No Mouth Goes Unfed Law

This proposed law, is to help eliminate waste, while helping feed local homeless citizens in the area, and encouraging them to help pitch in to the shelters’ resources. “Every year, the United States throws away one-third of all the produces. 133 billion pounds of food. And grocery stores are responsible for tossing 10% of that food” (Harrison Jacob, 15 Oct 2014). That’s 11.1 billion pounds every month, or 37 million a day, which comes out to 740,000 pounds per day by each state. So what the solution? My proposition would be a no waste law; starting at grocery stores and eventually moving its way to the citizens. I propose that all grocery stores, donate all ‘consumable waste’ nightly to local homeless shelters. After the food is taken to homeless shelters it would then be sorted out, and if the food is truly bad, have the homeless shelter use that food to make compost to either use in a shelters garden or sell back to the public to help the shelter make a little extra money.
The underlining question here is, how does one logistically plan this out where the expense is worth the effort? Because right away I can tell you, no business wants to make an extra expense to ‘take out the trash’, especially when the dumpster is right outside. Well in order to make something better, it has to start somewhere. One organization had already paved the way for this motion and I think we can expand on it. Below is an excerpt from the Starbuck community page on their mission and the scale value it went to helping the cause.
“In the spirit of Our Mission and Values, partners across the country advocated for a solution to donate unsold food to the communities we serve. Through a new and unique strategic partnership with Feeding America, we will rescue 100% of food available to donate from all of our U.S. stores, positioning Starbucks as the sector leader in food rescue” (Starbucks.com, Foodshare).
How has this act of kindness made things better? 50 million meal will be provided annually, and 60 million pounds of food will be diverted from the landfills (Starbucks.com, Foodshare). If one organization can make an impact this big, image if it became mandatory, and the larger list of achievements on a wider scale.
So how much is the cost? Doing the math I found a truck company’s average pricing, is by the mile; which came out to $2.17. I then calculated the average amount of miles between each shopping center and the nearest shelter (6 grocery stores all with-in 3.5 miles of each other and the nearest shelter) which comes out to $7.59 a day which is $227.85 monthly. Then add drivers charge and hourly (or salary for this case) which is an additional $4,699.50 for the driver; plus the $227.85= $4927.35, divided by the 6 shelters is an average expense of $821.30 a store. So the delivery cost of this kind act truly is inexpensive, and just like Starbucks to save money the truck would stop at all the grocery stores on the way, instead of having a truck per store. How is an ‘extra expense’ really that bad when you can help out the local struggling population? According to FeedingAmerica.org, in 2015 alone 43.1 million people were in poverty in the United States, 24.4 million of those people were ages 18-64, 14.5 million of those people were children under the age of 18, and 4.2 million were seniors 65 and older. We have to come together and help the community. They say we are only as strong as the weakest link. The limits of this world is in our own hands, the more we resist to help each other, the more we are resisting for a better world to live in.