20. AmpleHarvest.org (Fighting Food Waste & Food Insecurity) | Gary Oppenheimer

Learn how to fight food waste & food insecurity right in your own backyard!

Garry Oppenheimer created AmpleHarvest.org to help gardeners donate fresh produce to local food pantries. Food pantries get just-in-time fresh produce to hungry families in a day or two -instead one to two weeks- and gardeners get to avoid the dilemma of what to do with excess harvest after their family & friends have all been fed.

Up until AmpleHarvest.org, many small food pantries couldn’t provide fresh produce because they didn’t have the funds or space to purchase costly refrigeration units. Gary solves two of the most pressing issues in our food system!

Recognition:

-Nominated for a World Food Prize

-CNN Hero

-Invited to the White House’s Peoples Garden by Michelle Obama

-Point of Light Award

-TedX Manhattan (Link to video)

AmpleHarvest.org (Link)

Info@ampleharvest.org

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Transcript

Garry Oppenheimer (00:00.364)
What everybody has heard forever has been at every food drive, jars, cans, boxes, no fresh food. So we gardeners presumed you couldn't donate food. And the food pantries, by the way, presumed they couldn't accept it because they they needed additional refrigeration and storage. The bottom line was that the problem America was facing, it kept me as a gardener from donating and you as a food pantry from accepting, was misinformation and missing information. It wasn't a food problem, it an information problem.

You're a gardener with too many tomatoes, you come to Ample Harvest to learn how put in your zip code. Up come up the food pantries near you that are eager to accept the food. And once you have found one near you that you want to donate to, I've actually solved your two problems. You no longer need us. For the rest of your gardening life, you'll be donating surplus food to that food pantry. It's as simple as that.

Jollie (00:56.75)
More than 73 % of Americans have overweight or obesity, while more than 12 % have food insecurity. America is getting heavier, sicker, and more isolated from each other every day. Our motto, Eat, Give, reflects our belief that virtually every problem in America could be fixed if we took better care of ourselves and took better care of each other. Welcome to Interrupt Hunger's Move, Give podcast, where we talk with experts in exercise is medicine, food is medicine, and food insecurity.

And understanding that knowledge isn't always enough to help you lose weight. Every other episode showcases someone who's lost at least 10 % body weight to share exactly how they did it. Interrupt Hunger is a 501c3 nonprofit, which helps you lose weight while feeding the hungry. Bring our free 12 week weight loss challenge and donate your weight program to the places you live, work and pray. We fund our mission with sales from our movie, give bracelets and clothing. So please visit us at interrupthunger.org to show your support.

50 meals are donated for every item sold to the nation's largest hunger relief network. So get to look good while feeling good. Now onto today's episode.

Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here. And maybe I should start with the name.

Alright, great place to go. Yeah, go for it.

Garry Openheimer (02:30.774)
I was invited or asked to be the director of a community garden in the town I live in, in West Milford, New Jersey, Northern New Jersey, back in 2008. And when I met with the people who were already in the community garden, and we had an early meeting, one of the people, who's a school teacher in this town, by the way, said she was really disappointed from past seasons because people, as the growing season went on, people were bored, overwhelmed, went on vacation.

and food started rotting in the garden. And she felt that was a terrible idea. And the next thing I'm about to say is just what rolled out of my mouth. I had never used the phrase before, but I said, if we're going to have an ample harvest, the least we can do is get to people who really need it. And I had never said the phrase ample harvest before. People love the idea and the vision basically was put together as you, the people in the garden.

figure out how you're going to organize this within the garden. I'll go out and try to find food pantries in the town or in the community that would want to take the food. I had already been donating some of my surplus harvests to a local battered woman shelter in my town. I knew there were food pantries in this. This town is 80 square miles. It's like 28,000 people.

that went on Google and Google said, the nearest food pantry to you is 25 miles away in Amorstown, New Jersey. And I said, I knew that was wrong because my town had food pantries. And what I was learning as a result of that is that it was difficult to find food pantries. And I'm one of the early people in computers and the internet. And if I'm going to have troubles finding food pantries, so somebody, anybody else. And so we put a program together in the community garden called Ample Harvest. The idea was that

the gardeners would set aside indicators with little flags on their garden plots saying if they wanted certain crops or maybe all of the crops in a particular gardener section to be donated. And once a week, volunteers in the garden would come around and collect the stuff and it would be donated. that started off really well, but in one morning in March of 2009, I woke up and I realized if this garden in this town,

Speaker 1 (04:39.246)
is having this problem finding food pantries. What about every other town? What about every other community garden? And by nature, I'm a problem solver and I'm very much out of the box thinker. People think I don't even see the box. And I woke up March 9th, I think of 2009 with an idea. And I sat down on my computer on PowerPoint and I mapped out a vision of what we were doing in this community garden.

