Party kits are most commonly used for children’s birthday parties, with plastic tableware being the most popular choice as it is durable, lightweight, affordable, and suitable for young children. However, party kits have also been used for baby showers, workplace BBQs, community group meetings, and even gallery openings. 

How Party Kits Fit into a Library of Things

The party kit concept aligns closely with the principles of lending libraries, and many have already successfully added party kits to their inventories. There are two main models for incorporating party kits:

1. Pre-packed party kits: These are boxes of tableware lent out as single items. This setup is common in locker-based sharing libraries or libraries where tableware is not the main focus, such as public libraries, toy libraries, and nappy libraries. It simplifies administration by reducing the effort required to prepare each rental, though borrowers may end up taking more items than they need. Here is an example of Share Bristol’s party kit listing: https://things.sharebristol.org.uk/product/2314 

2. Customisable party kits: In this model, users build their own party kits by selecting items from the library’s inventory of tableware, decorations, and other party essentials. A basic party kit, such as a set of plates and cups, may still be offered as a pre-packed option, with the flexibility for borrowers to add other items as needed.  

Regardless of the model, all lending libraries offering party kits require that items are washed before being returned. Clear guidance should be provided on which items are dishwasher safe (most plastic tableware can be washed on an Eco cycle at lower temperatures) and the importance of ensuring everything is thoroughly dried before repacking and returning.

Benefits of Offering Party Kits 

Lending libraries that include kits report numerous benefits for both the library and its members:

Benefits for Borrowers

• Access to a broader inventory, including items like gazebos, bunting, party games, tables, chairs, tablecloths, jugs, and cool boxes. This reduces the need for one-time purchases that can often go unused after the event. 

• Affordability: For libraries with annual memberships, borrowing a party kit is often comparable with buying disposable supplies, with the added benefit that with each hire members are getting even more value for money. 

Benefits for Libraries

• Increased membership: Party kits attract new members, especially families. Anna Perry from Share Bristol said, “The party kits at Share Bristol definitely help us attract new members. Sometimes people find us through the Party Kit Network and join our Library of Things service to borrow one. Other times, people see the party kits as part of our inventory, which is enough to convince them to become members.”

• Inclusivity: Libraries can make party kits accessible to everyone. Lindsey Campbell from Linlithgow Tool Library explained, “We offer a pay-what-you-can system, so we don’t exclude anyone financially.”

• Broader reach: By nature, parties reach a lot of people, an opportunity to increase awareness of the library’s offerings and encourage more people to engage with local sharing.  

Community Impact

• Positive feedback: Borrowers consistently praise the ease of use and reduced waste. Helena Jackson from Stork and the Bees, a sling and nappy library with a party kit, noted: “People who have hired the kits have loved it. They’ve shared how easy it was to use, what a great idea it is, and how it means less waste. Plus, they didn’t have to buy or store reusable items themselves.”

• Visible impact: Borrowers notice the environmental benefits firsthand as they tidy up—there are significantly fewer bin bags of waste! Sharing these stories can inspire others in the community to embrace the switch to reusables and borrowing.

• Health & wellbeing: Borrowing and celebrating foster positive social connections, which are essential for mental health and wellbeing. Karen Elsbury, founder of the Elwood Kitchen Library, explains: “Our kitchen library is all about bringing people together through a love of food. By providing members of our community with access to kitchen items and party packs we enable them to entertain family and friends, celebrate together, and get creative in the kitchen.”

Free Download: “The Library of Things Toolkit”

Getting Started

If your library already includes reusable tableware in its inventory, you can join the Party Kit Network today! Joining is FREE and allows more people in your community to discover your library. Visit partykitnetwork.org/join to sign up.

If your library doesn’t yet have suitable tableware, consider these steps to get started:

1. Gauge Community Interest: Run a survey among your existing members to assess interest in a party kit. This can also be an opportunity to engage the wider community for their input, increasing awareness of your library’s services. 

2. Assess Local Needs: Before purchasing tableware, think about the types of events your members are likely to host. For example, for children’s parties typically 20-30 place settings are needed with durable, lightweight plastic tableware being a practical choice. For adult events such as BBQs, plastic tumblers are often preferred to glass for outdoor gathering due to their lighter weight and safety.

3. Source Tableware: There are several ways to acquire tableware:  

   • Community donations: Reach out to your local community to source reusable items.  

   • Preloved party kits: Purchase second-hand kits to reduce costs  

   • New tableware: Some libraries choose to buy new items, especially if they want to offer matching sets. Aesthetics can be important for members transitioning from themed single-use tableware to reusables.  

   Funding may be available from local authorities through waste prevention or small community grants, which can help cover the cost of purchasing reusable tableware.

4. Plan Hire Logistics:  

   • Hire periods: Many party kits are offered for a three-day hire giving people time to collect, party, wash and return, with most bookings occurring over the weekend. Your opening hours will likely dictate the duration of a hire.

   • Storage: Using rigid plastic storage containers is the easiest way to keep tableware clean and organised. A party kit for 30 can fit into a 48 litre box meaning it doesn’t take up too much space. Choose a size that balances capacity and ease of transport—splitting items into multiple boxes if needed to avoid heavy lifting. 

5. Reduce Losses: Include an equipment list with each party kit to help borrowers keep track of items and return everything they borrowed. Labelling items like jugs can also minimise the risk of them being left behind at party venues, while doubling as advertising for your kit. 

6. Collaborate Locally: I always recommend people check the Party Kit Network map to see if there are existing kits in the area. Most communities can support more than one kit, and connecting with other members allows you to collaborate. For example, you can refer enquiries to another provider if your kit is already booked. 

Case Study

Palo Alto’s Zero Waste Party Packs are reducing event waste

Getting More Support to Set Up a Party Kit

The Party Kit Network is committed to helping lending libraries include party kits, increasing accessibility and strengthening the sharing economy.

Here are some resources to guide you through the process:

• Comprehensive Guide: Download our detailed guide to running a party kit at https://www.partykitnetwork.org/start 

• Facebook Group: Join our active community on Facebook, where members share advice and ideas: https://www.facebook.com/groups/partykitnetwork 

• Online Meet-ups: Attend our regular online sessions to ask questions and get tailored support: https://partykitnetwork.eventbrite.com 

• Tableware Materials: For more information on tableware materials, please see our guide to reusable tableware: https://www.partykitnetwork.org/post/which-type-of-reusable-tableware-is-the-greenest   

Or please drop me an email with any questions or concerns, or to be connected with another library already successfully running a party kit – hello@partykitnetwork.org 

Conclusion

Party kits are a perfect fit for lending libraries. Libraries have seen their members utilise party kits when added to the inventory, and even join a library because a party kit was offered. It has been straightforward for libraries to set up a party kit, requiring minimal storage and experiencing low rates of loss.

By offering party kits, libraries empower their communities to celebrate more sustainably, reducing waste and promoting reuse. This not only strengthens connections within the community but also supports a thriving sharing economy, where resources are used efficiently and inclusively.

Adding a party kit is a small step with a big impact—encouraging more sustainable celebrations and reinforcing the vital role of sharing libraries in creating a better future.

This article was originally published by the Party Pack Network.

The post How (and why) to add a Party Kit to your Library of Things appeared first on Shareable.

We believe a more just and joyful world is not only possible but it’s constantly being realized in communities all across the globe. That vital work of regular people, often in the face of incredible hardship, continually inspires us.

Here’s a glimpse in 10 stories:

1. Modern-day colonialism and the tragic fate of an indigenous water and land protector

This story by Allen Myers shares insights from his 2022 trip to Brumadinho, Brazil, where he witnessed the enduring scars left by a 2019 dam collapse and the fight for justice that followed.

2. Life-Saving lending library: Union supplies Palestinian journalists with safety gear amid ongoing Israeli genocide

This story by Arvind Dilawar focuses on the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate’s efforts to supply Palestinian journalists with safety gear amid Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

3. The transformative power of Urban Recipe’s Atlanta food co-op model

Urban Recipe is an Atlanta-based food co-op dedicated to “food with dignity.” Shareable is partnering with Urban Recipe for our Food Assistance Co-op pilot project!

4. From reform to what works: Moving from the limits of institutions to a culture powered by neighbors

In the final piece written by the co-creator of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) model, John McKnight tells the stories of thirteen communities that replaced the institutional and recovered associational functions by assuming authority for much of their well-being.

5. A Shareable Explainer: What is the Solidarity Economy?

The Solidarity Economy exists all around us, from worker co-ops to community land trusts. This explainer dives into what exactly the Solidarity Economy is, examples in the US and internationally, and much more.

6. Cities@Tufts Podcast: Urban Environmental Marronage – Connecting Black Ecologies with Charisma Acey

This episode explores how marginalized communities in coastal Nigeria and the American South draw upon historical practices of marronage to create autonomous spaces and combat environmental degradation within cities.

7. The Response Podcast: Surveillance and reproductive justice with Rafa Kidvai

Rafa Kidvai from Repro Legal Defense Fund joined us to discuss interconnected struggles, the challenges of surveillance, and the power of community in the fight for reproductive justice.

8. New toolkit from Shareable will help you start (and grow) a Library of Things in YOUR community

Learn more about our comprehensive Library of Things Toolkit, designed to help people like you plan, start, and grow Libraries of Things in your community.

9. How to not pay taxes

Shareable is in the process of updating 50 of our 300+ how-to guides. We updated one of our most popular guides, which explains legal (and illegal) ways not to pay federal taxes. This guide is all too relevant to the United States’ annual military budget, which exceeds $916 billion.

10. “Power to the People: The Story of Rural Electric Cooperatives”

“The journey of rural electrification is a testament to community resilience and innovation. With the inception of Rural Electric Cooperatives (RECs) in the early 20th century, spurred by the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, rural America, quite literally, lit up.” This article features the animated short film “Power to the People: The Story of Rural Electric Cooperatives.”

While storytelling is at the root of everything we do, our work at Shareable only starts with articles like these. In 2024, we also:

• Directly supported nine Library of Things fellows; researched and released the State of Libraries of Things 2024 report; hosted a 12-week Library of Things Co-Lab; helped incubate the new Tool Library Alliance in the US; and released the comprehensive Library of Things Toolkit.
• Continued our partnership with Rural Power Coalition to support a just energy transition to the largest co-op sector in the US. In partnership with The Story of Stuff Project, we released explainer videos on the history of rural electric cooperatives, virtual power plants, and agrivoltaics.
• Supported the development of community backup power systems with our Emergency Battery Toolkit, launched a Food Assistance Co-op pilot project in partnership with Urban Recipe, and co-hosted the Social Co-op Academy with the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center.
• Updated and republished 24 how-to guides covering topics from worker co-ops to participatory budgeting to mutual aid to making music with friends and more!
• Co-hosted 13 public Cities@Tufts lectures in partnership with the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University (including Reimagining Urban Planning with Jose Richard Aviles, How to fight a mega-jail with Maya Singhal, and Here There Be Dragons with Jess Myers), released five episodes of The Response (including indigenous disaster response, Facing the heat: Disaster management in the age of climate crisis with Samantha Montano, and journalists in Palestine), and worked with spoken word artists in Oregon to perform “Voices of The Response” (our live version of The Response).

That’s a LOT of content and resources to help you imagine and build cooperative sharing projects in your local community!

And there’s even more planned for 2025. We’ve got big plans to provide resources to launch new mutual aid projects, scale Libraries of Things across universities and affordable housing developments, start new food assistance co-ops, train rural electric co-op member-owners, and so much more.

But we need your support to make it happen.

If you’re able, please make a contribution so we can continue building on this momentum and co-create a world where sharing is daily practice and communities thrive.

The post Best of Shareable 2024 | Reader’s Digest appeared first on Shareable.

What are Agrivoltaics?

Simply put, agrivoltaics are the integration of solar energy production into land used for agriculture. In practice, this typically looks like ground-mounted solar panel arrays with pastured livestock grazing alongside those panels. In many cases, vegetable and fruit crops can be grown underneath, between, and around solar arrays. Some agrivoltaic setups may also incorporate pollinator habitats and native ecologies between the arrays; this variation is sometimes called ecovoltaics.

How do farmers and landowners benefit?

According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, farm incomes have declined in the past years, and once the numbers come in, further declines are expected for 2024, as well. Before the pandemic (between 2018 and 2020,) more than half the farms in the country experienced financial risk.

