and around the world. In January, we launched YieldWise, an all-inclusive solution for tackling food waste and food loss from farm to table. The goal of the initiative is to demonstrate how the world can halve food loss by 2030.
Food waste is a global issue, but it's also deeply personal. Find out how you can cut food waste from farm to fork.