How does it work on a national level? In a four hour session, I mapped out what became and is today AmpleHarvest.org. Now, part of me donating food to a food pantry is I hate waste. I grew up with finished what's on your plate, kids are starving in Europe, post-war baby. So I waste, I hate wasting time, money, energy, food, et cetera. So when I did this PowerPoint presentation to myself, I then went out and found AmpleHarvest.org was a

an available domain. So I bought it for $9. $9. That's great. So now I'm stuck because I hate waste. And I spent the $9 and I couldn't let the $9 go to waste. I had to move forward with the project. That's absolutely the true story. So I set about to put this together and I found two volunteers, two web designers to help me. I had the vision and they executed on it.

And over a period of a couple of months, they built what I outlined. The woman who was working on the team, her name is Maureen, did the whole front end. looked beautiful. And Josh did the dorky stuff, the data engine and everything else. So the way I described the people, if Maureen did it, it looks good. If Josh did it, it's what makes it work. And if you can read it, it's what I did. So May 18th of 2009, it was ready and I rolled it out.

And at that point it wasn't a nonprofit and it wasn't anything. It was just an aging geek with an idea, but it took off like crazy. So this is the summer of 2009. The East Coast has had a cold, wet spring. So the potato and tomato crop in the East wasn't doing well because of the different fungi that were attacking it. It was also when there was a, the economy had got into a dip, but the food pantries loved the idea. I did a lot of guerrilla marketing and

Speaker 1 (07:01.294)
150 days later, which just happened to be World Food Day, the 1000th food pantry signed up. The pantries desperately wanted the fresh food. And I knew gardeners, and again, this is not an organized nonprofit, it's just me doing this. Fast forward April 2010, I founded, I actually incorporated as a nonprofit called ampleharvest.org, except to the IRS, the IRS for ample harvest org, because the IRS doesn't like.

punctuation in legal names. In December of 2011, I'm invited to the White House for the White House holiday party with the Obamas. And I ultimately had seven visits. mean, Michelle Obama was then running a program called Let's Move, which encouraged people both to exercise and to eat better. But for the then 42 million people who were going to a food pantry,

You can eat better when you want, if you don't have access to fresh food, nothing happens. So she loved ampleharvest.org. Sam Casco ran Let's Move for her and I became friends and he was the White House chef. He was known for that. But so on February, I think it was 2012, Michelle Obama announces the on the first anniversary of the Let's Move initiative or the speech given in Florida. And her team had called me up and said, Gary, you want to watch this video? So I did.

and I recorded it, and she's talking about Let's Move. And then she's talking about a program called Ample Harvest that is enabling gardeners to donate food to food pantries that are a partnership with the then National Council of Churches. First of all, I went screaming down to my wife and said, wow, look at what happened. And then I thought about it. You said, you know something? She said, Ample Harvest. I'm going let this one slide. That's fine.

Cool.

Speaker 1 (08:51.884)
So she's the only person, and by the way, she subsequently wrote about ampleharvest.org or what she said was ample harvest. She wrote a beautiful book called American Grown. It was a tabletop, beautiful book. I have an autographed copy about the White House Kitchen Garden. And there's a whole outtake in there about ample harvest and I'll put it in the .org. So for everybody, it's ampleharvest.org. But the idea was very simply to create an information-based solution to hunger and food waste to enable-

Today, 62 million people who garden, who grow an estimated 11 billion pounds of surplus food a year, that's enough to feed 28 million people, to learn that they can be able to donate and to enable them to donate, and then we get out of their way. Yeah.

I love this story. This is random. Yeah. And I do remember back, back in the day, how, how much emphasis Michelle Obama was putting on physical activity and gardening and the people's garden there at the white house. Yeah, that's, that's pretty cool. So I want to ask you like the specifics, like get into like how ample harvest works. my gosh, I did it again. You're not Michelle Obama. Ampleharvest.org. So, so this is a really cool random factoid. So talk to me back in

What? Apple harvest.org.

Speaker 2 (10:09.358)
I think it was like 1986. You were the first to do something that we see all the time, right? You talked to me about newsletters. is random.

