How to actually feed America - by Caroline Sutton

We hope all of our U.S. readers enjoyed a happy Thanksgiving yesterday. Today we’re sharing a guest post from our Assistant Editor Caroline Sutton on an innovative system for getting donated food to the places it’s needed most. One of Susannah Morgan’s early memories from her years running the Food Bank of Alaska involves a truckload of pickles she never wanted. Not jars of pickles, either — five-gallon buckets. Accepting them meant paying $5,000 to ship that heavy load across the Gulf of Alaska. Rejecting them meant losing her place in line and waiting who-knows-how-long to be offered another donation from Feeding America, a clearinghouse that collects surplus food from grocery stores, producers, and farms and routes it through a national network of food banks like hers. In that moment, she was forced to choose between wasting scarce resources or wasting scarce opportunities. For decades, this was simply how the largest charitable food network in the United States functioned. Food ban

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