The issue of financial viability in our agricultural system is multifaceted, but agrivoltaics offers a way for farms to add a source of diversified low-maintenance income for farmers and landowners. Once financed and installed, solar panels require little maintenance and catch sunlight, which gets converted into energy and turned into a steady income stream.

For certain crops, the full or partial shade of solar panels can also benefit production and profitability. For example, a 2019 University of Arizona study found that “Plants in high-light environments tend to have smaller leaves – an adaptation for not capturing too much sunlight and overwhelming the photosynthesis system. Plants in low-light environments grow larger leaves to spread out the light-capturing chlorophyll that let plants change light to energy. The researchers are seeing that in their trials: basil plants produce larger leaves, kale leaves are longer and wider, and chard leaves are larger.”

With proper site development and decommissioning planning, agrivoltaics leave open the potential for a site to return to purely agricultural uses in the future. By alleviating financial pressures, landowners are less likely to have to convert agricultural land to be used for something else. They are also less likely to be forced to sell the land off entirely.

How does the environment benefit?

Agrivoltaic systems provide an array of benefits to farmers and landowners, rural communities, and the environment. They can provide habitat for pollinators, reduce the need for herbicides and labor-intensive vegetation management on site, and contribute to stormwater absorption capabilities of the soil by reducing the amount of land converted to impervious surfaces.

Sheep, goats, cows, and other livestock can be grazed among solar panels to maximize land-use outcomes on a single site. Integrating livestock and solar systems provides forage for the animals, who in turn maintain vegetation and minimize site upkeep. In addition to producing clean energy, solar panels cast shade for the animals to shelter under on hot and sunny days.

What to consider when setting up an agrivoltaic system

Setting up a system that optimally integrates agriculture and solar production requires time and planning up-front. When done well, this will improve the long-term benefits for health and production, as well as the pocketbook.

The farmer or land manager must work with the solar developer to find a solution that works best for both parties. Livestock farmers must ensure their animals’ food, water, and shelter needs are incorporated into the site plan, and the panels are protected. For example, sheep tend towards docility, but goats require more protective measures around the panels and any associated infrastructure. Cattle require more space between rows of panels and for the panels to be mounted much higher off the ground. Crop farmers require the appropriate panel height and spacing for the intended crop.

Agrivoltaics in the real world

At a site in Haskell County, Texas, one company estimates that it saved $115,000 in mowing costs in the first seven months just by having sheep graze along the arrays, keeping the panels optimally productive. At one site in Southern Illinois, semi-transparent solar panels and moving tracker panels allow enough light for plants in a vineyard to thrive while also producing solar energy. In Longmont, Colorado, an agrivoltaics farm that grows 15 crops provides enough solar energy to power about 300 homes. These are just a few examples. At the time of writing, there are almost 600 agrivoltaic sites in operation around the United States, according to the InSPIRE Research Project, which maintains a database, an interactive map, and informational resources on agrivoltaics. Although there has been a directed effort by fossil fuel companies to keep rural and agricultural communities pitted against renewable energy, there are clear benefits of agrivoltaics to farmers, their communities, solar developers, and the general public—who will enjoy cleaner air, soil, and water. The benefits of agrivoltaics are already being embraced by agricultural communities, with many more projects to come.

Shareable produced this video with the Rural Power Coalition and The Story of Stuff Project. Learn more about Rural Electric Cooperatives by reading additional articles in this series.

The post Agrivoltaics: Harvesting the sun to benefit farmers, crops, and livestock appeared first on Shareable.

Throughout US history, street food vending has rarely been considered an improvement to modern society or its capitalist economy. However, beginning in 2008, a new generation of mobile vendors serving high-quality, inventive foods became popular among affluent populations.

Ginette Wessel’s new book, Mobilizing Food Vending: Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City (Routledge 2024), investigates the gourmet food truck movement in the US and provides a clearer understanding of the social and economic factors that shape vendor autonomy and industry growth.

Using a human-centered approach, the book features case studies in a variety of American cities and uses top-down and bottom-up urban theory to frame a discussion of food trucks’ rights, displacement, and resiliency. Wessel shows that food truck vendors are critical actors that support local economies and contribute to the public realm while shaping regulatory policy from the bottom up.

This lecture appeals to urban scholars studying the contemporary neoliberal city, the public realm, and communication technology and mobility, as well as to urban planners seeking to understand how vendors shape city plans and policies.

About the speaker

Ginette Wessel, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University, where she teaches courses in urban design, urban planning, and environmental design research.

As an urbanist, designer, and scholar, Ginette has published articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, New Media & Society, and the Journal of Urban Design, as well as chapters in Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice (MIT Press 2017) and Participatory Urbanisms (UC Berkeley 2015).

She holds degrees from the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina (UNC), Charlotte, and she is an experienced urban designer who has worked with communities throughout her teaching at RWU, San Jose State University, UC Berkeley, and UNC Charlotte.

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Watch the video of Mobilizing Food Vending

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Transcript for Mobilizing Food Vending

0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net, just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:40.2 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tuft’s Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on Colonized, Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Ginette Wessel, who is associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University.

0:01:19.0 Julian Agyeman: She teaches courses in urban design, urban planning, and environmental design research. As an urbanist designer and scholar, Ginette has published articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, as well as chapters in my book, Food Trucks, Cultural Identity and Social Justice, and a chapter in participatory urbanisms. Her forthcoming book, which I’m sure she’s gonna tell us all about, is called Mobilizing Food Vending, Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And that’s coming out apparently next month through Routledge. It investigates food trucks rights and resiliency in the urban food scape using ethnography, policy analysis and spatial interpretation. Ginette’s research interests include current social and cultural transformations that are underway in city making with an emphasis on public space, social equity, and communication technology. Ginette’s talk today is mobilizing food vending, planning and policy for gourmet food trucks in the American city. Ginette, a fantastic welcome to Cities@Tufts. Over to you.

0:02:31.0 Ginette Wessel: Thank you, Julian. I’m very excited and delighted to be here, and thank you for everyone to come and listen to the talk today. My title of my talk, as Julian mentioned, is Mobilizing Food Vending, Planning and Policy for Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And I first really became interested in food trucks back in 2008 when I was doing my doctorate work and I found myself really intrigued by their growing presence around the San Francisco Bay Area. And their ability to mobilize, using social media and activate urban space was really something quite novel to me and unfamiliar. And little did I know I would spend about 16 years following the industry, but here we are and I have a new book to share with you, that talks about that. So let me get my slide moving here.

0:03:27.1 Ginette Wessel: So in my book, I use a spatial lens to question how food trucks navigate social structures of power in cities and contribute to the evolution of urban space. I look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Charlotte, and I examine how agency among usually disproportionately powerful actors unfold spatially in the act of claiming rights to urban space. I also examine how social life is generated in urban spaces with the help of communication technology and mobility. And further, I incorporate a firsthand study of space to understand how food truck locations play a role in the public realm of the capitalist city. I confront as well problems facing food trucks, due to rising property values and shifts in the real estate market. So in this book, I question if food truck’s spontaneous ability to overcome time and space is an indicator of a wider bottom-up transformation of how urban space and social life are generated. How will cities adapt and react to food trucks and how should they plan and accommodate them? Who is the gourmet food truck phenomenon, including who’s it excluding? And what about food trucks helps to diversify the city and support a more equitable city?

0:04:49.9 Ginette Wessel: So in this book, I argue that mobile food vending offers a window into a wider urban transformation, in which urban space has become part of a social and economic system reliant on mobility and technology for success. And that’s a new urban process that has become really fundamental to society’s social landscape and neoliberal economy. So the talk today is gonna follow this sequence. I first wanna talk a little bit about the origins, then I wanna shift into some theory that supports the framework for my work. I wanna look at a series of vignettes, about displacement, bottom-up policymaking, pandemic resiliency, and then we’ll look at some of the benefits and drawbacks and then a planner’s toolkit.

0:05:39.2 Ginette Wessel: So Roy Choi, Korean-American, professionally trained chef had just left his job at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and had a sleepless night. He began experimenting with Mexican and Korean flavors and created a short rib taco made with warm corn tortillas, the Korean barbecue beef or bulgogi, salsa Roja, cilantro, onion, lime, relish, slaw, and chili soy vinaigrette. Without enough money to open a storefront, Choi decided to sell his $2 tacos out of a food truck. His friend Mark Manguera quickly brokered a deal with a local commissary owner for a used catering truck. And he called his sister Alice Shin, who was a writer in New York City to manage the customer relations. Manguera, his wife Caroline, her brother Eric and Choi, bought $250 worth of food and trained for one week and began serving Korean barbecue tacos on Sunset Boulevard. Together the team of friends and family established the Kogi barbecue food truck, which made stops in South Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Koreatown and their initial vending locations had really predictable foot traffic, but were surprisingly unsuccessful.

0:06:55.3 Ginette Wessel: And then in December of that year, the team tweeted and parked outside a co-op housing unit at UCLA during final exams week, and 1000 students lined up for tacos. Choi’s recalls that was the turning point for their business. And the truck grew steadily with crowds up to 500 people within the first three months grossing nearly $2 million in that first year. And the food trucks customer base grew rapidly, both through word of mouth, but also Twitter really launching Choi into a leader of culinary experimentation. The team soon added Roja, Verde and Aranka, which served different areas of Los Angeles County, and Rosita was used for special events. And following the success of Kogi food truck imitators emerged almost immediately, each one trying to recapture Choi’s mix of fusion street food and street smarts. In 2008, a variety of unique converging factors led to the perfect moment to start a food truck business.

0:08:00.4 Ginette Wessel: For one, the economic downturn in 2008 and the subsequent decrease in consumer spending, diminished sit-down restaurant sales and made the purchase or the maintenance of a brick-and-mortar restaurant impossible for many. Chefs found food trucks to be more financially feasible option for supporting existing restaurants or starting a new business. And food truck ownership and leases grew among the under and unemployed populations across US cities. While clever food entrepreneurs sustained their livelihoods with food trucks, they also introduced a new competitive dining model to the American public. At the same time in 2008, the social media website, Twitter, which is now called X, was just 2-years-old, and it was growing in popularity among young adults. And by alerting customers to the day’s plans with a simple tweet, chefs could visit different locations with the assurance that their customers could find them. This new mode of finding food was also a fun engaging activity for food truck fans who really enjoyed seeking out new foods at impromptu locations.

0:09:12.1 Ginette Wessel: And so also another critical factor in 2008 is also thinking about food trucks and mobility, which was certainly helpful for the industry’s success. The mobility that a food truck has, really affords vendors the flexibility to change locations if business is slow or if demand is picking up in a specific location. Mobility is characteristically an American phenomenon, one that has been deeply embedded in the country’s economy and American everyday life for over a century. And more recently, mobility has been leveraged to create new economic sectors, such as on demand shopping and food delivery businesses that really cater to where people live and work. Food trucks mobility challenges also established planning ideologies, which generally address economic growth and consumer dining through very fixed and predictable business locations.

0:10:15.4 Ginette Wessel: So this calculable process of development usually allows governments to easily regulate and monitor business activity within the formal market system. In order for food trucks to align with those existing regulatory processes, governments actually require food truck owners to submit a very detailed vending schedule or operate a GPS device for surveillance. Fundamentally, mobility afforded by the food trucks temporarily activates urban space with social life, providing more opportunities for the public to socialize or take a break from work. Aside from organized special events, food trucks frequently appear in underused marginal spaces of cities of which many are privately owned. As opposed to the celebrated downtown centers, these spaces are typically a distance from restaurants or have fewer regulations. And these unfamiliar spaces also reveal the unbalanced priorities of cities, which typically focus on economically productive space, new development, or automobile circulation. Food trucks informally provide opportunities to strengthen the public realm by converting the once auto dominated spaces into more active pedestrian hubs. And food trucks also blur clear social and political boundaries of urban space, by carving out spaces for the public on private land.

0:11:49.4 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks are also attractive to customers because each visit includes a culturally charged experience. The marriage of Korean and Mexican flavors created a specific consumer connection for the Kogi food truck. Whereas over the 20th century when we were talking about cooking French or Mexican or Chinese or Italian food, that really meant providing Americans with a very well-known and easily recognizable dish reminiscent of a particular culture.