This is cool. So let me take a step back. I came out of college with a degree in psychology and immediately upon graduating did nothing with it, which both my wife and I think my daughter agreed makes the world better. But I had fallen in love with programming. I taught myself programming on then mini computers, we called them in college. Came out of college and immediately started doing computer programming on mini computers for the banks in New York City. I then said, I'm going to take some time off. I did this in

in 87, no, I'm sorry, I'm wrong about that, in 70, 1977, said I'm to take a break and travel around the country. And I did, and I came back, and two things happened. A, I couldn't find a place I wanted to live, so I ended up living on a boat in Manhattan on the Hudson River. But B, I was doing some programming on what were then called personal computers, I'm sorry, micro computers, which were the precursor to what we today call a personal computer. And out of the blue, I get a

call from a woman who I'm still friends with today who said, I want to meet with you to talk about an opportunity. And so I go to the office at Penn Station in New York City and I meet with a lady named Leslie Lampe who was from the then fledgling email service called MCI Mail. And this was pre-internet. So this is the days of the early commercial services, EasyLink, ATT Mail, MCI Mail, CompuServe.

She had heard about me. She said she couldn't tell me how. years later I've asked her and she said she didn't remember how, but she said they were looking for agents for people to sell the service. And I said, sure. And I remember one of her closing comments was, don't quit your day job yet, but if you're good, you can make a lot of money. So 1980, I think, 84, 85, I started as a sales representative for MCI mail, working off my boat on the Hudson River.

Speaker 1 (12:18.7)
and I'm selling email service. And again, this is the day when you paid for emails. with NCIS, I actually paid for every email you sent. And that was just their model. And then I would get stuff in the mail from them. I would get in the mail, you know, a user guide, I'd get in the mail, brochures. And I started thinking to myself, wait a minute, this is an email service that's sending me stuff, paper stuff.

Living the dream.

Speaker 1 (12:42.06)
And I came to the realization that MCI Mail was a communications company that wasn't communicating effectively with its own customers. So I sat down and just like I had that epiphany years later about ampleharvest.org when I did a PowerPoint presentation with MCI Mail, I simply sat down and wrote a newsletter. I said, here's addressed to my own customers. And I started writing right here, things you can do, hints and tricks and this and that. And I came up with a very clever in my mind acronym for the name. was going to be the pen.

newsletter, pen being an acronym for a periodic electronic newsletter. From then until the early 90s, I think 50 or 60 editions of the pen newsletter came out. Wikipedia says it was the first ever electric newsletter. I did not invent spam that was done by a law firm, but I also invented an opt out option because before the newsletter would go out, I would write the newsletter. Of course, I had a table of contents.

And I sent to all of my customers a short email saying, this is the newsletter that's going to come out. Here's the table of contents. If you don't want to receive it, just let me know. Otherwise you're going to get it. And so there's like occasionally people would say, no, I don't want to see, but most people got it. And as it turned out, so I gave people that opt out capability. And as time went on, it became widespread throughout the MCI mail world, sales representatives globally and domestically started resending it because it was a great source of information.

And to this day, I still have it. It's up on Wikipedia. It's on some other sites. So yes, I invented the electronic newsletter. I did not invent spam, but it speaks to the way my mind works of connecting the dots with the newsletter. I wanted to connect the users of an electronic mail service to the service by way of information electrically provided to them. It was cost free. It was fast. It was efficient and was good for the environment.

moved forward to 2009, connecting to the gardeners to the food pantry. It is free to the gardeners, it's free for the food pantries, it's good for the planet, it's good for the people, it's good for the community, it's good for the country. But again, it was simply connecting that. So that's how my mind has always been wired towards efficiency. And again, going back to the idea of not wasting what MCI Mail was doing with mailing out the booklets and this and that was wasting paper, wasting money. And I came up with a non-waste solution.

Speaker 2 (15:03.606)
I love that the exact same systems, just different situations.

Yeah, the difference is that the newsletter was there to promote a commercial service, MCI mail. I mean, was making money on it, MCI was making money on it. AmpleHarvest.org is not there to promote a commercial service. They're really to make a societal change using social innovation. The issue is this, if you're a gardener, and I want to be clear, talking about gardeners and not farmers. So a gardener is somebody who grows food for pleasure,

A gardener grows food for profit. If you're a gardener, you've put all that love into growing the garden. You know how great your food is. You know, you put all that love in it. And so you hate to see that food go to waste. And everybody knows there's hunger in the community. What everybody has also heard forever has been at every food drive, jars, cans, boxes, no fresh food. So we gardeners presumed you couldn't donate food.

