Food Tank's 22 Podcasts on Food, Farming, and Sustainability

At FRN, we are big fans of Food Tank. This global nonprofit powerhouse is dedicated to transforming food production and consumption, focusing on education, advocacy, and collaboration to make a tangible difference. With FRN’s very own Executive Director, Regina Harmon, on its Board of Directors, we aim to contribute to this work and the on-the-ground solutions it champions.

In case you missed it, Food Tank published this fantastic blog post in June, curating a list of 22 podcasts that explore diverse aspects of food and agriculture systems globally. This roundup is ideal for anyone interested in the multifaceted world of food, from production and policy to personal stories and cultural impacts. Don’t miss out – check it out now!

Allegheny College FRN, Student Gleaning

A Celebration of Earth Month: What’s your favorite tree?

At FRN, at the start of almost any meeting we have, we start our time together with a check-in question to ground us all into the space together. In honor of Earth Month, at a recent FRN meeting, our check in question was, “What is your favorite tree?”

As an admirer of my natural surroundings, as an avid hiker, tree planter and tree lover, I’d never reflected on that question before. And, many in this particular FRN meeting hadn’t either and for the next 15 minutes, we all talked about trees: we shared stories about trees, we googled trees we hadn’t heard of, we oohed and ahhed about which tree was our favorite tree; and it was an FRN moment that I will cherish for a long, long time.

It’s hard to say what tree is my favorite tree. I love so many for so many reasons. I love peach trees because they grow in my region, and I love to eat peaches. One summer I drove down skyline drive into the Blue Ridge Parkway without GPS (and though it was basically one road with no turn offs, it felt like such an adventure to me as someone who can get lost in one room) to go to an edible nursery where I picked up two self-pollinating peach trees for my new house in NE DC. I love magnolia trees and crape myrtles because my husband loves them so much. I remember taking a walk with one of my best friends in Pittsburgh, tree identification book in hand, observing the different trees in her neighborhood, using the choose your own adventure style process to determine which trees we were seeing: if the shape of the leaves look like this, then go here—if the leaves cluster like this, then go here, if the leaves come off the tree directly versus from a stem, then go here...

I recalled to the team that my favorite memory of a tree was the two lilac trees in the backyard of my family home in Maine. And at that moment of relaying my lilac memory, I pondered outloud, “well, maybe they’re bushes and not trees? I actually don’t know.” Another illumination for me that occurred when thinking about trees! These particular lilac trees were both maybe eight feet tall, one flowered white and the other purple. Each tree had a small section taken over by what I now think to be the Eastern Tent Caterpillar, and I spent a lot of my childhood time carefully smelling the lilac flowers from other sections of the tree far away from the moths. I spent a lot of time simply looking at these moth nests fascinated by what they were doing. In relaying this memory of the trees, or maybe bushes, I was brought back to my home state, my old house, my backyard and my curiosity about what in the heck all of these hundreds of moths were doing, growing, transforming, reproducing, journeying, dying.

As a bonus, I also noted that Nina Simone, one of my favorite artists, sings a song I love called Lilac Win. I think a very strong cover of that song was done by Jeff Buckley, and that’s a nice lilac connection that makes me happy when I think of lilacs.

We conclude Earth Month, another April full of growth, transformation, reproducing, journeying, dying. And May presents itself with offerings of the same magnificence and hardships. I wanted to ask all of you to take a moment of reflection with us and let us know, what is your favorite tree, and why?

My Data-Driven Wish Come True

Four years ago when I began my position as the inaugural Chief Operating Officer (COO) at FRN, I was delighted. I came to the organization shortly after I completed my Results Count fellowship with The Annie E. Casey Foundation.  My fellowship experience equipped me to use data to bring a cohesive vision across the programmatic, communications, and operational function areas I oversee. To learn how this work started, evolved, and how it influences our daily operations and future planning, please watch our mapping webinar, How FRN’s Data is Driving Impact. 

Through combining and analyzing six different data sets, here is what I learned about FRN’s work and how we can increase our impact:

• Community colleges are the key to our growth. It is more often community colleges, rather than four-year institutions, that are geographically located in the areas with both the most surplus food as well as the most people experiencing hunger. To help expand into community colleges, we have launched a new grant program to bring our food recovery model to neighborhoods across the U.S. Click here to learn more and apply.