0:12:19.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi’s Korean barbecue tacos are inventive, they’re original, and they’re cooked with ingredients that showcase Choi’s ethnic background in culinary expertise. Chefs also bring with them global influences to urban spaces through vibrant food truck branding as well as the music, all of which play and have a powerful effect on how we recognize other cultures, whether they’re real or constructed identities. And many food trucks chefs have trained in culinary kitchens across the globe, experienced transnational mobility throughout their lives, and created popular dishes that incorporate those indigenous ingredients sometimes combining them to create new fusion foods. And as food truck customers seek out or outdoor food experiences, they’re also immersing themselves in the flavors and the ambiance of distant cultures.

0:13:15.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi food trucks are unique, in that they intentionally seek out diverse social classes in both affluent business centers and low income communities in LA. Their menu is priced affordably at $3 a taco, making the food attainable for many Angelenos. And these lower price points help attract loyal customers whose regular presence allows that truck to keep the prices low. However, very few food trucks can maintain lower prices, given the complexity of the menu or the operational costs in their region. It’s not uncommon for food trucks to exclude low income groups with prices ranging from 15 to $30 a person. The great recession of 2008, the convenience and rising popularity of social media, and the renewed desire to engage in the public realm of cities led to the birth of the US gourmet food truck movement. Over time, the food truck industry has steadily grown with the exception of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and expanded to mid-size cities and small towns.

0:14:20.0 Ginette Wessel: And as of 2023, there are more than 47,000 food truck businesses nationwide, and that industry is now worth approximately about $2.2 billion. Mobile food trucks are an important topic to study because their presence can be an indication of a changing urban landscape that reconfigures the social, the cultural, the economic, and the physical contours of cities. Moreover, as communication technology is part of our everyday life, and proximity is less of a factor in customers’ decision making shifts in how urban space is consumed and produced really should be carefully considered.

0:15:03.6 Ginette Wessel: So, let’s keep moving here. All right. So historically government officials have resisted street food vending on the grounds that it supports unsanitary food practices, it congests streets, it weakens business for brick-and-mortar establishments, contributes to crime, and is part of a low income sector. Unfavorable views of vendors have reinforced the mid 20th century modernist planning and design ideals that were about creating clear order, automobile-centered city streets and doing away with activities perceived as inefficient or unproductive.

0:15:44.9 Ginette Wessel: In the 1970s, concerns over the oversaturation of vendors in New York City prompted a 3000 vendor permit cap, which in turn tripled the cost of the permits and produced a black market. The treatment of vendors historically is rooted in a belief that their presence is an informal practice with little contribution to the formal economy. In 2009, municipalities were taken by surprise, really with the rapid growth of food trucks, which forced them to revisit the outdated and often irrelevant vending regulations.

0:16:21.6 Ginette Wessel: The lack of effective regulations allowed food trucks a bit more freedom in finding locations, enabling a faster expansion of the industry. But however, food trucks soon learned that regardless of whether they’re conducting business in a public right of way or on private land, they’re gonna draw a debate from a variety of social groups that are economically or socially motivated. And food trucks relationships with cities and municipal government, and other food sectors has fluctuated over time in terms of its acceptance or resistance, but I would say overall increasingly favorable as the customer demand continues to this day.

0:17:04.7 Ginette Wessel: So let’s talk a little bit of theory. I’m gonna look at Philosopher Michel de Certeau’s concept of strategic and tactical spatial practices, which are particularly relevant to understanding the spectrum of power or lack thereof in the mobile food vending industry. Regarding the tactical spatial practices, Certeau states, “Tactics are a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents, and also to the play it introduces in the foundations of power.” He emphasizes that participants in the city who live in transverse adapt, alter in appropriate space, make it their own. And food trucks perform tactical spatial practices, finding opportunities within the urban landscape and adapting to new changes. Similarly, Philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the oeuvre perfectly frames food, trucks, social production of urban space. And oeuvre is an urban milieu in that is participatory in nature within which urban citizens have a right to appropriate and modify their environment.

0:18:21.7 Ginette Wessel: And oeuvre is a realm of everyday life, an opportunity for play and social exchange in the city, rather than a space with the functional purpose of making profit. To the benefit of residents, food trucks offer opportunities to remake the city as an accessible and livable social space. They are nimble, flexible, and self-organizing. And however, they’re often subject to regulatory controls or strategic spatial practices which observe, measure, and control vendors determining their inclusion or exclusions from government’s total vision of urban space.

0:19:03.7 Ginette Wessel: So I would like to review a few of them. Notably proximity bans, which are advocated by restaurant owners, proximity bans are among the most common examples of strategic spatial practices limiting their opportunity. Supporters of the bands argue the presence of vendors creates direct competition, and therefore vendors should be distanced from restaurants to protect their profits. The protectionist views often align with the interest of local politicians and council members, who leverage their decision making power to promote or to protect or improve economic development in the area, which is often defined by property taxpayers.

0:19:47.0 Ginette Wessel: Some municipalities, such as Chicago, Boston, and even Cranston, Rhode Island, have begun monitoring food locations by requiring them to place GPS locator in their vehicles. Restrictions that contain vendors to districts or ban them from public property or limit the amount of time they can stop and wait in one location also serve as examples of powerful interests really seeking to gain from regulating food trucks. The complexity, the type, and the degree of regulation enforcement in the US depends on the local municipality and its residents.

0:20:30.3 Ginette Wessel: Strategies that are used to regulate food vendors can be categorized, as I’ve done here, as acts of spatial exclusions, things like proximity bans or bans on public and private property, acts of regulating and monitoring behavior, such as putting GPS devices in the trucks, or spatial distancing between vendors, or regulating alcohol consumption and recycling, or acts of enforcing public health standards, such as requiring a commissary or letter grades for the trucks. So, however, food trucks become more powerful and gain more rights when they work collectively as an association or they seek out representation from a supporting advocacy organization, and these groups argue for more equitable regulatory frameworks and fight for vendors’ rights and share best practices. The Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association is the most legally active group in the US, having sued 13 municipalities for not abiding by the California Vehicle Code, which states that vending regulations for the public right-of-way must address a specific public safety issue.

0:21:48.7 Ginette Wessel: So, for example, in Monterova, California, the city’s ban on food trucks in the Old Town District for reasons of business competition was quickly reversed by a lawsuit. In 2013, as these food truck associations began to grow across the nation, the President Matt Geller, co-founded the National Food Truck Association, along with six other association leaders to support existing food truck associations and build new ones. And the organization represents now about 18 regional associations across the US, and I’d also mention, likewise, the Institute for Justice in Washington DC, which was founded in 1991, and that’s a non-profit public interest law firm. They litigate for food truck vendors, and they’ve organized and filed over a dozen food truck cases across the country, winning most of them and publishing many research reports on how to promote food trucks as small businesses in growing.

0:22:55.4 Ginette Wessel: So, tensions between how we think of tactical and strategic spatial practices are inevitable when public space is at stake and when new food industries emerge in landscapes with established restaurants. The strength of the food truck industry in each city is really determined by that interplay between the bottom-up efforts of food truck vendors, the associations and the advocacy firms, and the top-down regulations that are typically installed by local, county, and state government. So, now I’d like to share a series of vignettes that I think best capture the central debates at play surrounding the gourmet food truck industry.

0:23:37.1 Ginette Wessel: In 2010, the rise of gourmet food trucks on Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile led to a dispute with local restaurant owners at the Museum Square and LA County Art Museum, who argued vendors were encroaching on their business at a time when sales were in decline following the 2008 recession. One restaurant owner stated, the economy’s been so bad I had to cut employees and these trucks show up and I have to cut more. We all average $16,000 in rent and I have to pay employee taxes and alcohol licenses.

0:24:11.4 Ginette Wessel: Supporting the restaurants, District 4 Councilman Tom LaBonge claimed the trucks monopolized parking spaces and he said these trucks parked for multiple hours in a commercially zoned area, contrary to the intent of those metered spaces. Parking meters were designed to encourage turnover of vehicles in high-demand areas. Soon, junk cars began appearing to occupy the available spaces for trucks and LaBonge proposed two alternatives to City Council, either restrict trucks from commercial zones or create designated zones for them.

0:24:50.4 Ginette Wessel: The food truck vendors saw LaBonge’s proposal as short-sighted and in violation of the same code that upheld the earlier People versus Garcia-Lonchera court case, which found that local regulations can only be enacted for matters of public safety. Accordingly, LaBonge expanded his argument and claimed that the trucks blocked visibility of drivers on Wilshire Boulevard. A local food truck advocate turned to Twitter, spread the news about the debate on a Friday in 2010, asking the community to contact LaBonge with concerns. A Facebook page titled Los Angelinos Against LaBonge described him as a friend of the celebrity and a foe of a small businessman. And by the next Monday, LaBonge’s phone and inbox were flooded and the backlash postponed the measure for two years, allowing the trucks to continue business if they located an empty parking space.

0:25:44.3 Ginette Wessel: In December 2012, Los Angeles City Council approved two restrictions for the area. Food trucks larger than 22 feet long and 7 feet high were prohibited from parking with oversized vehicle restrictions along 15 blocks of Wilshire Boulevard. And second, oversized vehicle parking was prohibited from bisecting streets entirely. These restrictions, still in place as of today, reduced the number of potential parking spaces by half, from 40 to 20. And food truck advocates claim that the lack of visibility has not been proven and argue that the new regulations were a way of balancing competing interests and not having to take sides. The vendors feel the real losers are the customers who have more limited lunchtime options. So the restaurants argue that by selling food in the vicinity of their locations, food trucks are unfairly luring customers away from their establishments.

0:26:52.7 Ginette Wessel: However, the several court cases really have no evidence to support that. And much of the case law has been established by longer running Loncheras. 1978, another case where there was the banning of sale of viticules on public streets with within 100 feet of a brick and mortar establishment. And after Loncheras fought this ordinance, it was ruled that the regulation discriminated economically against catering truck operations. So that’s important to realize that the Loncheras had such an incredible role in laying a foundation. Some restaurant owners have been more inclined to embrace, actually, the food truck activity and found ways to reinvent or boost their business.

0:27:37.1 Ginette Wessel: So for instance, the owners of the Lennon ru restaurant in the HBO Hulu campus in Santa Monica realized that they could not stop food trucks from parking near the campus and instead lowered their prices and changed their menu with a different offering each day. Their new business model responded to the consumer demand and have more to go options. So from the perspective of mobile food vendors, restaurants constitute an entirely different market that offers dining space and restrooms in a climate controlled environment.

0:28:11.9 Ginette Wessel: The person who’s going to the food truck isn’t going to it over a restaurant, they’re making an active choice to go. Even so, many vendors are aware of restaurant complaints and make an effort to really avoid areas with the established restaurant scene. And in the end, consumers are driving the market and today they want more options and more access to foods that are inexpensive, inventive, and healthy.

0:28:36.9 Ginette Wessel: So my second vignette illustrates the vulnerability of food trucks at bottom-up food truck rallies in Charlotte, North Carolina. Two years after Kogi had been serving the streets of West Hollywood and they were really popular in major cities across the US, they just started emerging in Charlotte at office parks and breweries on the outskirts of the city. When Kelly Kierson arrived in Charlotte in 2010, she was eager for her own business and found that the startup cost of a truck were too high and the city’s regulations were not friendly.

0:29:13.6 Ginette Wessel: In May of 2011, Kierson started her roaming for food business in a refurbished equipment trailer and began contacting property owners at major office parks in Ballantyne and South Park. Two months into her search, she began building a relationship with Gaines Brown, a local property owner with a passion for growing the arts culture in the South End. Brown owned a vacant lot sparsely covered in grass at the intersection of Camden Road and Park Avenue. He purchased the lot in the 1980s as part of a larger initiative to create Live Work Hub art studios in this dilapidated area. In the 2000s, the lot hosted a popular weekend tailgate and Brown agreed to let Kierson operate on his lot on Wednesdays for lunch and on the first Friday art gallery crawl.

