One Los Angeles nonprofit is turning food waste from the movie industry and other sources into a resource for the community, Food Tank reported.
Everyday Action was founded in fall 2020 by former assistant directors Hillary Cohen and Samantha Luu.
"The only way Sam and I have built this is because we're assistant directors who can do 700 things at once," Cohen told Food Tank. "An assistant director always says yes and figures it out."
"Planning things on a massive scale, being in charge of reallocating waste, that's easy for me and Sam," Cohen added. "It's allowed for Everyday Action to grow faster than other spaces, because we are such big do-er type humans."
Everyday Action collects the surplus food from film and TV sets, grocery stores, and other sources and then distributes it to food-insecure residents of Los Angeles — a city where 16% of the population struggles with poverty and the cost of living is twice the national average. In other words, this nonprofit turns what would be food waste into a resource.
Food waste is a major problem. All the resources that go into food — the land allocated to farms and factories, the water for crops and livestock, the energy for processing, the materials for packaging, and the pollution for shipping — count for nothing if the food doesn't get eaten.
We have to do it all again to replace the food, costing people money and putting pressure on a planet stretched thin to support our wasteful society.
By redirecting high-quality food waste — not rotten or unappetizing food but excess that would have been unnecessarily thrown out — to fill hungry mouths instead, we solve several problems. We reduce the strain on food production, ensure fewer people go hungry, and save space in landfills.
Some for-profit companies, including Too Good To Go and Martie, also offer food at a discount to divert it from landfills. However, Everyday Action is special for bringing food to the people least able to afford it themselves, and with access to a new warehouse space, it will be able to do more than ever before.
"It's a problem that can be solved, and it needs to be solved," Cohen said.
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