Lunch, Not Landfill: Nonprofit Rescues Produce Rejected at US-Mexico Border Svati Kirsten Narula - Quartz
go to original April 11, 2015

Nogales, Arizona, is the largest inland food port in the world. Much of the fresh produce trucked up the “food superhighway” of Mexico’s west coast comes through there - and a shocking amount of it doesn’t travel much farther, dropping into local landfills instead of being sent to consumers.

It’s a loss to the farmers who harvested the food and to the consumers who would have eaten it, argue filmmakers Jesse Ash and Phil Buccellato, who made an eight-minute documentary featuring Gary Paul Nabhan, a former MacArthur fellow and advocate for sustainable food reform. The film opens with footage of just-ripe tomatoes being bulldozed.

“If the Florida tomato prices drop on a certain day,” Nabhan narrates, “120,000 pounds [of tomatoes] might be thrown into a landfill” in Nogales, while much smaller quantities might end up in food banks or in livestock feed.

"Man In The Maze" | Throughout the U.S. borderlands, a diverse group of people come up with innovative solutions to mend our broken food system. Directed by Phil Buccellato and Jesse Ash. (Sundance Institute)

Cut to Yolanda Soto, the CEO of Borderlands Food Bank: Borderlands “rescues” between 30 and 40 million pounds of produce each season and distributes it to rural residents, providing fresh fruits and vegetables at less cost than the nearest grocery stores. “Vegetables are expensive,” says Soto, and the area has “a very, very high rate of diabetes.”

Nabhan is perturbed that this is happening in southern Arizona, where high rates of food insecurity coexist with significant biodiversity: “If we can’t use that biodiversity to make life better for the very people who live here, something is wrong.”

Read the rest at Quartz

Photo: Reuters/Francisco Bonilla

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