One lunch changed Komal Ahmad's life
It was 2011. She had just come back from Navy summer training and was attending the University of California at Berkeley to start work on her undergraduate degree.
While she was walking near campus one fall day, a homeless man approached her, asking for money to buy food because he was hungry. Instead of giving him cash, Ahmad invited the man to lunch. As they ate, he told her his story. He was a soldier recently returned from Iraq and had a bad turn of luck.
"He'd already gone on two deployments and now he's come back, he's 26 and on the side of the road begging for food," Ahmad said. "It just blew my mind."
It bothered her so much that she decided to do something about it. Within a few months, Ahmad set up a program at UC Berkeley that allowed the school's dining halls to donate excess food to local homeless shelters. That program then expanded to 140 college campuses across the US in about three years.
Ahmad, now 25 years old and CEO of a nonprofit service called Feeding Forward, is looking to expand even more into what she calls on-demand food recovery.
Through a website and mobile app, Feeding Forward matches businesses that have surplus food with nearby homeless shelters. Here's how it works: when companies or event planners have surplus food, they tap the Feeding Forward app and provide details of their donation. A driver is dispatched to quickly pick up the leftovers and deliver them to food banks.
"Imagine a football stadium filled to its brim," Ahmad said. "That's how much food goes wasted every single day in America."
Excess food is a serious issue in the US. After paper, food scraps are the nation's second largest source of waste, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Leftovers fill 18 percent of landfills and make up over 30 million tons of what is sent to dumps each year. When cut off from oxygen, the organic matter creates methane gas and contributes to global warming.
Feeding Forward Indiegogo Campaign Video
Feeding Forward harnesses the power of technology to connect those with surplus food to feed those in need, instantly.
One in six Americans do not know where their next meal will come from, while over 40% of food in the United States is wasted. This amounts to a daily loss of over 263 million pounds of consumable food, equivalent to $165 billion dollars.
Food waste not only hurts our planet, but our wallets as well. Worst of all, this discarded food could be used to help feed the 50 million Americans who go hungry every single day.
Click here to watch this video
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