Local food rescue inspires change

A private member’s resolution on food rescue that was introduced in the legislature last month, has drawn support from local food rescue advocates, though they stress the importance of tailoring solutions to the needs of individual communities.

Introduced by Mike Moroz, an NDP MLA for River Heights, the resolution was a call to the provincial and federal governments to address corporate food waste and support efforts to redistribute a surplus of good food that might otherwise be thrown away. Moroz suggested to the legislature that food producers, distributors, and businesses could be offered incentives to donate their excess food, instead of sending it to landfills.

“This really is ultimately a conversation between various levels of government, the food sector, and nonprofits to find the best path forward to ensuring that there is little or no food waste within the system,” Moroz told the Sun in an interview.

Moroz said that he introduced the resolution because of high rates of child poverty and people struggling to make ends meet in the province, while food is being wasted on a provincial and national scale.

“More food is wasted than is actually consumed which seems like an unbelievable tragedy,” he said, adding that he hopes that an important issue like access to food doesn’t become a partisan issue.

Moroz also mentioned in his resolution, Brandon’s Food Rescue Grocery store’s model of accepting excess food from retail and warehouse distributors and selling that “rescued” food to community members at a discounted price.

“How is it possible that we are throwing out food, huge quantities of food, while some Manitobans go to bed hungry and almost all Manitobans face some form of anxiety over their future access to healthy food?” Ted Dzogan, the Food Rescue Store’s food rescue extraordinaire told the Sun.

Dzogan was in the gallery of the legislature when the resolution was presented and said it has set the stage for people who are willing to talk about food waste and work on solutions to the issue.

“One of the reasons the food rescue store has been successful, is we actually listen to people in the supply chain, the producers, the truckers, retailers, and they tell us about their pain, and then we come up with a way for them to feel less pain, but still play ball with us,” he said.

Many donors to the Food Rescue Grocery Store don’t want to be identified, Dzogan said, as some of the excess food they receive is from a miscommunication or a mistake, like a restaurant ordering a double shipment of milk in error, or another shipment of a product arriving but the sales on that product are down.

He explained that the Food Rescue Grocery Store works to accommodate donors’ needs, even if it means putting in extra effort to move the products into unmarked boxes just to ensure that the donor’s need for privacy is met. Dzogan said that it’s important that people in the food distribution chain are not punished for such mistakes, rather there is an easy path for those people to divert their excess food, quickly and easily.

“We’re talking about provincial legislation, but we’re also talking about spearheading something that could be bigger,” Dzogan told the Sun. “We need to create opportunities for social agencies and private partners to work together in a way that fits their community best.”

Jennifer MacRae, Manitoba food rescue and emissions reductions project manager of Climate Change Connection, agrees that food rescue will look different in different communities but said that the Brandon store model is a model that is scalable, and is something she has been trying to implement in Winnipeg.

She says that work needs to be done on creating the infrastructure for food rescue organizations to be able to quickly receive and store excess food and a process that makes it easier for distributors to donate their excess food rather than sending it to the landfill.

“We just need a better storage solution that’s safe and can give time to some of these service agencies to be more efficient [and] less reactive, but also to present a pain free option for retailers and suppliers that is confidential, that is quick [and] reliable,” MacRae said.

She also emphasized how food rescue tackles two massive problems — poverty and climate change. When food rots in landfills, she explained, it produces methane gas, which traps more heat in the atmosphere per molecule than carbon dioxide, making it more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide.

According to Second Harvest, a Canadian food rescue organization, nearly 60 per cent of food produced for Canadians is lost and wasted annually, and 32 per cent of that, or 11.2 million tonnes of that food is edible and could be redirected to the dinner tables of families.

“There’s a huge potential here for our government to tackle two issues that they say they want to tackle — climate change and poverty,” MacRae said. “And we know that hungry communities are not safe communities. And this is good food, it’s not food that is rotting, it’s not food that’s mouldy, it’s perfectly good food that is overproduced, or gets stuck in transit, or doesn’t meet store acceptability standards.”

Meanwhile, as the resolution will return to the legislature for more debate, Dzogan hopes that the next step will be for a working group of government agencies and those in the public and private sector who produce, transport and retail food.

“Do not legislate one way to do things,” he said. “Open the door for people, so they have the tools to solve a problem.”

» gmortfield@brandonsun.com

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