0:30:08.7 Ginette Wessel: In February 2012, Gaines Brown, Brian Seely, owner of the rising food truck Urban Legend, and Ted Boyd of the Charlotte City Center City Partners began collaborating to host food truck rallies on Brown’s lot every Friday night. City Center Partners helped them build a relationship with the city officials since the event violated current ordinances. Next door, a local grocery provided restrooms and sold beverages that could be brought to the rally. The trucks were scheduled and managed by the Tronner family, who operated the Sticks and Cones ice cream truck, and the rally started with just three trucks and rapidly grew from there, reaching 14 by 2015. These family and dog-friendly rallies also supported the neighboring Fat Burrito restaurant, whose manager reported that the weekly gathering had doubled their sales. After three years of popularity, in October 2015, Brown announced on Facebook that the last food truck rally at the lot would be that November. The lot, along with parcels of land on the 2.3 acre block, was being sold to make way for the Dimensional Fund Advisors investment firm headquarters.

0:31:27.2 Ginette Wessel: Brown saw this nine-story, 292 square-foot commercial office space development as crucial to supporting the amount of housing in the city and he was nearing retirement and wanted to pursue other things. And while the closing of the Food Truck Friday rallies at the lot was upsetting for many, it was not unexpected given the area’s rising property values and the walkable access to light rail and the strong housing growth in the surrounding area. Luckily, Brown, whose impact on the arts community was lasting, took steps to accommodate the rally at a local brewery.

0:32:04.2 Ginette Wessel: Sycamore Brewing, one of Charlotte’s rising brewery establishments, had a 1.6-acre property with an unused gravel area that could accommodate 12 trucks just a few blocks south of the original site. At the brewery, the trucks were successful but eventually seen as an amenity, not a focal point, for customers who primarily visited the location for the quality craft beer. Eventually, in 2021, as the South End neighborhood continued to appeal to real estate investors, the owners of Sycamore Brewing sold their property for $9 million to developer Hortman Holdings.

0:32:41.1 Ginette Wessel: The two-phase, 16-story development called The Line includes 285,000 residential square feet, 28,000 retail square feet, and the retail component of the development is anchored by a new 7,000-square-foot Sycamore Brewery and Taproom. And while the brewery moved into the new development, no plans were made to relocate the food trucks. And as South End became more vulnerable to development pressure in the neighborhood, food truck rallies were phased out. The food truck rallies had played a vital role in introducing the area to outsiders and to facilitating the community’s revitalization for 10 years and were a true public space, fostered from the bottom up by the public and local food entrepreneurs.

0:33:26.0 Ginette Wessel: So for my third vignette, I wanna step back a little bit to 2008 to explain the challenges that hindered the growth of them in Charlotte. In 2008, just before gourmet food trucks had arrived on the scene, the city revamped its food vending ordinances by enacting strict controls after residents complained about crime and noise from them along South Boulevard.

0:33:50.1 Ginette Wessel: And among the many regulations implemented, the most impactful limited them to vending only 90 days a year, limited the hours of their operation, required 400 feet of separations from residential communities or another vendor, and prohibited them entirely on the streets within the Central Business District. At the time, Loncheras, the Latino vendors that were the dominant population, saw the new regulations as a direct attack on their 50 vendor community. In an attempt to change what felt like a discriminatory act, the Loncheras launched the Carne Asada Is Not a Crime campaign and petitioned for the ordinance to be amended. Residents and city council members, on the other hand, argued the regulations were not about ethnicity and were meant to eliminate noise, garbage, and loitering. Unfortunately, the Loncheras’ advocacy efforts were too late to prevent the passage of the regulations, which had a detrimental impact on their businesses, decreasing from 50 to 7 by 2019.

0:34:52.3 Ginette Wessel: In 2014, Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Planning Department proposed the first major set of revisions since 2008. This was in response to the gourmet food truck scene, which had found the mobile food vending regulations way overly constraining. And these amendments established more zones which food trucks could operate in and were overall viewed as a step in the right direction. But vendors still felt they didn’t go far enough and were concerned that they were limited to operating one day a week, they had to remain 100 feet away from restaurants or residential districts, and they could not provide tables and chairs outside of their truck. So in response to this, vendors formed the Charlotte Food Truck Association in 2014, launched charlottefoodtrucks.org, and collected 3,000 signatures in three days. These advocacy efforts materialized in the Charlotte Mobile Food Truck Citizen Advisory Group, which were meetings held by the Planning Department.

0:35:54.5 Ginette Wessel: In March 2017, after three years of meetings, a set of amendments were approved by Charlotte City Council. Of them, some of the significant ones were allowing vendors to operate in residential districts at schools and churches, but still maintaining 100 feet from a property line, residential property line, down from that previous 400 feet, allowing them to operate near a restaurant if they had permission from the owner, written permission, otherwise they needed to stay 50 feet away. Vendors were no longer constrained to certain hours of operation, and although the regulations still required expensive special event permits, this was largely seen as a collaboration between city officials and vendors and resulted in much less severe restrictions. And vendors felt the new regulations were really an improvement and were pleased that their voices were heard.

0:36:52.1 Ginette Wessel: So though Loncheras were unable to change policy in 2008, and food truck vendors were able to achieve this middle-of-the-road agreement in the subsequent decade, it highlights the kind of ensuing challenges ethnic vendors face in the US. And for my final vignette, which I’m gonna kind of shorten ’cause I see time’s getting a little tight here, I do wanna mention that Charlotte’s residential communities were really unanticipated lifelines for sustaining profitable food truck businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, something that many vendors hadn’t predicted. Charlotte’s residents, like residents of many cities and towns in the US, were ordered to stay at home. And at that moment, food trucks across the city really started to appear in housing complexes.

0:37:47.2 Ginette Wessel: And in addition to the thrill and the novelty of ordering a meal from a truck, vendors were providing an enjoyable break from the monotony of daily life and the opportunity to connect with other people, things that were really taken for granted before the pandemic. One food truck expert had noted that neighborhood associations and apartment management companies quickly started scheduling food truck visits as a perk for their residents, and real estate businesses benefited from happy residents and residents enjoyed food options close to home. So this was a big shift for vendors who were very familiar with very predictable commercial and office areas. Now shifting into this new set of residential communities.

0:38:34.4 Ginette Wessel: And this eventually, now with the new unified development ordinance in Charlotte, is now a long-term opportunity for vendors to be vending in these large multi-unit residential complexes. There’s even data to show that the county had noted in 2021 about 250 food trucks and 70 of those had opened within the year of the pandemic. So very resilient despite that.

0:39:03.3 Ginette Wessel: I do want to pause here for another little snippet on thinking about rights. So the right to the city, as Henry Losev reminds us, always requires mobilization and struggle. Food trucks’ rights are never fixed. In this past January, I spoke with a reporter about a food truck dispute in which two Haitian Food Truck owners filed a lawsuit against their Virginia town of Park Slee after a vulgar city council member cut the truck’s water line because the owners did not have an active conditional use permit and were allegedly disposing of grease in the city’s sewer system. The lawsuit states that if the owners had not been of Haitian descent, the town government would not have engaged in abusive contact, effectively putting them out of business.

0:39:50.9 Ginette Wessel: I wanna mention that food truck vendors claiming rights to urban space is a very high risk activity that can collapse their business entirely and add to the many, many challenges of being successful. And so for this reason, actually, catering companies and brick and mortar locations become preferred by chefs and food truck owners after just a few years of operating. And while it’s unclear what the outcome will be for the Haitian food truck owners, this case is certainly a reminder that food trucks’ rights to urban space are deeply entwined with issues of cultural prejudice and protectionism of property.

0:40:29.4 Ginette Wessel: Food truck locations are also vulnerable due to the rising property values, as I’ve mentioned, and that was amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. And as vacant land in the growing capitalist city becomes sparser and more valuable, food trucks are at risk of displacement. Additionally, and paradoxically, while food trucks are displaced, they are also part of the gentrifying process in a neighborhood. They can participate in changing a neighborhood economically by fostering food business competition or catering to populations with middle or upper incomes. And food trucks could also be promoted as amenities for new housing developments, even as they simultaneously displace homeless who occupy marginal and unseen spaces of the city. Therefore, food trucks can be gentrifiers, but not unilaterally. They are part of a wider set of relationships that force neighborhood change, and they sometimes experience the brunt of that change themselves.

0:41:32.5 Ginette Wessel: So I know we’re getting tight. So I’m gonna skip a few parts here as we get down to thinking about… I’m gonna jump down to the toolkit as I start to think about how we might approach planning for them in the future. So let me get to my slide on that one. Okay.

0:41:57.5 Ginette Wessel: So I’d like to conclude with a planner’s toolkit. Food trucks, they can support planners’ strategies to diversify and grow small businesses. And they can introduce food options to areas with very few food businesses, and they can diversify food options for customers and others. In areas with an older restaurant scene, food trucks can elevate food quality, they can provide friendly competition at lower price points. And in general, food trucks strengthen the local economy rather than weaken existing revenue streams. Food trucks can also serve as a catalyst for diversifying that economic landscape by increasing the growth of other small businesses in mobile enterprises like beauty salons, pet shops, and health services. And planning for the growth of small businesses and recognizing them as critical economic contributors within cities helps grow entrepreneurship among that middle and low income population.

0:43:00.8 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks should be considered as part of short-term and long-term urban planning strategies to activate urban space with pedestrians. They can attract patrons by social media or by proximity. They are versatile in their environment and should be considered when we think about how to distribute them with high and low income neighborhoods.

0:43:22.0 Ginette Wessel: Food truck markets create large social gatherings and more economic revenue and facilitate streamlining permits and simplifying seating and trash and other amenities. So food truck businesses also can do well independently, but both models of having independent or collective vending can be used in combination with urban activation plans. And whenever possible, they should also be supported with mobile and permanent seating shade and weather protection.

0:43:56.4 Ginette Wessel: Zoning ordinances that deregulate rather than creates constraints leave room for interpretation and flexibility when it comes to the particularities of locations. Each site’s unique and so therefore thinking about each challenge should also be unique. And so the ability to kind of think about ordinances that incorporate access to easy transportation, thinking about how public safety and fire prevention codes apply to land use zoning is also an important element that needs to be simplified. Managing these issues on a case-by-case basis appears to be the best policy that will mitigate issues and conflict. But there’s many, many other things that they can do by simplifying their permit application. They can build better communication between enforcement and the decision makers that reduces unneeded ticketing and unneeded fines. They should also think about delegating the parking enforcement to be kind of the guardians of the industry opposed to police force who are too busy to kind of manage them.

0:45:14.5 Ginette Wessel: I’d also add that data, in some of my past work, helps to support kind of an efficient form of urban planning. When you can start to see where the food trucks move over the city over time, you can pair that with land uses and food deserts and public infrastructure and property values. So thinking about how the data of social media posts can be incorporated as a planning tool is also very powerful.

0:45:42.0 Ginette Wessel: Almost done. So almost last slide here. In the end, as I recall my visits to food trucks since 2008, I realized that the industry is a microcosm of a larger set of dynamics that define everyday urban life in the 21st century. The public realm may forever be digitally mediated and amplified by our social connections. And at the time of writing, mobile enterprises are growing in value in American society. And as real estate prices continue to skyrocket. And as formal urban centers in the public realm grow fewer, the demand for informal public spaces becomes ever more obvious. So food trucks are pop-up reminders of the tremendous value in public social life in cities. Thank you, and I look forward to chatting if we have time.

0:46:34.8 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Ginette. That was fascinating. And as I mentioned in my introduction, Ginette contributes to the great chapter to my book on food trucks, which is now seven years old. Go back to some of the research that we did, and we found, for instance, you know, Portland Go figure is the gastro-polis, the great food truck center, and they only have three permit requirements, whereas Boston in 2015-16 had 17 or something requirements. So of those forms of regulating trucks, I think spatial exclusion, there was behavior. And then public health. And public health. We found in Boston, the public health restrictions were huge. I mean, is this still the case? Is… Well, which of those forms of exclusion do you think is most prominent?

0:47:41.6 Ginette Wessel: It’s a good question. You know, gosh, Portland is such the anomaly in the food cart democracy because they do not require this commissary use. And I think that commissary use is a very powerful regulation coming from the county’s public health regulatory body. And so I think that is the biggest shaper of what the food trucks can or can’t do, meaning that they would have to park their trucks overnight. And in all states except Portland require that. It’s quite amazing to see this. But you see what it looks like at the end of the day if we didn’t have that particular regulation on there.