And the food pantries, by the way, presumed they couldn't accept it because they thought they needed additional refrigeration and storage. The bottom line was that the problem America was facing, it kept me as a gardener from donating and you as a food pantry from accepting, was misinformation and missing information. It wasn't a food problem, it an information problem. The misinformation is you can't donate food. The missing information is where and when to donate it. This is not terribly different, by the way, from Uber and Lyft, who I...

who while you may think of as transportation companies aren't. They're solving the missing information problem. A person looking for a ride doesn't know where to find the cab. The cab looking for the passenger doesn't know where to find the rider. It's an information problem. Solve that information problem if a very highly efficient vehicle forgetting, forgive the pun, forgetting a person to where they want to go. They solved a transportation problem using information.

Speaker 1 (16:58.1)
AmpleHarvest.org solves a hunger and food waste problem addressing the misinformation and missing information. So addressing the misinformation is a large scale effort of outreach to the gardening community across America. Telling you that yes, you can donate the food. I have a massive year over year grant from Google to help with that. Social media, traditional media, a podcast like this.

There's no one way to reach gardeners. Solving the missing information, where do I donate and when, that involved setting up a nationwide search engine of food pantries, he could receive the food populated by the food pantries themselves. That's what you see on the website. know, get pantries come to Ample Harvested Orang, they put in all their information, their days are over, where they're located, how to contact us, this, this, this. You're a gardener with too many tomatoes, you come to Ample Harvested Orang, you put in your zip code.

Up come up the food pantries near you that are eager to accept the food. And once you have found one near you that you want to donate to, I've actually solved your two problems. Misinformation is gone. Missing information is gone. You no longer need us. For the rest of your gardening life, you'll be donating surplus food to you, to that food pantry. It's as simple as that. So we never touch the food. We're the conduit that connects the food pantry.

to the source of food in the community. And the refrigeration issue is addressed by virtue of, I introduced for the first time ever into the food system, just in time inventory logic. And so if you're unfamiliar with what that is, it's common in business when, this is obviously hyperbole, when Boeing is making an airplane, they don't want the wings to be delivered until the fuselage is built and they're to attach the wings to the fuselage.

That's just-in-time inventory logic. That was obviously an exaggeration, but in the case of ampleharvest.org, if your food pantry is only open on Sundays to distribute food, if a gardener shows up on a Monday, you got to refrigerate the food for a week. But if the gardener is told a day of the week and time of day to donate, ideally a few hours before the hungry families come in, the food goes from my garden to the food pantry to the hungry family on a same-day basis.

Speaker 1 (19:13.794)
The pantry does not need refrigeration and storage, and the hungry family is getting food that is by every stretch of the definition of the word garden fresh. And it is fresher than you and I can buy in a supermarket. So that's the model, again, entirely information driven.

Yeah, this is a problem that the, solved a problem that has been painting, troubling both backyard gardeners and food pantries since either one existed. The very first person I told, one of my friends who's been a backyard gardener for a while, told her that I was going to have you on the podcast and told her all about the ample harvest.org. And she's like, my gosh, that's, she's like, I love this. She's like,

This has been one of the biggest concerns of Backyard Gardening because she always has leftover produce that just goes to waste. it's been, it's just, it's just, you could tell talking to her, it just pained her to throw this away, whether it became compost or whatever, but it was going to waste. She didn't know what to do with it or how to efficiently get it out there. And you have solved this and one foul swoop that is as easy as it could possibly be.

is. And the EPA actually some years ago came up with a hierarchy for food. What do you do with food? Now the highest level is human consumption. That's the highest level. If you can't use it for human consumption, animal consumption, give it to a farmer. If you can't use it for animal consumption, I'm sorry, compost it. If for some reason it can't be composted, use it for biofuel. Make energy out of it.

Lastly, throw it in the trash. You don't want food in the trash because reality is that wasted food is a huge, I think it's a number three contributor to climate change. So the gardeners who have put all this love into their garden have always hated wasting the food. I always tell people that the best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow. They spent all their time huddled over the plant, weeding it, watering it, this and that.

Speaker 1 (21:17.346)
They're connected to it and to have it go to waste is very frustrating and the ability to not only waste the food, but to have it nourish somebody else is very personally rewarding. By the way, there's an ethical component in ampleharvest.org that I didn't realize until after I built it.

I told you that separation in time between the gardener donating and the food pantry clients coming a few hours later. was the 17th, I'm sorry, the 15th century, there was a rabbi named Hillel in Spain who came up with the 10 levels of giving charity. And the highest level is actually giving somebody a job. And the lowest level is giving less than you can grudgingly only after your ass. And there are eight gradients between them.

like this.

Yeah, it's an ethical thing. It's how do you, basically he was addressing the ethically ideal ways of helping people. But I think number nine or eight on the list is making sure that when you give charity that you don't humiliate the recipient, help to maintain their dignity. It didn't dawn on me when I built Ample Harvest, but when I did a looking back, I realized that it's quite possible that...