• FRN must implement our programs in the areas of the most need. We believe each state presents an opportunity to reduce food waste, feed people, and fight climate change. By mobilizing 200+ college student-led chapters to recover perishable food that would otherwise go to waste from their campuses and communities and donating it to local nonprofits who feed people experiencing hunger, we have created one of the largest college student-led networks fighting food waste and hunger in the U.S. With our ability to quickly replicate in any area where a four-year higher institution is present, we created a list of all 50 states and the specific area we would start a chapter, within each state, in order to feed more people of the most need, faster. 

The areas listed below were prioritized using a variety of factors including, but not limited to: number of higher education institutions in a given area who generate surplus food (NCES, EPA), greatest need as defined by the difference between the median wage (U.S. Census) and living wage (MIT), number of people experiencing food insecurity (Feeding America), SNAP, food insecurity, and poverty rates (U.S. Census), presence of higher education institutions (NCES), and areas where the population is predominantly people of color (U.S. Census).

States listed below are in alphabetical order.

If you are interested in hosting a Lunch and Learn for your organization to see your individual area, please contact programs@foodrecoverynetwork.org.

Recap of Food Recovery Network's March Roundtable Talk

Gratitude to everyone who attended and listened to the March 2024 Roundtable Talk. We appreciate your time. And for those of you who’ve yet to hear directly from us about the halfway point of our 2024 program year, can I encourage you to find some time to listen to the recording of our biannual Roundtable Talk?

The conversation refamiliarized everyone with FRN’s longstanding vision to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the U.S., and reiterated the scope of our work to achieve that vision. This biannual conversation celebrates the accomplishments of Food Recovery Network’s efforts at the halfway point of our program year, of which there were many. Importantly though, our conversation highlighted the difficulty of that work within a system designed to make access to food and economic security difficult. To feed everyone who is hungry, we cannot look away at what makes us uncomfortable, and we cannot assume there is nothing that can be done. Food Recovery Network is making tremendous progress every day, and we need you to stick with us and bring others along.

Can I encourage all of you to share this blog post and recording link with others who might be encouraged to know that a small and mighty national nonprofit has recovered more than 1.7 million pounds of food for those in need, in turn ensuring 2,112 metric tons of CO2 wasn’t emitted into our atmosphere only since July 2023?

Below are further reflections from the March conversation and ways for you to be involved.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM March:

• Comprehensive solutions are needed for communities to thrive. Food Recovery Network understands that within any community that is suffering from food and economic insecurity, many interventions must be developed and tried, and the communities will need parts of some interventions and sections of others to generate continued solutions to thrive.

• Developing new programmatic offerings of how to engage students beyond chapters is critical to making a meaningful impact on a community-based level. To our student leaders, thank you for your continued commitment over the last 13 years. The national office will continue to send invitations for further involvement.

• Our metrics need to reflect these learnings — we will continue to track impact beyond pounds of food recovered. We know adding our impact numbers to the collective conversation of food recovery is important to show movement. At FRN, we also want to remain fixed to the belief that all of these metrics represent our fellow humans and there is more to talk about and to know that goes beyond pounds of food recovered. We will not lose focus on the point that every meal we recover goes to a person in need, in your community, on a specific day. We will not lose focus on the point that our students go to classes, and then they convene at their campus dining kitchens, scoop and pour food into trays and bins, take the temperature and weigh that food, and then drive that precious cargo to their partner agency where they directly hand it to people they care about who will then further distribute that food to their neighbors, and then our students get back in their cars or vans and go home.
  

We have the ability to correct something that is terribly wrong in the U.S. Together, we can create consistent access to food in the ways most welcomed by communities. We can dwindle the number of neighbors experiencing food insecurity to zero. We can. Here are ways you can be involved:

• Who do you know who’s not heard of Food Recovery Network? Send them this post with a message of love, “I thought you should know about Food Recovery Network.” To change the process from food waste to food recovery we need more chapters to start and more businesses to design food recovery plans.

• Join us in April for virtual Power Hours to directly support thousands of pounds of food being recovered! It’s 60 minutes well lived, I promise!

• Your financial contributions directly support our efforts to feed more people, faster. We are grateful for any sized contribution.

I would like to take a moment of reflection for the 7 World Central Kitchen aid workers who lost their precious lives in April trying to provide food to those in need within a desperate conflict zone. They lost their precious lives trying to help, and they will be forever connected to their humanity. To date, WCK provided more than 1,700 trucks of assistance in the conflict zone.