0:48:24.3 Ginette Wessel: So I think that’s one of the most powerful shapers. But I would also say the immediate reaction to them was proximity bans, as that is now over time, I think, lessened. And we’ve gotten to really look at, again, site-specific requirements opposed to blanketing the whole city with a ban to restaurants or schools, which was a very holistic approach to thinking about it. So I think we’ve backed off from that immediate reaction. And like I said, over time, the headlines to me just keep improving in terms of their acceptance. Yes, it may mean more layers of regulations in some places, but there is generally a partnership and relationship forming between cities and food trucks to what I call in San Francisco, a top up form of urbanism really where there is a strong, strong, tight-knit relationship. And that can lead to drawbacks and benefits too, certainly thinking about vendors’ autonomy is at jeopardy there. So I think I’m always fascinated. Every place has a different story that emerges from it. And it’s really a wonderful topic to explore and study.

0:49:45.9 Julian Agyeman: So we’ve got a question from our own page, Kelly, from Shareable. She says, “Any thoughts on the growth of mobile food trucks in rust belt cities and the economic benefits they could bring?” She says, “I’m in Syracuse, New York, and it feels like we’ve had a food truck boom. Local businesses like beer gardens and even our art museum have really embraced them with permanent or regular food truck days.”

0:50:11.1 Ginette Wessel: Yeah, no, I think that is absolutely the case. It is… And again, I think this is reinforcing what I just mentioned as the kind of top-up urbanism where you find city officials and event organizers really tapping into and actually looking to I would say the industry for help in understanding it better. Some of the more famous food truck advocates have become really stars for helping cities understand what to do. And that might be the case there, that they’re starting to kind of really latch into and seeing the value and the benefit that these trucks are providing in terms of economic development. There’s wonderful spillover effects that can be heard. But it comes back to kind of Julian and your work and always thinking local, right? This is another amazing illustration of how the local sustains and is resilient and continues. The COVID didn’t kill the food trucks, you know, they found a way. And so there’s just a beautiful, local approach to thinking about how we can continue to fight for rights and agency over urban space, as long as we kind of stay true to the fight.

0:51:29.5 Julian Agyeman: Right. Okay. We have another question here from Tom, Tom Llewellyn. “Are there examples of food trucks increasing access to food in neighborhoods without grocery stores and brick and mortar restaurants.” That’s a great question, Tom. I’ve never actually thought about it. So are there food trucks that are really helping out in food desert, so-called food desert areas?

0:51:56.2 Ginette Wessel: There are. And that was one of the slides I had to quickly go through. But World Central Kitchen has actually more recently been famous because they are starting to work with food trucks during disaster relief efforts, predominantly in Florida, where there’s been a lot of destruction happening. So that is becoming, more recently, the newest kind of resilience, where they’re really helping support communities in times of need after devastating natural disasters. Roy Choi, believe it or not, started a restaurant called Local, which was meant to serve low-income communities in Watts neighborhood in LA. And so he, believe it or not, the first person has really put that message forward of trying to think about how do we serve vulnerable communities in food scarcity.

0:52:50.3 Ginette Wessel: There are also education programs with schools that will take a truck for free of lunch programs in the summer for children in neighborhoods. So there is an incredible amount of efforts and it… I’m thinking too, actually. Yeah. The wildfires in California, food trucks were able to kind of go and mobilize to help collectively get a lot of food that they could distribute quickly. I know Off the Grid was very well part of that effort there in San Francisco. So there’s so many great ways I think that they are helping in filling in the void in so many dire situations of dire need or everyday stresses of communities too.

0:53:29.6 Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Ginette. So final question. You know, you’re talking here to a lot of urban planning students. If there’s one thing you can say about food trucks going into the future, that they need to be aware of as budding urban planners, what would that be?

0:53:49.0 Ginette Wessel: That’s a great question. It’s a hard one. I would say, don’t ever assume, always talk to the chefs, talk to the owner. Ethnography is an incredible tool and powerful tool for urban planning, and I think we don’t put enough attention to it. And so that would be my last piece of wisdom to leave you is, look closely and get to know your subjects that you’re looking at.

0:54:14.8 Julian Agyeman: Great. Well, Ginette, thanks so much. And you’re in Providence, I’m in Boston. Next time, let’s get a coffee in the tent.

0:54:24.3 Ginette Wessel: That’s right.

0:54:29.2 Tom Llewellyn: I hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript, and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors, and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Ronna Alexander. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

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In addition, 97% of food waste ends up in landfills, and the methane gas released from rotting food – the same thing that’s released in your refrigerator drawers, causing perishables to expire faster – is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. So, reducing food waste has an environmental impact as well, playing an important role in curbing climate change.

Addressing food waste through prevention, redistribution, and composting is an emerging focus for city leaders. Inspired, in part, by the report Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill, by Dana Gunders, staff scientist at the NRDC, food waste is a hot topic.

Despite the magnitude of the problem, solutions exist to prevent food waste—many of them are fairly easy and inexpensive to implement. In fact, a great deal of food waste prevention can be accomplished simply by changing people’s habits.

Everyone can help reduce food waste, and some steps elected officials, city managers, and other leaders can take to make food waste prevention a widespread practice. Countless resources, tools, and initiatives to prevent waste and draw attention to the issue have already been created:

• France became the first country to ban supermarkets from disposing of unsold food. Supermarkets in France now donate unsold food to charities and food banks.
• The Food Too Good to Waste toolkit provides families and communities both strategies and tools resulting in a nearly 50% reduction in preventable food waste.
• Just Eat It, a documentary film about food waste, is screened around the world.
• National Geographic features the ugly foods movement in its cover story, How ‘Ugly’ Fruits and Vegetables Can Help Solve World Hunger.
• ReFED – a collaboration of more than thirty business, nonprofit, foundation and government leaders committed to reducing United States food waste – creates numerous resources, including a Solutions to Food Waste interactive chart and the Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent.
• WRAP, a UK organization that works in “the space between governments, businesses, communities, thinkers and individuals,” creates the Love Food Hate Waste program to educate and instruct people about food waste prevention strategies.
• SHARECITY is crowdsourcing information about food sharing activities enabled by Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). They’re creating a searchable database of 100 cities around the world.
• Save Food, a joint initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Messe Düsseldorf, and interpack, forms to fight world food waste and loss through a global alliance of all stakeholders.
• Italy offers tax breaks to supermarkets that donate their waste food to charity.
• FoodCloud announces a ground-breaking partnership with Tesco Ireland to redistribute surplus food from 147 grocery stores to charities and community groups.
• The Real Junk Food Project creates cafés in the UK that serve restaurant-quality food from produce headed to the landfill.
• The Think.Eat.Save campaign of the Save Food Initiative is created to “galvanize widespread global, regional and national actions, and catalyze more sectors of society to be aware and to act.”
• LA Kitchen recovers healthy, local food from the waste stream to feed the hungry and provide culinary training to unemployed adults, particularly adults exiting prison as well as foster kids aging out of the system.
• A growing number of apps are created to reduce food waste, including Waste No Food, Copia, Zero Percent, Pare Up, Spoiler Alert, FoodKeeper, Food Cowboy and many more.
• Imperfect Produce launches to deliver ugly fruits and vegetables in the Bay Area.
• End Food Waste’s Ugly Foods movement grows into a global community connected by social media platforms.

For city officials, reducing food waste remains a matter of educating residents, providing the necessary infrastructure and creating a consistent messaging strategy that addresses both sides of the issue: preventing food waste and recycling organic matter once there is waste.

Shareable connected with three food waste reduction experts to get their recommendations for city leaders in the effort to help reduce food waste on a municipal level. We spoke with Cassie Bartholomew and Jeff Becerra from Stop Waste in Alameda County, California, which has one of the largest food scrap recycling programs in the country, and Veronica Fincher, Waste Prevention Program Manager at Seattle Public Utilities in Seattle, Washington, where it’s now illegal to throw food and food waste into the trash.

Their responses include great tips to prevent food waste, strategic partnerships for food redistribution and recycling options for food waste once it is generated. Here are their top 27 recommendations.

1. Look to Prevention First

Just as the materials recycling hierarchy places reduction as the best option, ahead of reusing and recycling, food waste has a similar hierarchy. Preventing food waste is a far more desirable option than dealing with it once it’s been created.

Composting is certainly better than letting food waste rot in the landfill. But it’s also important to remember that when food is wasted, all of the resources used to produce the food, including water, are also wasted.

As Fincher explains, at the municipal level they’re trying to reduce the tonnage of materials going to the landfill through both composting and prevention.

“It saves everybody money if we don’t have stuff going into the waste stream period,” she says. “It’s a matter of trying to use resources wisely, conserve, keep rates as low as possible, and help our customers reduce the amount of food waste they throw out.”

The food recovery hierarchy places reduction as the most preferred means of reducing food waste. 

2. Raise Awareness of Food Waste Reduction Strategies

One of the biggest challenges of reducing food waste is breaking people’s habits and automatic behaviors. If someone has thrown away food scraps and uneaten food for decades, composting requires a complete behavioral shift.

The best way to accomplish this shift in thinking is to create awareness regarding the massive amounts of organic waste. The Food Too Good to Waste toolkit is designed to help families both track and reduce their individual food waste. It includes instructions and messaging and marketing materials as well as research conducted on reducing household waste. Numerous cities are already utilizing this toolkit for broader campaigns and food waste challenges, and it can be customized to work with any community or family.

Communities can also include food waste prevention with their municipal messaging, supplying tips and resources to help citizens implement food waste prevention strategies in their own daily lives.

Download our free ebook: “Beyond Waste: Community Solutions to Managing Our Resources”

3. Bring the Problem Home

Food waste prevention requires everyone to do their part. Programs that people can easily implement at home and that involve the entire family bring food waste awareness to people of all ages. Therefore, it’s essential to find and create ways to work with families to minimize food waste.

An estimated one-third of food produced in the world for human consumption is being lost or wasted. 

4. Reduce the Ick Factor

Some people already understand the benefits of composting, while others push back with concerns about cleanliness and rodents. As Becerra points out, compost consists of the same waste that people are already generating, they’re just sending it to a different location.

“When you have a new waste stream like this, people don’t necessarily get it,” he says. “There’s sort of this ick factor that people need to get over.”

Becerra suggests creating simple behavioral changes, such as designating a small pail in the kitchen to collect vegetable trimmings and disposing of food-soiled paper in an outdoor organic bin.

5. Support the Growing Community Composting Movement

Community composting programs use previously wasted resources as local assets and reinvest them back into the same community. Many of these food waste prevention programs are powered by bicycles. City officials can support community composting programs and partner with them to further engage the community.

6. Educate Composters about Prevention

One of the challenges that Stop Waste faces is getting people who are already composting to make a deeper commitment to food waste prevention. Composting is the fifth tier of the EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy, so it’s important to educate seasoned composters about the importance of reducing food waste in the first place.

“People may feel like they’re already doing their green duty,” says Bartholomew. “They feel good about [food] recycling. It’s easy to do. It doesn’t take as much thinking and analysis as prevention.”

Through composting, organic waste becomes fresh soil. Photo: USDA (CC-BY)

7. Look at the Big Picture

Because food waste is a complex issue, it’s important to look at the big picture as well as the steps toward ideal solutions. Stop Waste did some strategic planning to assess the whole waste management cycle—how materials are produced, consumed, and ultimately discarded in their area—to create a closed-loop cycle.

“That’s where the prevention and reduction piece came in,” says Bartholomew, “from looking at the EPA’s food recovery hierarchy and trying to develop resources and best practices around reducing waste through prevention, reduction, and donation, then composting the rest.”

8. Work on a Community Level

Raising awareness of food waste prevention and recycling should be part of a top-down messaging effort, including mailers, posters and websites. But the message should also be community based, reaching community members in familiar places. Where are people in the community gathering? What messaging will they respond to? What kind of hands-on education can you provide? These are key questions to ask.

9. Develop Culturally Appropriate Materials

Developing culturally appropriate materials for community members works hand in hand with community outreach efforts.

Determine your target market, then work with community organizations to find the best ways to spread food waste messaging and disseminate resources. Be culturally sensitive. Work closely with neighborhood organizations to determine the most effective strategies for their specific community, then support them in doing the work. A marketing message has far greater impact when it comes from someone within a community.

“We work with community organizations and nonprofits so they can help educate their communities,” says Becerra. “They work in conjunction with us, but in a way that resonates with them. We’ve been visiting nonprofit groups over the last couple of years and have worked closely with them to find the best ways to reach their constituents.”

