How Can Social Help Solve the Food Insecurity and Food Waste Disconnect in the U.S.?

As a member of the executive team, I was involved in the TEDxSanJoseCA TEDCity2.0 event at the beautiful Silicon Valley Capital Club on Friday, where we heard talks from some compelling speakers.

Part of the fun, and breaking with the normal traditional TEDx schedule, was that the attendees were assigned randomly to different tables for breakout sessions on the themes of:

• Food
• Public Space/Art
• Housing
• Youth and Play
• Water
• Health

I was seated at the Food table. We had 15 or so minutes of discussion time to brainstorm some big ideas about creating and sharing our vision of the future city of San Jose around the theme of food. There were some amazing ideas that all centered around bringing food production into local communities.

We had two very different themes going in our brainstorming session:

• How could local communities grow and distribute local food, saving the money and time needed to ship produce across the country or even from continent to continent?
• How could local communities, government, and private businesses address local food insecurity and nutrition with gardens?

And we came up with the following ideas:

•  Work with corporations to replace lawns, trees, and flowers with vegetable gardens and fruit trees
• Work with building owners to add gardens to the top of their buildings in urban areas
• Add gardens to public parks and include free nearby housing for farmers
• Add gardens to already landscaped and watered street medians
• Set up flatbed trucks that could grow and deliver produce to the people who needed it the most
• Teach children how to garden and how to cook what they grow
• Create a smartphone app that connects people who have excess food with people who would like the excess food

And perhaps coincidentally, (and perhaps not), I've seen several articles about food insecurity in the United States just recently.

This one caught my eye first: Trader Joe's Ex-President To Turn Expired Food Into Cheap Meals. "Doug Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe's, is determined to repurpose the perfectly edible produce slightly past its sell-by date that ends up in the trash. (That happens in part because people misinterpret the labels, according to article from Harvard and the National Resources Defense Council.) To tackle the problem, Rauch is opening a new market, called Daily Table,, early next year in Dorchester, Mass., that will prepare and repackage the food at deeply discounted prices."

This article is the first time I've really seen, and thought about these pretty shocking figures:

• One-third of the world's food goes to waste every year
• In the U.S., about 40 percent of our food gets thrown out

And yet so much of waste may be caused  by the seemingly simple issue of no standardization on use by/sell by/best by dates on our food, as discussed in this article: The (Food) Dating Game: Why Expiration Dates Don't Help. According to this article, "Confusion over dates, according to a survey by the Food Marketing Institute, leads nine out of 10 Americans to needlessly throw away food."

Then there is Ron Shaich, CEO of Panera, who has taken up the SNAP challenge eating  on just $4.50 per day—the average food benefit for recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Shaich is sharing his experiences and thoughts on his blog.

The Feeding America website shares some startling facts about food insecurity in the United States.

So here's a challenge to my readers: How can we use social media channels to solve this problem? We have food going to waste every single day, and people who are going hungry every day. How do we connect the two, and use the first one to help solve the second one?

The Power of TED — Pay It Forward

I've been a TED fan for the last couple of years. (If you've never heard of TED, check them out asap — you won't believe that you didn't know about them before now. Verbatim from their website and in a nutshell: TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.)

I find so many of their videos informative and interesting, and I'm always attracted by the passion the speakers have for their topics. They caption their videos (making them accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing), so they work well in my accessibility social networking.

My friends (face-to-face and on Facebook and Twitter) have been listening patiently as I've gone on and on about how moved and inspired I was by spending a very long (but wonderful) Saturday at TEDx San Jose, California a couple of weeks ago.

I'm still processing, but I'm in awe — such smart, passionate people with the most creative ideas — and all of them striving to make our world a better place with their "Pay It Forward" ideas. There was not a single boring second — which I have to say has never happened to me at a conference before. It was inspiring just being in the same space as the speakers, and getting to meet and talk with them at the after party at the very elegant Silicon Valley Capital Club in downtown San Jose — just wow.

I've been ruminating about this blog post — unable to decide how to best articulate the experience and how I felt moved and changed by it, and just found this video that I have to share that says it all.

  
I used to play a game with my kids when they were small. After an adventure, I would always ask them what their favorite part or thing was. They were never happy only picking one, so I'd let them pick their top three or four. And I find myself in the same position — unable to share my single favorite speaker; but while enjoying all of them — able to select the top six that resonated the most with me. I'm taking a wild guess that if you spoke with 100 different event attendees, you'd get 100 different lists. 

So here is my list of speakers who moved me the most, in no particular order:

• Doug Dietz — A designer for GE Medical Systems who made the entire audience cry along with him as he told us about his epiphany on how to design large, scary scanning systems so that they weren't so scary to children, with the impact of dramatically decreasing the need to sedate children for scans.
• Angela Zhang — A high school senior who loves to learn, won $100,000 for her science project idea, and may very well have discovered a cure for cancer.
• Jim Fruchterman — A funny self-described geek who created a great accessible technology for people who are blind, and now runs a charitable tech foundation.
• Manoj Saxena — The general manager of IBM Watson (how could I not look forward to meeting him), and a brilliant philanthropist in his own right.
• Preetha Ram — A brilliant college dean who left academia to create a program that uses the power of peer collaboration, gamification and social networking to help students who are failing in school be successful.
• Diana Reiss — One of the world's leading experts on dolphin intelligence who proved that dolphins are self-aware. She was also an advisor on the film, The Cove, and I've offered to help her with her social media campaign to stop the killing of dolphins in Japan. (I hope she takes me up on it.)

I can't wait until next year! :-)