My name is Cat, short for “Catherine,” and I’m excited to cover this week’s blog post! I study environmental science at Colorado College and live in America’s Rocky Mountains, a place I love dearly. I’ve also fallen in love with Italy during my two months here, and it’s been absolutely fascinating for me to deeply internalize my experiences here by comparing Italy to the U.S. in every way possible. And because I intern at SenzaSpreco, I can’t help but compare how this organization handles food waste with how a major organization in my city, Colorado Springs Food Rescue (CSFR), handles the issue.
Colorado Springs Food Rescue is particularly difficult for me to ignore since it was actually founded by two students at my college, one of whom I know personally. (We’re both in the college music program and take bluegrass guitar lessons from the same professor.) CSFR is a pretty prominent presence on my campus. They hold several fundraisers every year at my college; I even regularly pack all my school supplies into a canvas CSFR bag I bought at a fundraiser. We college students think of CSFR as a cool, important new organization, so many of us are happy to donate a little of our limited funds to the organization. Thanks to donors, fundraisers, and efficient planning, the organization can operate on a budget of only $73,000 per year.
Of course, SenzaSpreco indisputably has a bit of a leg up as an organization when it comes to the food waste problem, thanks to Italy’s recent Food Waste Law. Meanwhile, the U.S. currently has no such law to cover the vast entirety of the nation. That means our ethical responsibility in America is to properly allocate food surpluses falls to grassroots organizations. SenzaSpreco has the liberty to focus more on utilizing and selling famers’ surplus produce, since legislation covers the other stuff; CSFR, and many other American food waste organizations, are better off dedicating their time to delivering spare, prepared food to people undergoing homelessness. Otherwise, that food will go to waste in Colorado Springs—arguably a tragedy in a state where one in every seven people experience hunger.
What CSFR ends up doing is biking (only driving if absolutely necessary, in order to mitigate carbon emissions) to restaurants, supermarkets, and other food providers to collect small batches of surplus food in the city of Colorado Springs, Colorado. The food is often reasonably healthy, quite tasty, and generally already prepared and cooked. This food—totaling over 13.600 kg per month—is then delivered to local charities and organizations serving those who experience homelessness. The organization works with over 50 different partners, both food providers and food delivery locations, and also collaborates with local underserved communities in order to devise solutions to food insecurity problems. They rely on both employees and a large volunteer base.
In short, SenzaSpreco saves mostly, even if not only, food before it’s even on the market; CSFR saves food after it has already been sold, and that’s due to a lack of American policies that require companies to manage that waste in the first place. Since I personally know a handful of CSFR’s employees, I was hoping that my internship with SenzaSpreco would lend me some valuable knowledge that I could help implement back home at CSFR. I didn’t realize until I arrived here that the two organizations deal with entirely different stages of the food supply chain. Still, though, I’m keeping an eye out for ways SenzaSpreco can teach me some things CSFR would find useful.
CSFR and SenzaSpreco share a big component of the same mission: to mitigate the harmful effects of food waste. I think that CSFR could perhaps expand its bases more broadly to include the same kind of work that SenzaSpreco does. Like SenzaSpreco, CSFR could contact more local farmers and sell their surplus food to consumers in order to bag a profit, and this money would increase the organization’s annual budget potential. In turn, CSFR could expand its services even more widely and beneficially. I just might return to Colorado Springs and introduce CSFR to the fantastic new Italian ideas to which SenzaSpreco has exposed me—and, with any luck, my home city will be able to make even more of a difference.
