The Californians Rescuing Surplus Produce to Fight Hunger

The day at the “Pit Stop” warehouse in Bell, California, starts at 4 a.m. Forklifts move pallets of tomatoes, broccoli and bell peppers into trucks. Boxes of grapes and bananas wait to be loaded while trucks arrive with an abundance of zucchinis and nectarines. The 10,000-square-foot warehouse looks like organized chaos: A dozen employees move an average of 265,000 pounds or 132 tons here every day. “Share the Abundance” is written in bright blue letters across a yellow wall. The best part: All this healthy abundance is free. The nonprofit Food Forward receives the fruits and vegetables at no cost from wholesalers and donates them to those in need in 13 counties.

“Because we focus 100 percent on perishable fresh fruit and vegetables, speed is of the essence,” says Jen Cox, Food Forward’s chief development officer. “Hardly any produce stays here for more than 24 hours. The logistics are insane.”

In the US, more than 35 percent of the food produced (roughly 92 billion pounds) gets thrown out every year, amounting to an annual loss of $408 billion. At the same time, every fifth family is food insecure. Food Forward operates to fill that gap and solve both problems at once, hustling to distribute fresh food before it goes to waste.

Since its inception 15 years ago, it has rescued 217,000 tons of produce and distributed it to nearly 300 hunger relief partners, mostly in Los Angeles and surrounding counties, but every so often a truck of surplus travels as far as Texas. “We are providing enough food every day that would meet the USDA recommended daily requirements for 270,000 people,” Cox explains. “It equals millions of dollars’ worth of food they don’t have to buy if we can just grab it in time and move it.”

Preventing food waste also benefits the climate, not only because of the resources, water and energy invested in food production but also because food waste in landfills is one of the main sources of the climate gas methane. “Last year, we prevented the emissions of more than 21,000 metric tons of CO2e,” Cox says. “That’s the equivalent of taking 4,571 cars off the road for a year. And we prevented 1.4 billion gallons of water from going to waste in 2023, the equivalent of 2,129 Olympic-sized swimming pools.”

How to Renovate Your Home for a Billion Children

If you’ve been on TikTok at any point in the past six months, chances are you’ve stumbled across them, as I first did during a fairly routine doomscroll one night this summer. For me it started with two videos somewhat incongruously tagged #homeremodeling and #housedesign. One of them featured a CGI man summoning a baby phoenix outside of a tree that he planned to turn into an apartment. Then a robotic AI voice started to narrate how the CGI man, identified as “Little John,” was going to build it. Over the next 90 seconds, Little John transformed the tree into a maniacally space-efficient luxury unit in an AI-generated ballet of flying galvanized square steel, ecofriendly wood veneer, and expansion screws.

The other video, featuring nearly identical CGI and the same hypnotically flat AI narrator, followed the story of a couple with a billion children that, like Little John, decided it was time to improve their home. And those two videos were only the tip of the galvanized steel iceberg.

There are hundreds of accounts posting these videos to TikTok right now, and they’ve become immensely popular, racking up millions of views. Even the “character” of Little John has become a meme of his own, with people making skits where they pretend to be him.

The videos struck me as a fascinating case study of how TikTok trends have evolved—or rather devolved—over time. What was once an app full of human beings making content in conversation with each other has become a dizzying world where irony and sincerity, memes and spam, blur together into a slurry of bizarre content no one is quite sure what to do with. As I set out to discover who was making these videos, I assumed that lifting the rock would reveal an even stranger world of broken social networks, AI content farms, and shady engagement hacks, wiggling just beneath the surface of the web. Which it did! But stranger still, in the end, it turned out these videos hadn’t become huge as a TikTok trend at all.

Via Garbage Day: Stop listening to the strategists