Ever since my first years of elementary school, I have noticed the amount and severity of food waste in the cafeteria. Perfectly good items are constantly being thrown away while people in our community struggle to find where their next meal will come from. After many years of seeing the meals in the garbage, I took the initiative and did something about it.

The beginning of my Sophomore year, I started and organized a Food Recovery Program at our high school. All unused, unwanted, and wrapped food is picked up and distributed by Fresno Metro Ministry, an organization that advocates for the health and well-being of the less fortunate. This is a daily program which I oversee making sure that everything is being done correctly. We feed 75-200 people a day from the Bullard site! Bullard is the only high school in our district that has a Food Recovery Program and I have recently expanded this program to the 10 elementary and 3 middle schools in the Bullard region. I personally met and discussed the program with every principal in those schools and they were all enthused and eager to have their school participate. We are now beginning to make this a district wide program with more than 100 schools participating. ​

The complete story can be both seen and viewed at the link below.

www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/high-school-student-starts-food-recovery-program-to-help-people-in-need/915900608​

Mark Topoozian
Bullard High School
Fresno CA

Here is a sequence of pictures taken today in Richmond, IN on the route for The Christian Charities K-12 Food Rescue food route.  First was the central cafeteria for the Richmond Community Schools, followed by Dennis Intermediate School, then Westview Elementary, and finally Fairview Elementary. Crestdale Elementary was also recently added  but not pictured below
The food was delivered to the Circle U Help Center (picture of the truck full) and then the final picture is when we emptied at the Gateway Hunger Relief Center.   Gateway has a pantry distribution from 3-6 PM each Friday so what we gave them today has already been fully distributed to homes.  The food is very well liked and goes fast.
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In addition to these schools, we monitor Vaile Elementary School and they had 7 boxes today.   Eric Weiss from Circle U Help Center handles Test Intermediate, Charles Elementary School and Reid Health, also on Fridays.  He also files his own reports with the K-12 Food Recovery database.

Guy Guthrie
Christian Charities

Food Rescue's interview with a K-12 National Student Leader, Josh Hechtman in Spokane Washington.

This article appeared in the The Spokesman-Review, and was written by Shawn Vestal and updated on 9/4/18

​If you’ve been in a school cafeteria, you know where a lot of food goes: into the garbage.
And if you’ve been in Spokane for any length of time, you know that a lot of people here struggle to put food on the table.
Josh Hechtman wants to find ways to take some of the wasted food from the cafeteria at Lewis and Clark High School and make it available to students whose families need help.
“Last year during lunches I noticed students – me included – just casually throwing away granola bars, bags of chips, an orange …,” said Hechtman, a 16-year-old junior at LC. “I realized we could probably do something with that food.”

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Hechtman has formed a club, ReProduce 81, with the goal of reusing some of the safe, packaged foods that might otherwise go to waste in the cafeteria. He’s particularly focused on items that students bring from home, as opposed to cafeteria lunches. Hechtman has gotten a grant from the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund, has coordinated with the head of the district’s nutrition services, Doug Wordell, and is recruiting club members to help gather food at 12 spots throughout the school.
“I love the idea,” Wordell said. “We really would like to reduce waste.”
It’s not just a school issue. Tons of food is wasted every day in America. A USDA study published earlier this year estimated that the average American wastes a pound of food every day. The waste would be enough to feed some 2 billion people annually.
Spokane Public Schools has undertaken a variety of efforts to reduce food waste. It has shifted to more scratchmade food in recent years, partly to improve taste and nutrition, but also to combat waste. More food is made to order to prevent leftovers. More choices are offered, and students are encouraged to pick only what they really want to eat.
“Thirty years ago, when you went into a high school cafeteria you got chili, chili or chili,” Wordell said.
Hechtman, who also plays football and tennis at LC, has spent the summer trying to get his program ready to launch. He formed his organization under the umbrella of the Spokane Edible Tree project, which was founded by Councilwoman Kate Burke, and has gotten help from Burke and other local politicians in building community support.
As a volunteer at the House of Charity, he’s seen how a program that relies heavily on donations of food that might otherwise go to waste can work – and he found that helping others can be deeply gratifying. He was impressed by the T-shirt one of the shelter’s lunch clients was wearing one day: “It had ‘Homeless’ crossed out, replaced with ‘Human,’ ” he said.
Hechtman’s charitable impulse is tied to his love of food and cooking. He is a fan of food TV, he said, and has an aunt in the Los Angeles area, Dana Hechtman, who is a private chef. He visits her regularly, and they go on food tours of the city – “places only chefs would know,” he said.
He and his aunt are talking about writing a cookbook with the proceeds going to charity. His parents are Todd Hechtman, a sociology professor at Eastern Washington University, and Wendy Ayers. Cooking for his mother when she was injured a few years back helped to cement his interest in cuisine.
ReProduce 81 has a threefold purpose: the food reuse project; an effort to encourage student volunteerism; and working to educate people about reducing food waste, including possibly producing a video on the subject.
Hechtman’s plan is to have club members staff stations in the school during lunches, with bins where students can leave unused items. He and his fellow volunteers will have to ensure the items are unopened and safe, and would then give them to the school’s food pantry, which donates food to students in need.
It’s a relatively simple and safe procedure for packaged, nonperishable items and some fresh items; if he plans to move into redistributed packaged dairy products or the like, such as milk or string cheese, he will need to jump through the hoops to get permission from the Spokane Regional Health District, Wordell said.
If everything goes as he hopes, Hechtman would like to see his project expanded to other schools. After all, he notes, a significant number of his fellow students in Spokane are “food insecure” – a 2014 community survey showed that 16 percent of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders said they’d skipped a meal because there wasn’t enough to eat at home.
“I wanted to do my part to try and fix that,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story was changed on Sept. 4, 2018 to remove incorrect information naming Ayers’ profession.

UPDATED: SEPT. 4, 2018, 2:11 P.M.

October 10th, 2019 article featuring Josh Hechtman
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2019/oct/03/sfcc-starts-saving-cafeteria-leftovers-in-effort-t/