On February 5th Lucy Aria and I went to go and meet with Abby at the organization Gods Love We deliver. This organization is a great place. They deliver food to people with any kind of sickness that may make it harder to get food. Some people have things that make it harder to leave their house. Gods Love brings breakfast, lunch, and dinner to these people. If there is a mom or dad who is sick and is unable to leave the house, cook food, or they don’t have access to any Gods Love will deliver to them. The interesting thing is that the children will still not have food, Gods Love delivers to them as well.

All of the food is very healthy. In the summer volunteers grow food outside in a community garden. The food does not have sugar or too much salt so the way it tastes good, is because of the spices. God’s love provides 15,200 meals each weekend. The kitchen takes volunteers year round. Everybody in the kitchen is very nice and does incredible work everyday. We got to meet with the kitchen manager that showed us around. The oven, mixers, and freezers are huge because they store so much food.

We had an interview with Abby Diess. She talked about the relationships with the people they bring food to. A lot of the people look forward to seeing the driver every day. God’s love has build a very big community with everybody they help. Abby said that there are so many stories about how This organization has changed peoples life.

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On January 14th we had the opportunity to interview Eric Baer, the head chef at LREI. We learned a lot about food waste at school. A lot of the food waste was food from people that had been opened, put on plates, but just not finished. Eric said “It is good to try new things but it’s also good to take food in small portions. You can always get more.” Eric also mentioned that there were many attempts in the past to reduce food waste, but there were many problems that he faced in doing so. There are many great organizations that will drive to you school or restaurant and take leftover food. This is usually free but to get somebody to come you would have to have a certain about of leftover food which LREI does not have.

Something that I was really surprised about was that most of the food waste at our school comes from the salad bar. If things in the salad bar stayed separate, like the yogurt did not touch the fruit, then it would be reused for the next day. The reason there is little to no food waste after each day is because the kitchen staff do a great job preparing and knowing how much food to make each day. They make more popular food and less of the food that is eaten less. Even though we learned that it is really hard to manage the waste in a good way, we hope to find efficient ways of reducing LREI’s food waste in the future.

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This museum was very interesting and I learned a lot. At the beginning of the tour there were lots of paintings on the walls. They were paintings of people but the interesting thing about them was that they had quotes in the art. There were things that read “We belong here” and “We too are american” I thought they were beautiful and I learned they were a form of activism. we also learned a lot about trans rights and trans activism. I thought it was really powerful how the movement started and how this community formed. There were many gay activist and people that supported the LGBTQ rights, but in the beginning a lot of trans people were left out of this. I also learned about women’s rights and how a lot of people expected women to just cook and clean and raise a family. It was really nice to see how women supported each other for equal rights. We also learned a little bit more about disability rights and how much better things have gotten. Buses and subways have both gotten much more accessible, especially for people in wheelchairs.

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My group watched a documentary called Food Inc. This was all about processed food, how animals live, and food waste. In this movie we learned a lot. Animals are treated so much worse than we could imagine, People do everything that they can to profit the most of all of the animals. By doing this the animals have terrible living conditions but also the food that seems organic and good for you is really not. People usually go for the organic or less expensive brands of meat, but the brands that are less expensive are usually not good for your health. Food insecurity is not just access to food but to access to healthy food. When we watched this we learned just how hard finding good food can be. When you look in the supermarket you will see many different kinds of food but in reality they all trace back to three main places. Those three main places are big brands that sell unhealthy processed meats.

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On Friday, Lucy, Aria, and I went to fill a community fridge on 6th street. We bought healthy food before the trip, including fruits, vegetables, and other good food that might be hard to find or too expensive to buy. The fridge was small and completely empty when we got there. This was very upsetting because there are lots of people that would benefit if that fridge had food in it. When we were filling the fridge, there was already someone to take some of the food. I learned that a lot of the time the fridges get shut down and relocated. It is really hard to not only keep a fridge open but also fully stocked. Most of the time the fridges are empty because people don’t usually consistently fill the fridge.

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