I'm donating food to the food pantry and my next door neighbor who fell on hard times and or lost his job or whatever is going to the food pantry to get help, to get bread, milk and cheese, et cetera. And he's not very proud of the fact that he's embarrassed actually that he can't support his family, that he needs to go to food pantry for a while. If I was there dropping off my food and he's there at the same time getting food, I'd be embarrassed and he'd be humiliated. But by separating us by a couple of hours,

Speaker 1 (22:51.662)
We're both anonymous to each other. I know the food's going to somebody in the community, but I don't know who. He knows the food is going, came from somebody in the community, but he doesn't know who. His dignity is maintained and our friendship is untouched. So that ethical component I accidentally built into AmpleHarvest.org, not intentionally, but the model with the just-in-time inventory logic, all the other pieces just came together. I have evangelical friends who have been adamant that I'm doing the Lord's work.

It makes them happy, I'm fine with that. But I was just driven by how I solve problems. so the model today, by the way, our partners, Google's been our biggest partner. We get $40,000 a month, month over month of free advertising from Google. Whatever complaints you may occasionally have about Google, they should be deeply appreciated for their impact on reducing hunger and food waste in America. That's amazing.

$20,000 a month.

Speaker 1 (23:49.976)
Honey Plants, the largest supplier of seedlings in America, has been a huge partner, especially since the pandemic, of helping us, helping the gardening community further become aware that the solution to hunger is in their backyard. And we actually shared with them that, and I don't think they knew at the time, that edible food, know, plants and seeds and whatever, if you're on SNAP food stamps, you could actually buy them with SNAP and food stamps.

So they now sell their products on Amazon and other places that are EBT eligible.

I just learned that. Yeah, that's a good fact.

of people don't know. I had learned that when in one of the White House visits, when a gentleman who was quite adamant about this, he actually found this piece of code hidden in the USDA code. He created a website called snapgardens.org and it's still live and it basically speaks to the fact that you can either go to the store and buy food or you can go to the store and buy a plant and grow the food or you can do both. So the program today

is at work in all 50 states in 5,600 communities. We're working with around 8,300 food pantries, about a quarter of the food pantries in America. And during the pandemic, I was looking at our map. We have a national impact. I can see every dot on the map where there's a food pantry. And I was really bothered by something. We were doing a great job in the eastern half of the country. By east, I don't mean East Coast. I mean, you draw a line down the center of the country. To the right of that, we're doing good. And the West Coast, we were doing good.

Speaker 1 (25:22.242)
We were missing the boat in much of Texas, the Southwest and going up to the Great Plains. We had food pantries, but not as many as there should be. Now every county in America, every county has hunger. And every county in America has gardeners. I've been, what are we doing wrong? New Mexico and New York got the same treatment. I finally, looked at water tables, I looked at climate, nothing made sense. And finally,

In talking to a decade-long friend of mine, gentleman named Chief Henry Red Cloud Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation, I said, Henry, I have a problem, and can you help me with this? And we looked together at a map of Native American reservations across America and where Ample's Harvest Elk was and wasn't. And we overlaid the map. We realized that a good chunk of Native American reservations overlaid the areas where we didn't have many food pantries. With Henry's help,

the help of other tribal elders and indigenous food sovereignty people, we came to realize that we had to make some adaptations in ampleharvest.org to make it work for indigenous communities. Some technical changes, some use of language changes, and some changes in the model. None of which were huge, but all of them were significant. And again, with the help of Bonnie Plants and Google,

We built a special adaptation on Ample Harvest, or called AmpleHarvest.org in Indian country. And we addressed a number of issues. I'll give you an example. On the Navajo Nation, which is the largest nation, it itself is the size of Rhode Island. So just picture that size. There are no street names. There's no such thing as 100 Main Street. If you want to find the shoe stores, go to the gas station, turn left half a mile.

So how am I going to guide a gardener to a food pantry if I don't have a street address to give to Waze or Google Maps? We had to solve that problem. We had to adapt our model because our model requires the food pantries that join us to be nonprofits and give food away for free. But on tribal communities, some of the food pantries happen to be tribal government owned. And in some cases, it's a couple of shelves in the back of a hardware store. We had to make the changes.

Speaker 1 (27:31.406)
We also had to make some changes in some use of language to be, I'm going use the word respectful, I can't think of a better word at the moment, but to be appropriate in the use of language in reference to the indigenous communities. So we made the adaptations. We then rolled it out. It was announced at the 2022 White House Hunger Conference. And the next day I met with the Navajo Nation's headquarters in New York City. Essentially what to them is an embassy.