The resulting projects include a community mural about composting and a door-to-door canvassing campaign.

“It’s a little more of a grassroots community effort,” says Becerra.

Reducing food waste can be a grassroots community effort. Photo: Family O’Abé (CC-BY)

10. Create Food Waste Reduction Requirements for the Garbage Franchise

Cities typically control the garbage franchise, so they can require garbage haulers to pick up the organic stream. That organic stream can be set up to allow for food waste, including food scraps from preparation, uneaten food, and food-soiled paper, such as paper coffee cups and takeout containers.

“If the city is able to site a commercial composting facility, that helps a tremendous amount as well,” Becerra says, “because you’re generating this new waste stream, so you need to have a place fairly close by to process it. The city can assist by making sure the permitting process is not too cumbersome for setting up a commercial composting facility relatively close to the city.”

Becerra stresses that waste haulers need to be on board and invested in the fact that recycling organic matter is worthwhile and not simply meeting the requirements of their agreement.

11. Find the Right Location for Industrial Composting

Neighbors will likely push back against proposed locations for commercial composting facilities because they don’t want it in their neighborhood. Finding an agreeable location will be different for every city, but Becerra advises finding an area that is close to the city, but not necessarily in an urban setting. Many of the Alameda County composting facilities are in fairly remote areas.

The Food Too Good to Waste toolkit is full of resources and strategies to reduce household food waste.

12. Create Diverse Strategies and Messaging

In your communications about reducing food waste, offer a variety of options. Not every food waste prevention technique will work for every family or individual. In a small pilot study in Seattle, residents received a list of possibilities to reduce waste and tested three options over the course of a month.

“We were hoping it would settle on a few key, top strategies,” says Fincher.

However, they discovered a mix of 15 different strategies that worked for different people.

“It’s so individual,” Fincher explains. “We recognized that we need to allow for a lot of flexibility in our messaging so people can pick what’s going to work for them.”

13. Leverage Waste Management Funding to Raise Prevention Awareness

Cities may have robust budgets and resources available for food scrap recycling, but fewer resources available for food waste prevention. Bartholomew advises leveraging the recycling budget to raise awareness about food waste prevention.

“When rolling out a new recycling program, for example,” she says, “see if you can pair the messaging to use this as an opportunity to teach people how to reduce the amount of food waste they’re generating in the first place, then compost the rest.” She adds, “It’s a complex message, and you’re teaching multiple behaviors. Clearly there’s an opportunity to leverage that funding that already exists for outreach by adding in the prevention messaging.”

14. Create Food Waste Challenges

Building on the resources from the Food Too Good to Waste toolkit, you can create food waste challenges in households, neighborhoods, and cities to bring awareness to the issue of food waste. Rally community members around the cause and introduce a competition where people can challenge themselves and each other.

15. Utilize the UK’s Love Food Hate Waste Resources

Love Food Hate Waste is a project of the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). Their website offers a number of resources to reduce food waste, including an app to help people waste less and save money, a perfect portion tool, a two-week meal planner, and hints and tips about date labels, freezing food, storing food, and more.

To help reduce food waste, set goals for yourself and your household. Photo: Madhan Karthikeyan (CC-BY)

16. Create Partnerships

Partnerships play an important role in solving food waste at a grassroots level.

“If communities are going to be successful,” says Becerra, “multiple parties need to be on board. Working together is critical to making it happen, whether it’s food waste prevention or food scrap recycling.”

Potential partners include industrial kitchens, restaurants, school cafeterias, supermarkets, local community organizations and nonprofits. To facilitate these partnerships, there’s a growing need for companies to create software and increase efficiency.

Food recovery—taking surplus food from one business and delivering it to organizations working to curb hunger—also requires key partnerships.

In Orange County, California, they found that restaurants didn’t understand the Good Samaritan Act, which protects businesses from criminal and civil liability when they donate food to nonprofit organizations. Concerns about liability had been preventing restaurants from donating food.

To educate restaurant owners, local health inspectors, who regularly visit the restaurants, were trained to discuss how to safely donate excess food.

The county then partnered with Yellow Cab and local 7-11 stores: Yellow Cab picks up the food during off-hours and takes it to the convenience stores to refrigerate overnight until pick up.

“These are innovations that are specific to that community,” says Bartholomew, “and they took a handful of partners to really think through and come up with.”

Food rotting in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO². Photo by Taz (CC-BY)

17. Sell or Donate the Compost

Compost can be sold, donated to local schools and organizations, or used for public projects like parks and gardens.

“One thing you can do,” says Becerra, “is have free compost giveaways. It’s a way to show residents, who are essentially the customers, that their work is creating a useful product, and not just disappearing.”

One school district in Alameda County has language built into the city’s franchise agreement to donate a percentage of the finished compost to the school district for school gardens. One of the haulers also has a donation program where they donate directly to community groups and school groups that can promote the use of local compost.

18. Do a Local Study

Gathering sample data can help determine next steps toward sustainable consumption in cities. Officials in Seattle conducted a small food waste study of 119 households. They asked each household to weigh their organic waste to help determine how much of their total waste stream was organic matter.

“That gave us some data that we didn’t have from any other source,” says Fincher. “It showed that a third of our food waste is edible food waste and that reducing it is actually something that is worthwhile.”

Food waste occurs at every stage of the food cycle, from producers down to consumers. Photo: s pants (CC-BY)

19. Create and Support Food Recovery Programs

Food waste recovery is an important, socially responsible aspect of reducing food waste. Businesses may be inclined to adopt food waste recovery practices, since production is unaffected.  Encourage local stores and restaurants to join existing food recovery programs or to create a new program.

20. Create and Support Food Redistribution Tech Tools

Preventing food waste requires smart systems. Develop and use local tech platforms, such as online portals or mapping platforms, to connect those with surplus food to those who need food. In Seattle, for example, 200 different agencies pick up and redistribute food, but, as Fincher explains, “There are a lot of other generators and people who need the food.”

21. Celebrate Wins and Showcase Businesses Taking a Leadership Role

One of the best ways to get businesses and organizations on board with food waste reduction is to spotlight the ones that are already doing it well. This inspires and encourages other enterprises to find ways to participate.

“We’re always trying to share success stories and best practices,” says Bartholomew, “by highlighting businesses that are doing the right thing or highlighting how they overcame some barriers.”

22. Set Food Waste Reduction Goals

In keeping with the nationwide goal to reduce 50 percent of food waste by 2030, city officials can create local goals to keep leaders and residents on track.

“By setting some sort of goal, tracking how much pre-consumer food waste is being generated, then categorizing why it’s being generated and whether that food gets composted or goes to the landfill,” says Bartholomew, “we can see where that food waste is generated and where it goes.”

Stop Waste will be gathering data for the next few years to yield better insight into the county’s larger waste generators. Once they’ve pinpointed the largest problems, they can work to reduce food waste in those areas.

23. Include Food Scrap Pickup in Mandatory Recycling Programs

Alameda County has a mandatory recycling program for businesses that includes organics collection. Recycling Rules Alameda County states the rules and gives information on both the expectations and best practices.

97 percent of food waste ends up in landfills. Photo: Alan Levine (CC-BY)

24. Support Food Waste Reduction Legislation

There’s an increasing amount of legislation addressing food waste reduction—particularly regarding date labeling. Advocates aim to create a standard labeling system to help reduce food waste. The NRDC report The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America is a “first-of-its-kind legal analysis of federal and state laws related to date labels across all 50 states.” The report presents recommendations for a new labeling system.

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree from Maine recently introduced the Food Recovery Act. The bill is aimed at reducing the amount of food wasted each year in the United States and includes nearly two dozen provisions to reduce food waste.

Supporting legislation around food waste issues is critical for city leaders working to prevent food waste.

25. Provide Food Waste Awareness Outreach in Schools

As Bartholomew explains, it’s easier to instill positive waste reduction behaviors in children than to change existing behaviors in adults. To facilitate this behavior change, city leaders can create and support programs designed specifically for local schools and youth organizations.

Organizers should work with an existing recycling coordinator or find the resources to integrate food waste education into existing programs. To create consistency, Bartholomew recommends setting up a consistent infrastructure, so kids have the same recycling bins at school that they have at home.

Stop Waste’s Student Action Project visits 5th grade and middle school classrooms to train teachers about recycling and food waste. Their team also helps families with the Food Too Good to Waste program, which works with them for four to six weeks. Bartholomew finds the citizen-science aspect to be particularly effective because students are bringing the same message home to their families.

26. Get Other Officials On Board

The best way to get other officials on board with a food waste reduction program is to show them projects that are successful in other cities.

“City officials have to deal with many of the same issues,” says Becerra. “It’s helpful for elected officials to know that it is possible to do these things.” He adds, “Sometimes it takes a while for people to understand that this can be done fairly easily and that it is important.”

27. Connect with Successful Food Waste Reduction Programs

Are you ready to get started on a food waste reduction strategy? The Stop Waste team is available to advise and share its best practices. Services and programs are well established in Alameda County, and the Stop Waste team stresses that they can help connect the dots for other leaders, too.

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This article was originally published on April 11, 2016

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The post How to prevent food waste: 27 tips for community leaders appeared first on Shareable.

Describing a place as a food desert, says food sovereignty activist Sophi Wilmore, “implies that this is a natural phenomenon—that the lack of healthy, fresh, nutritious foods in certain neighborhoods is par for the course, normal, organic.” 

On the contrary, says Wilmore: The real issue is structural racism, and unjust systems that keep people impoverished, hungry, and positioned for incarceration. 

Wilmore is the co-executive director of Feed Black Futures, a community-based, Black, queer-led food sovereignty organization in California that connects Black and brown farmers with Black mamas and caregivers whose lives and families have been impacted by incarceration and the criminal legal system. 

“It’s all part of the systems of oppression and how they function,” they say. “Getting us further away from the places that have the highest food distribution intersects with food apartheid. These are the places where there is limited-to-no access to fresh foods and vegetables.” 

Food apartheid, a term coined by the farmer and advocate Karen Washington, has real impacts. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, among the more than 54 million Americans who lack access to healthy food, formerly incarcerated people and their children are at least twice as likely to suffer from food insecurity. People with felony drug convictions, for example, are permanently banned from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, though many states, including California, have opted out of this ban. 

But even joining, or re-joining, government food programs can be difficult for formerly incarcerated people, who often lack the information, resources, and support they need to restart their lives. This makes the lack of healthy food an “often overlooked consequence of incarceration” that is connected to other societal injustices, such as homelessness and unemployment. 

This type of structural racism hinders the well-being of Black women and caregivers who have been impacted by the justice system, Wilmore said, and who are owed reparations. 

“We were promised land after the abolition of slavery and never received that land,” they said. 

In response, Feed Black Futures pursues reparations through a teach them to fish strategy of food justice, food education, and farmer training to decrease dependency on industrial and capitalist food systems that put profit over people and the planet. 

Ali Anderson, FBF’s founder and co-executive director, jumpstarted Feed Black Futures with a crowdfunding campaign to raise $10,000 and feed 20 families that benefited from the annual Black Mamas Day Bail Out at the start of the pandemic. She collaborated with the Essie Justice Group, a women-led membership organization that supports Black and Latinx women and families affected by incarceration. A month later, Anderson had surpassed the initial goal to raise about $90,000.

That initial effort motivated Anderson, an experienced community organizer who holds a masters degree in public health from Emory University, to start Feed Black Futures. 

Today, the organization, grounded in principles of abolition, liberation, and self empowerment, connects Black women and their families and caregivers with nutritious foods and fresh produce purchased from Black and brown farmers—what Anderson calls “building pathways of food and land sovereignty in California.”

Fannie Lou Hamer, a community organizer and civil-rights activist who died in 1977, once said: “Down where we are, food is used as a political weapon. But if you have a pig in your backyard, if you have some vegetables in your garden, you can feed yourself and your family and nobody can push you around.” 

Feed Black Futures breathes life into Hamer’s words by training participants to start and nurture backyard, apartment, and community gardens — and to advocate for food sovereignty policies and practices that enable marginalized communities to gain access to fresh food production and equitable food distribution. 

