Well, really not that hard at all.
Preparing dessert from rejected but delicious fruits at the Feeding the 5000 event in Nantes on September 25, 2014.
Since the first Feeding the 5000 event was held in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2009, these inspiring campaigns to shine a light on the incredible global food waste have "mushroomed" from Paris to Dublin, Manchester, Sydney, Amsterdam, Brussels, and other cities across the globe. Inspired by the hard-to-swallow reality that roughly one-third of the edible parts of food produced for human consumption — about 1.3 billion tons per year — gets lost or wasted globally, these large public events rescue food that normally would be wasted at farms, groceries and restaurants and turn it into stews and curries for up to 5,000 people.
Feeding the 5000 is coming to the United States for the first time!
Next Wednesday, October 22, from 11 to 2pm at The Pit and Top of Lenoir Dining Hall, Carolina Dining Services team members at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill will serve veggie curry, Brunswick Stew, Jamaican Fish Chowder, and Fruit Cobblers, all gleaned from salvaged fruit and vegetables left to rot at farms around North Carolina due to retailer’s strict cosmetic standards or to overproduction.
Feeding the 5K founder Tristram Stuart will be at the event in Oakland to call attention to the global food waste scandal.
Last year, I was personally initiated into the miracle of volunteers gleaning perfectly edible but deemed unsellable food, prepping it, cooking it, and serving it to an arena-sized crowd of appreciative locals. Attending the Ecocity World Summit in Nantes, France, I got to witness first-hand the amazing energy of a Feeding the 5000 event.
Follow me below the orange peeler for some thoughts and impressions.