And they loved it. was in their newsletter a week later. And we've since been working at Rolling Out. It's a slower effort. It's more difficult than I would like, but you're not dealing with one nation like I did in 2009. I'm dealing with 326 nations. So there's more of a challenge there. But the important thing about Native Americans is they grow more food per capita. I'm sorry, they do more gardening per capita than any other community in America. As a matter of

the day when 68 % I think of Native American families bought seeds for growing food. And this is far greater than Caucasians or African Americans or any other group. So the opportunity is clearly there and certainly the need is there. One of the other things we did, and then I'll let you answer, ask your questions.

Speaker 1 (28:51.874)
The heart of ampleharvest.org is getting more food pantries on ampleharvest.org and getting more gardeners learning they can donate. Those are the two big groups I need to get together. Sometimes a single number opens up a whole new world for you. In 2016, I learned that 70 % of all food pantries are in the House of Worship. Yeah, that makes, okay. Suddenly, I realized that makes the faith community an ideal partner for ampleharvest.org.

We're not a religious program. We don't advocate religion. We don't promote religion. There's nothing on our website that says anything religious, except that 70 % of the food pantries are sitting in a church or a mosque or a synagogue or whatever. So with the help of a partner organization called GreenFaith, we built a program that today is called Faith Fights Food Waste. You can find it at faithfightsfoodwaste.org. The idea behind it is to reach out to the clergy of America.

Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Unitarian, and what I will call tree hugger, or you might just want to call spiritual. A, to teach them about the big picture of food waste, the big picture stuff from organizations like REFED, the EPA, the USDA, et cetera. Then, and here was the fun part, we created a faithy sounding but faithless sermon about food waste. Then Green Faith, I'm sorry, then Green Faith translated it into Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Unitarian.

the same sermon from the perspective of the Torah, the Koran, the New Testament, et cetera. And then we created nine calls to action that the pastor or the rabbi or the imam could talk about, which of course donating garden produce was the first one, but there many others, portion sizes, date labeling, these other things. And the idea is that 20 % of the people in the pews are gardeners. So when one minister

who's talking to a hundred people in the church, instead of saying, need to feed hungry people, it's expected for us to feed the hungry. They can say, we need to be feeding hungry, but one way of doing that is to be not wasting the food. And he can then talk about how to reduce food waste and what the scriptures say about it, what traditions have to say about it. And by the way, if you garden, you can donate. So right off the bat, of a hundred people in the pews, have 20 gardeners who are sitting there.

Speaker 1 (31:12.92)
But we get meant to go back to that minister and say, if your church has a food pantry, it's a joint AmpleHarvest.org. Now, if you remember the AmpleHarvest.org story, I told you about misinformation and missing information. This was the third tier of it. The reason I needed to build FaithFightsFoodWaste.org was because clergy of all faiths had been overlooking what was in their own scriptures about food waste. Or put it another way, they had missed that information.

So we're dealing with misinformation, missing information and missed information. Those are the pieces that are addressing on a large scale, the opportunity to reduce the waste of food and to nourish more people in America. Faith by food waste, by the way, can operate globally. Ample Harvest Org itself is only for the 50 states. Okay, questions?

Okay, got it.

This is fantastic. So, yeah two big ones. We'll start with you. You mentioned the word dignity a lot and and I've come to come to learn what that really means. Have you met Clancy Harrison from the food dignity movement? my gosh, I need to put you two in touch. she

I'm not familiar with her.

Speaker 2 (32:21.836)
was a, she worked in the, I'll say the food bank systems, but then got frustrated on a few things and started a podcast. It's called the Food Dignity Podcast and her organization is the Food Dignity Movement. It's just so eye-opening when you don't know what you don't know. Like part of one of the really neat things about your system is you coordinate with the local food pantry.

what is best for them, what time's worst best for them. it's not just, hey, I'm a backyard gardener, I got some food, I'm gonna go take it to the food pantry. Like look it up, just take a moment of your time on amplehavers.org, it's gonna have your food pantry that's closest to you, you can look it up, it's very easy, where you plug in your zip code or use the map, and they've got the times where they will accept. You don't even have to call them up. I mean, you can if you wanna get involved, but.

sure it has a safety. But yes, you're correct.

Yeah, so I think the idea of not just showing up whenever, because the point of that is you have no idea by looking at somebody if they're struggling right then and there with food security, food insecurity or

Yeah, let me tell you one story that to this day brings tears to my eyes. In the early days of ampleharvest.org, I happened to be in San Diego randomly for some event. And I got an email from somebody saying, I'm having trouble feeding my family. My husband's injury can't work and my kid's hungry and can you help? Now we can't help hungry people. That's not what we do. We don't give any food to people.