In practice, Wilmore and Anderson’s organization has made more than 5,000 food deliveries to over 215 individuals, trained over 166 people in agricultural practices, and invested $120,000 in Black-and brown-owned farms in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

Feed Black Futures considers all of the people they help as members. That includes people who have received food services and gone through garden and farmer training. Participation replaces dues or any other type of remuneration. Wilmore’s hope is FBF’s investment in members will create a larger base of people advocating for food sovereignty. She also sees a future expanded platform that includes Black and brown farmers too.

Oakland resident Joymara Coleman, who has loved ones in the prison system, has been a Feed Black Futures member for the past two years. She says that knowing where her food comes from has had a positive impact on her emotional, mental, and physical health. 

“Anybody can get a community food bank box of non-perishables full of GMOs,” she said, but Feed Black Futures “gives us something more, like being intentional about the quality of food, the energy that went into growing that food, knowing that this is a symbiotic relationship between the grower and the consumer. That for me is the ultimate self-care.” 

By partnering with groups such as the Essie Justice Group, Agroecology Commons, and others in California and across the country, Wilmore said she hopes one day Feed Black Futures will become irrelevant, as more BIPOC women and families give up unhealthy food systems, support ecologically sound Black and brown farmers, and no longer go hungry because they or people they love were once incarcerated. 

“A great way to keep people impoverished is to keep them reliant on a system they cannot control,” Wilmore said. “Their choices are limited as to where they can get their food from. So we’re talking about food sovereignty as a mechanism for liberation.”

The post Reclaiming food sovereignty: How Feed Black Futures is challenging structural racism through food justice appeared first on Shareable.

One of the ways communities can do this is to establish a Little FreePantry (LFP) and/or a Little Free Fridge (LFF) (also known as a Freedge). Both LFPs and LFFs are small structures stocked by community members, for community members who need food. They are similar to Little Free Libraries as they rely on the goodwill of neighbors to keep them stocked and in good condition, they do not hold large inventories, and people can access them at any time.

What is a Little Free Pantry?

LFPs are generally housed in wooden structures with glass doors so people can see what is inside without having to open them. These are stocked with canned goods, dry foods, and non-perishable items. LFFs may be housed in wooden structures but they may also be located in an open shed or similar structure near a power source. These contain food items — including produce — that need to be refrigerated.

In areas with food insecurity, Little Free structures like these provide a lifeline for those who don’t have access to food to meet their day-to-day needs (though they shouldn’t be relied upon for meeting ongoing needs). In more affluent areas, LFPs and LFFs are often stocked with snacks and those forgot-to-grab-at-the-grocery-store items you might need at a moment’s notice.

The first official LFP was established in 2016 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but now hundreds of LFPs and LFFs are scattered across the United States, and even around the world. Join the movement, and create one for your community!

Step 1: Get up to speed on legalese and logistics

Before setting up a Little Free structure on your property, make sure there aren’t zoning laws against such structures. 

• Check with your city about any special permits you may need. 
• Fill out any necessary paperwork, and be prepared with answers to questions about safety and maintenance. 
• Be persistent and follow up on your paperwork as it moves through the approval process. 
• If you belong to a homeowners association, you may need special permission or additional paperwork to establish a LFP or LFF.
• Every state has specific rules related to the type of food that can be shared in LFPs and LFFs. While lawsuits related to donation sites like LFPs and LFFs are uncommon, you should check with your state, county, and city before establishing and stocking your food share site. (Freedge has compiled state-specific guides to help with this process.)
• Generally speaking, America’s Good Samaritan Food Donation Act protects food donors when donations take place through a non-profit entity. This law extends to food businesses in some states. Canada protects person-to-person food donations from lawsuits. This handy guide produced by the University of Arkansas School of Law outlines additional legal information related to food recovery.

Step 2: Choose a location

When choosing a location, remember that the goal is to provide for the community. 

• Pick a place anyone can easily access safely at any time of day. 
• Avoid areas with high crime or high vehicle traffic. 
• Places with high foot traffic, like street corners with sidewalks, are particularly good, but don’t place Little Free structures on easements or aprons between the sidewalk and street. In addition, avoid placing them behind gates or walls.
• Choosing a place with tree cover can keep midday sun at bay during the hottest times of the year. If you live in a particularly hot location, position the Little Free structure so it faces north or east. 
• LFFs need a nearby power source.

Step 3: Build Your LFP or LFF

Little Free Pantry has created both a comprehensive materials list and step-by-step assembly guides for the actual construction of your LFP if you need guidance, but you can build and decorate your storage space in any way you choose. 

• Make sure you build for longevity, as people will likely be opening and closing it several times a day, in all types of weather conditions, all year round. 
• Make sure wood is sanded down completely and free of splinters. 
• Use several coats of paint, and seal the edges and corners.
• Use caulk to prevent water from leaking into the structure.
• LFFs may be as big as full-sized refrigerators, or just a large drink cooler with a consistent cooling mechanism. 
• Unlike LFPs, LFFs need to be plugged in, so budget for that expense either personally or with contributions from the neighborhood.
• Both LFPs and LFFs should be painted brightly and clearly labeled so that everyone knows they are welcome to take advantage of the service.

Step 4: Keep it stocked and cleaned

It’s important to keep your Little Free structure filled and accessible to the public. This is where community buy-in and contributions come in handy (see step 5). 

• LFPs should be stocked with cans, boxes, and bags of non-perishable items. 
• Keep an eye on seasonal changes and weather conditions that could cause some items (like peanut butter or chocolate) to melt or freeze. 
• LFFs can house produce and refrigerated items, though fresh meats and dairy often aren’t allowed in LFFs because they can contaminate other foods.
• In addition to food, some LFPs keep a supply of hygiene products like toilet paper and toothpaste as well as household items like sponges and laundry detergent on hand. Others use them to make kid-friendly items and school supplies available. Depending on your community’s needs and the size of your LFP, these might be worthwhile additions for your neighborhood.
• Because this is a community effort, no donation is too small. All those single cans of beans and packages of spaghetti add up! Your neighborhood can boost its bounty by taking advantage of buy-one-get-one deals at the grocery store.
• Maintenance of the Little Free structure is also important. Request that people note the day of donation on the items they drop off (which is particularly important for refrigerated items), but don’t expect everybody to do this. 
• Encourage the community to keep the Little Free structure in good condition by keeping it organized and discarding any items that are damaged or have gone bad. 
• Make sure it is cleaned at least once a week, especially if it receives a lot of traffic.

Step 5: Spread the word

Don’t expect your LFP or LFF to fill itself. 

• Let your neighbors know you plan to install one so they know what to expect once it’s made available to the public. 
• Encourage them to support the site by stocking it, caring for its upkeep, and using it when they need it. 
• Little Free Pantries created both a “Coming to Your Neighborhood” flier and “How Does This LFP Work” flier that you can use to help educate your community about this initiative.
• Reach out to local cafés, restaurants, and grocery stores, and let them know about the Little Free structure as well. They may have additional restrictions regarding donating leftover or extra food, but it doesn’t hurt to make them aware of the LFP or LFF in the neighborhood. After all, it takes a community to support a community!

This guide was originally published on April 15, 2021 and was updated on July 3, 2024.

Related story: How to create a free farm stand in your community

Little Free Pantries Go Viral

The post How to create a little free community pantry or fridge appeared first on Shareable.

The food is sourced from produce that goes unsold at farmer’s markets, and from neighborhood and community gardens, and also from public and private fruit trees. Additionally, they help grow food on donated land. The Free Farm Stand builds community and provides a meeting place for locals on tight budgets. Most learn about the Free Farm Stand by word-of-mouth as there is little to no press and barely enough information online even to deduce the time and place of the weekly event. On distribution days, people start arriving around noon and request a number, which will be used to admit groups of ten at a time. Many folks picnic or sit in circles on the grass and talk while they wait their turn. There is no sense that this is any sort of hand-out or cattle call, but rather a way to connect to the community, get needed food, and foster a sense of belonging.

The founder, a long-time farmer, explains, “We want to improve trust and sharing through this gift economy. The idea is that if you give something, the universe will take care of you.”

While the Free Farm Stand may sound overly tree-hugger and hippy-dippy to some readers, it is a beautiful example of distributing unused food that would likely be wasted otherwise to those in need. It’s a win-win.

If you’re not motivated by the idea’s sheer altruism, think of it this way: Food insecurity drives people to seek public assistance (e.g., food stamps, and other forms of welfare) that strain state and local budgets. Community-driven activities like this decrease both food insecurity and public assistance. This is just another example of how sharing reduces waste, strengthens communities, and helps relieve already overburdened government budgets.

STEP 1: Get Organized.

Find a location and round up a few friends willing to help. When scouting locations, stick to open spaces and avoid sidewalks. The key is to be sufficiently visible to make distribution easy but not overly obtrusive so as to attract, say, attention from the authorities. Small neighborhood parks are ideal, or even parking lots of local businesses who agree to let you set up there.

Keep in mind that local laws may require permits before setting up a stand. It’s probably best to check with city hall first.

STEP 2: Collect the Food.

You might be surprised to find out there are many sources of free food out there. Go to your local farmers market when everyone is closing up and ask the produce vendors if they have any food to donate. Put together a friendly pitch about your stand and explain what you’re trying to do. Tell the vendors you’re willing to take anything that isn’t selling well or would spoil before their next market day. You’ll be surprised how many vendors will be willing to contribute. Ensure you have crates, boxes, or bags to take away your haul.

If you live in an area where many people have fruit trees in their yards, you can also go door to door and ask them if they’d like to donate excess fruit. For example, when you drive through neighborhoods in Southern California, you often see every other house with orange or lemon trees that are heavy with fruit. Much of this will likely go to waste because how many lemons can one family eat? Many homeowners will gladly give you their extras, even if it’s just to avoid the cleanup when the fruit starts falling to the ground.

You can also ask around at local bakeries and neighborhood grocery stores. Unfortunately, large chain grocery stores will likely have policies forbidding food donations due to liability concerns, but locally-owned stores may be more amenable to helping you.

STEP 3: Get the Word Out. 

Set up your distribution schedule and disseminate your information to all the local neighborhood organizations. Call your local Department of Human Services about which community outreach programs may be able to help you spread the word. You might even consider creating a Yelp page to make your stand locatable on the internet. This will establish an indexable address for your listing so that people can find the details online.

STEP 4: Distribute the Food. 

This is where the rubber meets the road. You want to make sure the food gets evenly distributed, but as you’re just starting out, you won’t know how to gauge the demand. You might try pre-packing bags of mixed produce, bread, and whatever else you have and give one out to each person. If fewer people than expected are showing up, you can add more food to each bag. If more people show up, your marketing campaign has been successful, and you can make adjustments next time.

STEP 5: Don’t Get Frustrated. 

You’ll likely be playing it by ear in the first few weeks. It takes a while for the news to get out. The worst-case scenario is that the few folks who do come will get a whole bunch of free food, making them likely to spread the word. Stick with it!

For more details, check out the San Francisco Free Farm Stand blog at freefarmstand.org.

This article was excerpted from the book It’s a Shareable Life.

The post How to create a Free Farm Stand in your community appeared first on Shareable.

For the last 24 years, JoAnn has spent almost every other Monday morning here. She is the longtime secretary of Co-op 1, a food co-op facilitated by Atlanta-based nonprofit Urban Recipe. Every other week for the past 34 years, folks facing food insecurity have gathered to sort, organize, and distribute food amongst themselves. Unlike a traditional food pantry, those receiving food assistance are members of a co-op that governs itself democratically

“I originally heard about the co-op from a friend who was a member, and I was just interested in the free food,” Crowder says. “Pretty soon, this co-op became my family. It’s something to do. It’s my reason for getting up in the morning, all of us helping each other out,” she adds. 

JoAnn is not alone. Many of the 50 families in Co-op 1 have been members for more than 10 years, including the co-op’s president, Canveta Burke. Ten years ago, she became a foster parent for a relative’s children. Suddenly, she was a single mom on a limited income with eight children to feed. She didn’t like the feeling of going to a traditional food pantry but could not afford to feed her suddenly full house. In those early years, the food co-op was a lifeline for her family. After years as a member of the co-op, Burke decided to run for president two years ago as a way to give back and to be a voice for other members to share their concerns. 

“When people join a co-op, it’s often initially just to fill a gap in the food supply,” says Urban Recipe executive director Jeremy Lewis, “But over time, the co-op is really meeting a need for food, yes, but also a need for community, for personal growth, for accomplishing a shared task together.”

