The primary goal is to diminish hunger in America. There are secondary and tertiary goals it reduces pollution.
How does it do that?
I'm glad you asked me that question! And by the way, this is not just me speaking. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now lists AmpleHarvest.org on their website as a resource to diminish food waste. The EPA is really getting on a big thing about wasted food and the environmental impact.
When you grow more food than you can use and you let it stay in the garden, there are a couple of the things that might happen. Number one you may let it rot in the garden. Okay, It's going to be recycled back into dirt but it's going to be wasted, which is too bad. Number two you may compost it. Not bad; but again, it's a waste of food, but you are recycling it. Number three, and really bad, is: you throw it in the trash. And when you [do that], which is what a lot of people do, in places where they can't compost or they're not allowed to... When it goes into the trash, you've increase the waste stream, which can increase your taxes.
Good point there.
Number two - Once it gets into the landfill, it increases the load on the landfill. And here's the worst part. Number three - A pound of produce and it doesn't matter if it's garden produce or the shavings from the carrots in the kitchen a pound of produce in the trash dump produces a pound of methane. Methane is a global warming gas, twenty times worse than C02. So, if you throw away a pound of whatever it is, a pound of extra tomatoes, you're producing the equivalent, effectively, of twenty pounds of C02 into the atmosphere.
So, if we can
extrapolate from this, if that was the choice someone were going to make, that
person would be better off not home gardening at all.
From that perspective, yes. But the ideal is, instead, to take the food that they've grown and instead of throwing it away, you harvest it at its peak (just because you don't want it doesn't mean that someone else doesn't want it) and donate it to someone else. Here's an important thing to consider and this dawned on me during one of my recent bike rides. I do my best thinking on a bike because all the blood leaves my brain and goes to my legs!
When you have a country in which one in six people are not getting enough food, it's like using a flashlight with half-dead batteries. You've got the light but you're certainly not getting all the brilliance you should be getting out of it. If you feed the people in this country better, both in terms of volume and in terms of the quality of the food, you're going to have both a better America and certainly a healthier America. If kids don't go to school hungry, if people are not growing up obese or with high blood pressure or diabetes, or what have you, you've got a better America.
Last
year, when I rolled this out, the Huffington Post brought up something that
never crossed my mind. This was in
the middle of the Congressional debate on the President's health care plan. The
Huffington Post said that, in the long run, getting this healthier food into
the pantries will lower the long-term health costs in the country. I never
thought about it and they were absolutely right. The canned produce that
pantries get are -number one, forget the higher carbon footprint from the
canned goods. The vegetables are almost always packaged in salt and the fruit
is almost always packaged in sugar. So, it's going to be excess salt or excess
sugar in your diet, both of which have deleterious long-term effects on your
well-being.
In addition to that, kids who, for the first time, bite into a fresh carrot, as opposed to biting into mushy canned carrots, or kids who bite into a fresh apple, instead of getting the sliced apples in the cellophane package from McDonald's may well decide they actually like eating fresh food better than eating junk food. So, you get to possibly change the eating habits of some of our younger people and again, that's good for the country in the long run, as well as being good for them individually.
There are a whole bunch of benefits that spawn off of AmpleHarvest.org, in terms of feeding people, long-term health and nutrition, and the environment and it doesn't cost society a dime. This is not where people have to spend money to make things happen. This is where - and this is all over our website where you reach into your back yard instead of your back pocket to help your neighbors in need. We have the wealth in our home gardens. And it's simply a question of salvaging that wealth and donating it to a pantry.
This is a country that has had a history of people acquiring massive amounts of wealth and then donating it. Look at Carnegie, look at Rockefeller, look at Gates. These are people who really didn't start out rich. But they built railroads or institutions or computer software and they became famously rich and then they gave most of it away. You're in Chicago and I don't know what's there. But, in New York, most of the public libraries were built by Carnegie.
If you think about it for a minute, when you plant a seed from a packet that cost you 99 cents, and you suddenly end up with tens of dollars worth of produce coming out of that seed, you've created your own wealth. And, just like Carnegie or Rockefeller or Gates, you get the opportunity to give some of your wealth away to make your community, your country, better. So we're not talking about on the scale of what these rich people did. Nonetheless, I think that turning a packet of seeds into produce, much of which you should be eating yourself. (I'm not advocating that you starve.) But [when] you give away the excess, just like these people did, we end up with a better country. And you feel good about what you've done and you've done good.
Where did this simple but brilliant idea come from in the first place?
It evolved over time. The tipping point was in 2008. I was asked to take over a community garden here in West Milford. I'm a Master Gardener, I'm also a Rutgers environmental steward. And I also hate waste. I was asked to take over a community garden that already existed. When I went through the emails and the notes, one of the things that jumped out at me was that toward the end of the growing season, people were leaving a lot of produce in the garden. People were going on vacation, they were bored, whatever. And we had a meeting, and these were the exact words: "If we're going to have an ample harvest, the least we can do is give it away." That just rolled off my tongue.
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