Every year, 40 percent of the food grown in the United States is never eaten. Locally, 38 percent of Madison’s input to the Dane County Landfill is organic matter, and a whopping 30 percent of that, or 5.3 tons, is considered edible food. The numbers are staggering, and in some ways, difficult to believe. It’s not just the food that’s wasted, but all the inputs that it took to get that food from the farm to the landfill: farm inputs, fuel, transportation, warehousing, processing, packing, and people’s time.

While this is occurring, families in our community are struggling to put food on their tables. Just this past summer, a coalition of Dane County food pantries and local leaders came together for a press conference to plead with our community for more support because they were continuing to be overwhelmed with need despite the waning of the COVID pandemic. Our community, along with numerous others across the country, is struggling to keep food-pantry shelves stocked.

Putting two and two together, Healthy Food for All Dane County is a food recovery initiative with the mission of capturing as much locally available excess food as possible and getting it to emergency food providers and directly into families’ hands quickly and safely. An initiative of Madison Northside Planning Council and operating out of FEED Kitchens, Healthy Food for All is a backbone resource to our local emergency food system, supplying food resources garnered through their food-recovery efforts.

Healthy Food for All specializes in connecting with local farms and farmers’ markets to recover excess harvest and unsold market produce. These healthy options are a welcome sight at food distribution events, oftentimes supplying culturally appropriate foods to families who may otherwise struggle to find foods familiar to their palette.

A second area of specialization for Healthy Food for All is working with event spaces and caterers to collect edible leftover food from events and cafeterias. As an example, Healthy Food for All has an ongoing relationship with the American Family PGA Championship Tournament in Madison to collect excess food over the tournament weekend to help the organizers make it a zero-waste event. Special care is taken to ensure food is properly handled, stored, and packaged before it’s picked up. Finally, Healthy Food for All coordinates a large cadre of volunteers who drive daily assigned routes to local food retailers to pick up items for donation and drop them off at designated community sites.

Many food pantries and community meal sites have relationships with food establishments near their places of service, and some larger ones even cast their nets geographically wider. These efforts are encouraged and supported by Healthy Food for All, which also coordinates efforts with Second Harvest Foodbank to ensure that any retailers they have relationships with are in the fold to donate excess or short-dated foods. Without Healthy Food for All’s service, much available food simply wouldn’t get collected, putting more pressure on food pantries and families in need. The efforts of Healthy Food for All also evens the playing field for smaller food pantries and meal initiatives that may not have the capacity for food recovery efforts themselves and are at a disadvantage in procuring other needed resources.

The hundreds of thousands of pounds of food that Healthy Food for All recovers and distributes every year not only feeds our community with locally available resources, it keeps that food from the landfill, where it causes problems by taking up space and creating climate-changing gases as it decomposes. As a society, we need to get better at using our food resources wisely. Until then, Healthy Food for All will be on the streets collecting and distributing our excess.

There are simple ways to support Healthy Food for All. Monetary donations are the most useful, as it takes dollars to keep vehicles on the road and to pay staff to drive them. Another great way to support the program and your neighbors in need is to purchase quarts of soup for yourself through Soup’s On! and then purchase a few more to donate to Healthy Food for All. Donated soups through Soup’s On! are immediately transferred to Healthy Food for All at FEED Kitchens and distributed within days to the community. Since November 2020, hundreds of quarts of soup have been donated through Soup’s On! to Healthy Food for All, providing warm hearty meals of quality soups to hungry tables around Dane County.

Chris Brockel is director of food systems at FEED Kitchens.
Photographs provided by FEED Kitchens.

To donate to Healthy Food for All, visit hffadane.org/donate. To purchase soup through 
Soup’s On!, visit madisonlocallysourced.com/soups-on annually November through March.