The Farmlink Project and FRN - A Partnership that has Recovered Over 1 Million Pounds of Surplus Food

In August 2020, Food Recovery Network (FRN) joined in partnership with The Farmlink Project to provide immediate food recovery assistance during the pandemic, as farmers across the country experienced unprecedented levels of surplus food and food insecurity rates skyrocketed. 

To help increase The Farmlink Project’s impact, FRN activated our incredible network of passionate and capable leaders to help reduce farm food loss, which resulted in the recovery and donation of 1,062,000 pounds of farm-fresh produce, equivalent to 885,000 meals! 

“FarmLink is an incredible solution to combating both food waste and food insecurity. As a member of the FRN e-board and as a farmworker— I’ve seen how much good food gets wasted on the farm and how much-prepared food gets thrown out that could have otherwise been recovered. I love being part of a team that works together to circulate fresh produce and food items to people with less access in such a creative and innovative way.”

— Theresa Ferrigno, Syracuse University

FRN students and alumni dedicated 456 hours of virtual volunteer service to help contact farmers and offer support to purchase or transport their surplus food to a hunger-fighting nonprofit or community organization. With help from FRN, The Farmlink Project worked with 120 farmers in 48 states over the last year, and they continue to recover millions of pounds of food as a result.

“Volunteering remotely with Farmlink has given me the chance to maintain activism towards food insecurity during a time when solutions are needed more than ever. I am very grateful for this experience and I look forward to more power hours in the near future.”

— Billie Porter, University of Massachusetts Amherst

In the fall, FRN and The Farmlink Project will continue to work together to move quality, nutritious food to communities where food insecurity rates are highest. Whether you can give one hour of time or twenty, it makes a difference to prevent food waste and combat hunger. We’d love to have you join us! 

Colorado College Chef shares low-waste Ramen Bowl recipe

This year we asked our Food Recovery Verified Chefs to share their favorite low-waste recipes with the network, and we are delighted to present Chef Cody Rodger’s recipe for a Ramen Bowl*, which was served at Colorado College this spring. 

*Please note this recipe is intended to serve a large crowd and students may not have access to the necessary equipment or ingredients to make this at home. For students and other home chefs, we’ve found a few alternative Ramen recipes that are easily prepared at home. See note below. 

About the Dish:

“We strive to be sustainable by working with local farms, using fresh seasonal produce, using all scraps possible to make our own in house stock, and working with students and local food recovery systems to minimize waste.  Our future depends on it. The broth for this recipe was a house-made stock (as ours always is) that utilized a lot of product that would often be discarded in other kitchens.” said Tyler Dexter, Operations Manager, Bon Appétit at Colorado College

Let’s get cooking:

 Broth Recipe

Ingredients: yield 10 gallons

• 40 pounds chicken carcasses

• 40 pounds chicken feet

• 15 pounds onions, quartered with the skins left on

• 6 bunches celery, rough chopped 1 inch in size using all of the celery (wash well)

• 5 pounds ginger, rough chopped with skin left on (wash well)

• 5 pounds whole garlic bulbs, skin left on (washed well)

• 15 each bay leaves

• 1 pound cilantro

• 1 cup black peppercorns

• 30 gallons water

Directions:

Place all the ingredients into the steam kettle, fill a large pot all the way until you are six inches from the top with the 30 gallons of water. Turn the kettle on all the way to 8 (med-high) and bring the water to a boil, immediately cut to a simmer, and cook for another six hours, strain into two Lexans, label, date, and store.

Choose how you want to top your ramen noodles: chashu pork, scallion, fish cake, marinated egg, bok choy, nori, wonton skins, potato, burdock root, carrot, turnip, and tofu.

Alternative Recipes for the Home Chef:

This recipe from Pinch of Yum provides a great foundation for a vegan/vegetarian Ramen bowl when you use vegetable broth as your base. If you enjoy meat-based Ramen, check out The Kitchn’s recipe for Chicken Ramen. If you enjoy a challenge and have a free weekend, try your hand at making Delish’s Shoyu Ramen. 

