It is jaw dropping to realize how much high quality food is produced locally (or even imported) and then simply thrown into the garbage. I’m not talking about leftovers scraped into the bin or even fruits and vegetables discarded for a minor blemish in high-end markets. I’m talking about entire pallets of perfectly good food.

Sometimes a marketing company will order a run of peanut butter jars with several different labels just to see what a wall of them will look like. Then they chuck them out. If a forklift crashes a pallet of soup cans, it is normal to toss the whole pallet rather than pay someone to go through the whole thing to determine which cans are still saleable. A produce shipper will ditch crates and crates of rapidly ripening fruit if demand has been met for the moment. There are all sorts of reasons that you have never thought of for throwing away warehouses worth of food each week.

The Quest Food Exchange is a Not-For-Profit organization that has devised a food recovery and redistribution model that makes this food available to low-income individuals and families in the Lower Mainland. More than that, they provide assistance in meal planning, budgeting and job skills development. They also have a community kitchen that prepares ready-to-eat meals for individuals and Social Service Agencies to purchase for their clients.

Despite these amazing efforts, Quest still is only able to rescue a fraction of the commercial food wasted. If this is a cause you can get behind, check out their website for ways to make a donation or volunteer your time.