History of food charity in the US

For low-income Americans facing food insecurity, food banks and food pantries are often a necessary lifeline. Many low-income families rely on government assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) or Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to meet their food needs. Not all families can access SNAP or WIC due to immigration status, draconian income and asset requirements, onerous paperwork requirements, the “time tax,” and work requirements in some states. For families who can access food benefits, the average monthly SNAP benefit was just $181 per person and $343 per household in April 2023 according to the Pew Research Center—hardly enough to ensure stable food security for an entire month.

Food banks and food pantries fill in the gaps for families facing both short-term and long-term food insecurity. While they may appear to be a permanent facet of American life for those living in poverty, the St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance in Phoenix, AZ was established as the world’s first formal food bank in 1967.

Early food banks were not established just to feed the hungry. Food banks and pantries are an essential part of an inefficient commercial food system that results in 30–40 percent of all edible food being wasted, according to the USDA. The vast majority of food donated to US food banks comes from grocery stores and government sources, with some estimating up to 80 percent or more. Food banks and food pantries provide food assistance to low-income families by exploiting the inefficiencies of a commercial food system built for profit over people.

The US now has more than 200 food banks serving over 40 million people annually according to, Feeding America, a national organization for food banks and the second largest charity in the country. In the US, most food banks consist of a centralized warehouse that distributes food through a decentralized network of food pantries, community centers, and churches across a city or region. Those decentralized food pantries are where most low-income people actually interact with this vast system of emergency food assistance.

The problem with food pantries

Canveta Burke describes her food co-op experience as “food with dignity.” That phrase gets repeated by food co-op members and Urban Recipe staff over and over again because the alternative—the experience at the average US food pantry—can often be a trade of food for dignity.

Thanks to a culture of individualism and “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps,” asking for charity or social services is often a fraught experience in the US. Beyond the internal shame or embarrassment that can accompany seeking food assistance, many food pantries operate under a charity model that removes the agency and dignity of those seeking help. 

In fact, many food pantries impose a lengthy application or referral process with multiple forms of income verification, long wait times, limited and inconvenient hours, periodic recertification of bureaucratic hurdles, and transportation challenges.

Additionally, most traditional food pantries limit the choice and agency of folks receiving assistance. Although some food pantries have adopted a “choice pantry” model that allows for some choices of different food options, most food pantries still distribute a pre-packaged box of whatever is available from the food bank that week with little or no input from the recipients. Rules established to ensure fair distribution can impose limits on the choice and amount of food, which can be disempowering and dehumanizing for those receiving assistance. 

Even the food pantries that take proactive steps to mitigate the bureaucratic barriers that plague the worst food pantry experiences often still operate under a charity model rather than solidarity. Food pantries that allow recipients to “shop” for the food they want still create passive, transactional relationships with those experiencing food insecurity.

“I can do things you can’t do. You can do things I can’t do. Together, we can do wonderful things!” —Chant led by Co-op 1 president Canveta Burke

The Urban Recipe model

Co-ops at Urban Recipe are anything but passive and transactional.

“Urban Recipe started in 1991 out of one church’s efforts to be in relationship with their community differently beyond the traditional food pantry relationship,” executive director Jeremy Lewis says. Urban Recipe has moved out of that church and now operates and facilitates six food co-ops similar to Co-op 1 and helps operationally support and source food for four additional co-ops in Atlanta that have been through their cooperative pathways training program.

Their model is rooted in cooperative principles, so decisions are made collectively and leaders are elected democratically in each co-op. Co-op members collectively decide the specifics of how food is equitably distributed, who does what jobs, how to handle extras or unwanted items, and how active a member has to be to maintain co-op membership. 

Each democratically elected co-op board regularly solicits input on what type of food they request from the food bank. For example, one co-op located at a senior apartment complex gets regular deliveries of nutritional shakes like Boost or Ensure, while another co-op at an elementary school gets lots of pre-packaged snacks for kids. Before the Shareable team visited, Co-op 1 even voted on whether we were allowed to come and if we were allowed to take photos while we were there.

In stark contrast to most food pantries, Urban Recipe’s role is basically ordering food and equipping and training members for success. Co-op members are not passive recipients of aid—each member is integral to the operations, from sorting and distributing food to making crucial decisions about the co-op’s functioning. 

“It’s really important that there’s always a role for everyone,” adds Lewis, The co-op is a reminder that everyone has a role, gifts, and abilities that often go unrecognized for people living in poverty. Given the space, those abilities can come to life in the co-op.”

New members go through an orientation and are usually paired with a seasoned member to learn the ropes, ensuring everyone knows how to contribute effectively. Some co-ops require all members to learn how to do all jobs while others let people specialize in the jobs they prefer, and even co-op members with limited mobility have a role to contribute. 

After about an hour of sorting, organizing, and packing a mix of shelf-stable foods, fresh produce, frozen meat, and other foods, Co-op 1 holds its bi-weekly meeting. Announcements are made, concerns are voiced, and co-op president Canveta Burke leads the group in a chant: “I can do things you can’t do. You can do things I can’t do. Together, we can do wonderful things!” 

With that, co-op members line up in the order they arrived (Co-op 1’s distribution policy to help ensure everyone arrives on time). Each member wheels a shopping cart full of food out of the warehouse to their car or rolling grocery carts to make the trip home. 

In stark contrast to most traditional food pantries, some members talk about where they are going to deliver some of the food. While most food pantries put up barriers to ensure food goes to the “deserving poor,” Urban Recipe actively tracks how many co-op members are able to share food with other family, friends, and neighbors. In 2018, 62 percent of all co-op members reported sharing food each month, compared with 29 percent before joining their co-op.

Urban Recipe’s model is a powerful testament to what’s possible when we reimagine food assistance through the lens of solidarity. By putting decisions into the hands of the very people it serves, this cooperative model transforms the traditional food pantry into a vibrant community where dignity and mutual aid replace charity and dependence. 

Members don’t just receive food; they gain a voice, a role, and a support network that extends far beyond the distribution line. This approach challenges the traditional food charity model and offers a blueprint for building stronger, more resilient communities grounded in cooperation and shared responsibility. As Co-op 1 chanted at the end of their meeting: everyone has something to offer. By tapping into those gifts through cooperation, together we can, in fact, do wonderful things.

The post The transformative power of Urban Recipe’s Atlanta food co-op model appeared first on Shareable.

While the supermarket may feel like a natural way to distribute food, it is, in fact, relatively new. While supermarkets began appearing as early as the 1920s, their rise to prominence coincided with the rapid growth of suburbia starting in the 1950s. Like other suburban organizations, the supermarket puts a premium on appearance, convenience, and profit, and is not designed for ecological or human-scale concerns. As a result, the supermarket we know and love, with heaping piles of fresh veggies, mountains of meat, and miles of baked goods, is one of the most pernicious producers of food waste in our country.

Because supermarkets have to maintain an appealing store, slightly bruised fruit is thrown out. If an orange goes bad in a five-pound bag, the whole bag gets thrown away, and probably a couple of bags surrounding it, just in case. If an egg breaks in a carton, it’s in the trash, because they’ll never be able to sell it. And if some yolk drips down the side onto a whole tray of eggs? In the garbage.

While this waste is a tremendous problem, especially when we live in a country (and a world) with widespread starvation, it also means that perfectly good food fills supermarket dumpsters every day. With a little bit of effort, you can make sure at least some of that waste goes to use and save yourself a lot of money in the process. With food prices on the rise, it can make a huge difference to your budget. Dumpster diving is an easy, and often fun, way to do your grocery shopping, and, believe it or not, I eat healthier when I dumpster dive; so many fresh vegetables and fruit are thrown out every day that you can eat like a king for free. How do you get started?

1. Decide you want to dumpster dive

Perhaps the hardest thing about dumpster diving is overcoming the stigma that comes with rooting through the trash. Our culture associates that behavior with poverty, and poverty with shame, and there is a strong cultural bias against dumpster diving. But dumpster diving is completely one hundred percent legal. If you live with roommates, discuss with them how you want to do it. Dumpster diving is great for communal meals because you can get a really big haul of food for free.

2. Choose a supermarket to dumpster dive

The next step is choosing a supermarket. Some supermarkets will be inaccessible because they throw their garbage away in locked dumpsters, or behind fences. This is easily checked by walking around the supermarket. If you know anyone who dumpster dives (and you’d be surprised, you might very well) they will know what supermarkets are good to go to, but generally, any medium or large supermarket will throw out enough food to make it worth your while. You’ll also learn, over time, which markets are the best. Bakeries are also always a good bet: They throw out their bread every day, so you can usually get fresh bread any time.

The next thing you need to know is when they throw out their food. Since most markets schedule private carting companies to take away their trash, food is usually only available for a couple of hours. To find out when they throw it out, you can ask a friend who dumpster dives, or wait around one night to find out. (Garbage often, but not always, goes out between an hour before and an hour after closing). Of course, if you’re feeling bold, you can just go into the store and ask an employee — usually, they’ll be glad to tell you.

Download our free ebook: “Beyond Waste: Community Solutions to Managing Our Resources”

3. Getting ready

Once you know where you’re going to go, and when, pick a day where you don’t have anything later in the evening. Dumpster diving can often be a late-night excursion, especially since you’ll have to take everything back home and wash it. It’s good to get a couple of large bags ready (you won’t be taking a whole bag out of the dumpster) and some plastic gloves if you don’t enjoy getting your hands sticky. It’s a good idea to bring a flashlight or a camping headlight too, so you can look into the bags without too much trouble.

Like any trip to the supermarket, you’re going to be coming back with a lot of food, so prepare accordingly. If you drive, it can be a good idea to lay down some newspaper in the trunk of your car. If it’s a walking-friendly city, you can use a “granny cart” and walk to the market, or bike using a bike trailer. In any case, treat it just like any normal big shopping excursion.

4. Getting the food

When you arrive, if you live in an urban area, odds are there might already be some people dumpster diving. In any case, walk up to the trash, and start feeling the bags: some bags will be mostly paper products and regular garbage, and you can usually tell this without opening up the bag. After a few trips, you’ll get the hang of this pretty quick.

If the bags are in big dumpsters, you should remove a bag and look through it, but be sure to replace the bag, tied up, into the dumpster. If the dumpsters are on the street, open them without ripping them, and tie them back up. Generally leave things as you found them; perhaps a strange admonition when dealing with trash, but it’s the best way to make sure the store doesn’t get upset with dumpster divers, and that the trash company can do their job.

The main thing when going through the trash is, don’t be bashful. Go for it! Dig through the bags with your gloves, and pull things out that feel promising. Use your judgment. If a fruit or vegetable looks rotten, don’t take it. But if you find a bag of apples or oranges and one is bad, but the rest are good, take the bag and  separate it out at home (this can be especially good if you also have a compost system.) 

Canned goods are almost always fine to take, and prepared foods usually are as well. Don’t worry too much about expiration dates: rely on your judgment and common sense about food. Don’t take anything you’re worried about; you can always do another trip. I’ve never gotten sick from dumpster diving, and there’s no reason you should either.

Once you’ve found a good amount of food, and you’re satisfied with what you have, load it all up, make sure you’ve tidied up the area, and bring your haul home.

5. Wash, store, and eat!

When you get home, make sure to wash everything that was sitting unwrapped in the trash. Just wash it thoroughly, and then store it like you would regular food. You’ll be amazed at the bounty of fresh food that you can get. You’ll be able to make delicious meals without spending a cent. And it’s always nice to prepare a big meal or host a potluck for your friends or community with the food you found. 

Of course, dumpster diving is not a solution to the major problem of food waste. We need concerted community action, and a reorganization of our priorities and our distribution systems. While CSAs, co-ops, and other more direct methods of food distribution are on the rise, the vast majority of Americans get their food from waste-producing supermarkets.

A map of food insecurity in the U.S.

In a perfect world, supermarkets would not exist as they do; the model that they operate on necessitates waste on a tremendous scale. But if you’re worried about waste, or just want to save a few dollars, dumpster diving is a great way to start getting involved. I know for me, it led to more direct political involvement in food issues in my community. I’ve written about that for Shareable before.

This article was originally published on November 7, 2012; updated February 21, 2022 and May 28, 2024.

The post How to dumpster dive, eat free, and fight waste appeared first on Shareable.