Did you make one of these recipes? Let us know! Tag FRN on social media with your final creation @foodrecovery. We can’t wait to see what you’ve cooked up!

About Colorado College: 

Colorado College has been Food Recovery Verified for four years. Since 2017, Colorado College staff have consistently donated their surplus food to Food is Power (formerly Colorado Springs Food Rescue), an organization dedicated to cultivating a healthy, equitable  food system in the greater Colorado Springs community, and The Place, which provides crucial support to youth in Colorado Springs. On behalf of the team at FRN National, we thank Chef Cody and his team for their continued commitment to reducing food waste, fighting climate change, and supporting their community by donating surplus food. 

About Food Recovery Verified

Food Recovery Verified (FRV) is a program offered by Food Recovery Network (FRN) to help businesses safely donate their surplus food. Businesses and events that donate their surplus food can be recognized for their commitment to sustainability by applying for Food Recovery Verification. If you are interested in learning more about the FRV program, please contact our team at foodrecoveryverified@foodrecoverynetwork.org. We’d love to help you start a food recovery and donation program!

Our latest feedback loop learning on our strategic framework

As a continued commitment to Food Recovery Network’s public learning approach and stakeholder engagement feedback loop, based on our latest conversation about our strategic framework, FRN10X, I wanted to provide our latest key takeaways. The takeaways are based on our latest sections of our FRN10X work from October 2020 to February 2021. We asked those in attendance to answer the question (and answer as many times as they wanted, even after the presentation on social media!) What does a just and equitable food system look like to you? I again invite those of you reading this post to continue to answer this question and tell us on any social media platform with which you interact with FRN. In the meantime, please read our latest takeaways from all of you.

• There is food to recover. Twenty-five percent of our chapters are currently recovering surplus food. That 25% of recovering chapters were able to recover the same amount of surplus food as 25% of our movement recovered before the pandemic. The amount of food did not decrease and reminds us all, there continues to be surplus food, though it may be located at different places within the food system.

• Disproportionate adoption across programs. At FRN, we offer several programs and ways to engage our network. There was a lot of excitement and approval of those offerings from our stakeholders. However, adoption across those offerings has varied. Luckily there has been high adoption on certain aspects of the work that will allow us to dig in at the appropriate level of engagement and also offerings that did not receive as much engagement as we had anticipated based on the encouraging feedback from stakeholders. We will also evaluate the offerings that did not receive much engagement to stop those offerings, or alter them into different programs. This is critical learning to ensure FRN can meet the needs and interest of our students and alums with an adaptable approach.

  • We will keep you updated! During our latest presentation on FRN10X, we asked all attendees how they most wanted to interact with FRN: To be informed, to act as consultants and/or to act as partners, the majority of people said they wanted to be informed.

  • We continue to be adaptive. FRN is moving into areas of work within the food system and programming that we’ve not before. Entering into these new spaces means we have to be very clear that the work in which we are engaged are pilots. We have hypotheses on the work, but we really need to engage in the work, see what happens, and analyze why programs shape up the way they do, and from there we will need to analyze critically as we move forward.

• When we asked our stakeholders What does a just and equitable food system look like to you,  some of the recurring themes we heard were access to culturally appropriate foods and access to enough calories were part of the vision for that food system.

• People are responding very positively to our commitment to public learning!

Thank you all for your interaction with our strategic framework, FRN10X. Please continue to share your thoughts with us. Be on the lookout for our next Roundtable Talk summer 2021.

Women of Color, Leadership and Food

On May 10, 2021, I had the honor of talking to two incredible women who are both leaders in their own right, and who both work in food from very different places of pursuit. Sharing stories, perspectives and expertise from people of different backgrounds is one way to bring equity into our lives. Who has an opportunity to share their voice? Are we hearing stories that expand our understanding, not just affirming assumptions? 

