This year has been full of surprises and challenges. I never would have anticipated a global pandemic, which would cause people all over the world to stay at home, stop going to work, and stop going to school. Considering all of that, I have come to believe that this year has also been the year of recognition and clarity. Many injustices and inequalities have been put in the spotlight and exacerbated because of this pandemic, such as our broken health care system and rates of food insecurity.

For example, according to Project Bread, food insecurities in Boston have increased 300% during the Coronavirus pandemic. Before this pandemic millions of people were unable to get access to food, let alone healthy food, while countless meals were being thrown away. Because of COVID-19 many people lost their jobs and were unable to provide for themselves and their families. Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, an organization that aims to “become the world’s most widely used solution for companies and individuals to eliminate food waste in their communities, making food rescue sustainable and universal, and food hunger a thing of the past,” had to reorganize their business to find restaurants that were willing to make tasty healthy food to be donated to shelters, organizations, and households. They started a couple of initiatives aimed to help people affected by the closing of schools and COVID-19, such as the Serving Our Students initiative, which focuses on BPS households.

After my enviro teacher assigned us a community service project, I found out about  Rescuing Leftover Cuisine and my group decided to volunteer to transport food. At first I was hesitant to go outside and interact with that many people, but after going on a zoom call with the executive coordinator of RLC MA, I was able to put those fears away. My friends and I met up and drove to Women’s Lunch Place–the food pick up spot on Newbury street. It was a little stressful–we had some miscommunications, but we successfully picked up the food. The plan was originally to drop off the food to two households. We drove to the first household and went to the door to hand off the food, but the recipient wasn’t answering their phone. So after trying to get in touch with the first household, we decided to drop all the meals off at the second household, as instructed to. Although this experience was far from seamless, volunteering at RLC brought some positivity to these unprecedented and scary months.

For more information: https://www.rescuingleftovercuisine.org

-Njoki