Speaker 1 (33:56.238)
Our point is connecting the gardener to the food pantry so the food gets to the hungry pin, but we ourselves can't do that. And we routinely write back, we express our sympathies for their difficulties. And here's, you can use Ample Harvest Library to find a food pantry or you should call 211 to let United Way help you, but we can't help you. But what got to me was when I saw her, information at the bottom, this woman was active duty U.S. Navy. A member of our armed services couldn't feed her family.

Now I've had the privilege of speaking several times at the Pentagon. As a matter of fact, last year actually was the key speaker for the Pentagon's own food drive called Fed's Feed Families. My opening act, forgive the expression, was the Secretary of Defense. He spoke before me and then I spoke. And I spoke to other people on things. And yeah, there's the recognition that people in the military ... So just because you are employed or just because you were employed by ...

For example, the military doesn't mean you're not necessarily having a hard time. The important thing is that you're not feeling well. You go to the doctor. You want to health check up, the doctor helps you figure out why you're Almost nobody's ever embarrassed about saying, I'm not feeling well, but they won't say they went to a doctor. Going to a doctor is not a humiliating thing. It's what a smart person does when they're under the weather to get the treatment, whatever it is that they need to feel better.

Nobody's embarrassed by that. Why should anybody even be embarrassed because they can't feed their family? It's not that they've done anything wrong, any more than you getting sick indicates you did anything wrong. It's that you fell on hard times. One number of people should know is that 90 % of people who go to food pantries are not long-term food pantry clients. They may be there six months, nine months, whatever, and they get economically back on their feet.

They're at a job and they no longer need food pantry. So just because people are at a food pantry does not mean they're the chronically year after year type people. It's only 10 % of the people there. So the dignity aspect is that the people going to the food pantry, except for the blessings of the universe, it could be you. And so you go there because you need help, because you want to feed your family. The distinction is that the food pantries historically have only provided jars, cans, and boxes, but no fresh food.

Speaker 1 (36:20.088)
So the highly processed food was the fruit was canned in high-fructose corn syrup, the vegetables were canned with salt. You had all these things that are really not great for you, particularly if you are diabetic or obese or hypertensive. And now all of a you have in the growing season, fresh food coming in and it makes a difference as to how your health is. One of the foundations that has been supporting Ample Hall Restaurant for years has been Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS, which is a wonderful organization.

that raises money at Broadway shows to then help people who are living with HIV AIDS across America. And we've been grateful beneficiaries of the support because of the food that we get into food pantries that are helping to feed people, families living with HIV AIDS. I love this.

there's just so many connections you can make. So I know you're familiar with the Victory Gardens of World War II, and if listeners haven't heard of this term, by the last year of World War II, 40 % of the produce being generated in the United States was from backyard and community gardens, so that the huge commercial farms could ship the foods overseas to the soldiers. We've completely forgot how to garden.

Hopefully, that's going to change. I'll tell you that actually there's something that predates that. During the Civil War, President Lincoln encouraged people to grow food and he called them People's Gardens. And this was told to us at an event with Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack, who was telling us the story. And he made it clear that even though it was called People's Garden, which is why the USDDA has the People's Garden Initiative, this has nothing to do with the People's Republic of China. He wanted to be clear about that.

This was President Lincoln's terms of the use of you locally gardening so that the food can be sent to the soldiers who are fighting, at least as far as I know goes back to the Civil War. But the community gardens are a valuable way of enabling people to garden. It's a great way, particularly in areas where it's difficult, maybe in an urban setting or something like that. It's great for the community. It's great for the spirit, the soul, and everything else like that.

Speaker 1 (38:28.014)
The about community gardens, by the way, only 3 % of gardening in America is community gardening. 97 % is in people's backyard gardens. So our heavy lift is finding the 97 % of 62 million people to let them know the solution to hunger is in their backyards. I So anything that people can do to talk to their friends like you did is great.

Yeah, so we're in the middle of a major transition with Interrupt Hunger and we're going to really be focusing on four areas. We're going to try to teach people to cook, teach them to garden. I encourage folks to like more opportunities for physical activity, more opportunities to give back. I think we could do this at schools and we could do this as small businesses around the country and then inject community into each one of those four pillars. So it is so easy to take

AmpleHarvest.org logo and just reach out to y'all, I'm assuming, put that on your, whether you're a clergy and you want to just let people know how to do this, or if you're a, you know, you've got some type of nonprofit or you're a food bank, you make it very, very easy to partner with you. And so much so that on, on homedepot.com, can see AmpleHarvest.org.