The two women leaders, Perteet Spencer and Leonisa Johnson shared their backgrounds and how they apply their skills and knowledge to their respective roles as a co-founder of a new and burgeoning food brand dedicated to helping the lives of farmers in Africa and providing an opportunity for people abroad to share in the community currently unfamiliar flavors of West Africa; and as a Program Manager at a nonprofit that works with public school gardens as a way to share experiences with young students to equip them with tools to begin to apply their own learnings to make choices around food and also to begin to question systems and situations in their communities. The goal of this conversation is to help widen our aperture of thought, and to be inspired by these incredible leaders hailing from Chicago and New York City.

Image: Perteet Spencer

Perteet: We started AYO to build a more inclusive grocery store that represented the ingredients and flavors of West Africa that we have enjoyed as a family.

Food is a form of cultural expression and provides a unique opportunity for people to expand their worldview. We are excited to have the opportunity to spotlight foods that have been historically marginalized through building the AYO brand. At AYO, we also believe that we have a personal responsibility to enrich the communities that inspired our products – we bring this to life through thoughtful sourcing and broader community partnerships.

Image: Leonisa Johnson

Leonisa: In urban areas, young people are often told about healthy eating from people who do not look like them. I have the opportunity to talk with students, to educate and provide experience, and from there, they do the hard work of starting to question other, larger topics. It allows young people to begin to think of and work towards different outcomes for themselves. I help to uplift what is already in the community that is working without the assumption that people have nothing. They work hard to present the food they put on their tables, and they take pride in what that food says about them. Access is a voice.


Watch the full conversation below –

Thank you to Perteet and Leonisa for your time and your story sharing. Perteet is venturing into a space that maybe we don’t often see people of color going, and Leonisa is preparing more young people to enter into those spaces at a young age so that by the time they are ready, seeing more people of color in roles not often open to them will be normalized for this next generation.

Building Better Nonprofits

On Thursday, April 29, I had the honor of speaking with three individuals who I respect deeply for their insights within their fields. Our topic was Building Better Nonprofits. Our conversation centered around our current moment interacting with the nonprofit sector and how this moment affects those in the sector. Together, we discussed how we can and how we are building a better nonprofit sector that is intentionally equitable, that is centered on radical healing, and not centered on our own fragility. Below is a takeaway among many takeaways from our conversation. I encourage you to listen to the full conversation. I also encourage you to follow each of these incredible people and the organizations within which they do their work.

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Image: Dr. Arnold

Dr. Kristy Arnold (@AskDrKMA) – Radical humility means being intentional. We are not doing things out of history and habit because that can reinforce supremacist values. Being intentional means driving from the driver's seat and setting a strategic plan that is authentic to the work you are trying to achieve and checking your organization often to ensure the mission is aligned with how the work is being done. Also, culture needs to be intentionally created and if your organization doesn't do that work, a culture will be created, it just may not be the one you want.

Image: Mr. Reuler

Ben Reuler (@SeattleWorks) – Dismantling racism as a white person involves embracing discomfort and conflict, things that don’t often come naturally. Self-compassion and self-love are crucial, they liberate us to shed white supremacy cultural norms including perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, and power hoarding. Dismantling racism needs to be ongoing, in perpetuity, so having grace with ourselves will allow us to sustain for the long haul, and to weather haters and detractors along the way.

Image: Dr. Bishop

Dr. Elizabeth Bishop (@DrBishopDigital) – Tension and burnout far preceded the pandemic. And, how do we want to consider the self-care that was necessary before the pandemic while in the pandemic? We as people who are serving others need to serve ourselves first and not feel like that is selfish and define how we bring ourselves to this work as our full, best selves. What does this actually look like in practice at all points within our organization and the people we interact with at all levels? Keywords – trauma-informed, healing-centered, transparency to the messiness that this kind of approach produces and not as something to run away from.

We are in this together. Conversations like the one I had with Dr. Arnold, Ben and Dr. Bishop help us all to widen our aperture of understanding, patience and seeing systems that are not helping everyone. When we can see the harmful systems so clearly, when we have the tools to help one another before we help those in our community, we truly can build better nonprofits.