Yes.

Speaker 1 (39:40.802)
Home Depot has been a wonderful partner. They're one of the three major big box chains in America selling to gardeners. And they want their gardeners to learn, their customers who garden to learn that they can donate food. As a matter of fact, this is from a partnership that was between Bonnie Plants and Home Depot that would encourage people to buy, to grow more food for explicit for donation. Bonnie Plants actually has a program called Grow More Feed More explicitly for that. So they, yes.

I only need five tomato plants to feed my family, but I got space for more plants. can buy more plants, put them in the ground, and knowing that those extra plants are going to help to nourish the people in the community. We want anybody anywhere in America to be able to point their customers, their members, their network to Ample Harvest.org to learn about how they can help end food waste and hunger. And I'll throw on one other thing, end malnutrition.

a Harvard trained economist formerly with Cisco systems did an analysis in 2016 and you can see this in ample Harvard's work slash study. He computed that if every gardener and every food pantry in America was connected, that's a hypothetical end game, but just if it were, America's healthcare costs would drop $58 billion per year reductions in diabetes, obesity, et cetera.

That's not money that would be going into the pockets of rich people or money going into the pockets of government. That's money that a food insecure families would not be spending on medicine and medical care. It actually is $58 billion put into the pockets of struggling families simply because they don't have to deal with buying insulin or any of the other issue costly things that are involved with healthcare simply because they got healthier food. Yeah, people is a no-brainer.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:34.862)
Like most people don't realize the intersection between food insecurity and those with obesity and chronic disease. If you don't have a lot of money, the only thing you can afford, unfortunately, is ultra processed foods. And traditionally, I would say before the food pantries learned about ampleharvest.org, there wasn't a lot of fresh produce to go around. this is one.

Yeah, typically the produce was the stuff many supermarkets were donating food as it was cycled out So, you know in the beginning of the week you get all the shipment of produce coming in and at the following week The next shipments coming in supermarkets to do something with the leftover produce So they take this stuff that's on its near at the end of a shelf life and they give it to a feeding America food bank to redistribute to a local food pantry That stuff is already looking sad

and it's at the end of its shelf life. And because of the Feeding America Food Bank architecture, that food may not get even close to the community where it originally came from. Supermarkets still do that. I mean, they still donate their food that's going south. Good for them. That's the thing they should be doing. Ample Harvesting enables the gardeners to one-up them, if you will, by enabling food that is truly garden fresh to get on people's dinner tables.

Well, is just, Gary, this is just such an easy way. You've created such an easy way to solve a heck of a lot of problems. Food waste, food insecurity, Crohn disease. You've created just a wonderful system for helping people. So thanks so much. This has been fantastic. Is there anything else as we wrap up you wanna leave folks with?

Thanks, been a pleasure chatting with

Speaker 1 (43:08.342)
Yeah, if you garden, feel free to plant more or even if you don't plant more, but visit ampleharvest.org to find a food pantry near you. If you know a food pantry, if you belong to a house of worship that has a food pantry, help their manager learn that they can join ampleharvest.org and tell them for a thing, it's free. You don't need refrigeration, you don't need storage, and it's free. Say the free part twice, that's really important to them. The more food pantries that are on ampleharvest.org, the millions more gardeners can donate.

And lastly, if you want to support the work that we're doing, visit ampleharvest.org and make a donation. It enables us to expand the program even faster to more communities. And for those who decide to make a donation of at least $10 a month, month over month, you can actually sponsor a food pantry listing and have in honor of, in memory, whatever you want listed on the food pantry listing on a food pantry of your choice. you use this for Valentine's Day or birthdays or whenever else you want.

but ampleharvest.org is the game changer for your community in the country. If you have any questions, reach out to info at ampleharvest.org and please follow us on social media.

and for it, Marvis.org. Got it. All right. Very good. This has been wonderful. So good to meet you. Love the way your brain thinks and you're turning these ideas into like actionable, easy systems that are helping just tons and tons of Americans across the country.

Thank you, it was a pleasure.

Speaker 2 (44:42.926)
Thanks so much for listening. Please rate and review the podcast on the platform of your choice so we can reach more people and more people are recommended this podcast. And if you really liked it, the single best way you can help us grow is by telling your friends. Now for all the legal stuff. The views and opinion expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent. For my day job, I'm an employee of ABV and appear on this podcast on my own accord and not in the professional capacity as an ABV employee.

All viewpoints provided are my personal opinions and not intended to reflect those of my employer. If you have any questions or comments, please shoot me an email at jolly at interrupt hunger.org. Let's go spread some joy people.