Mitch Thomson, Executive Director of the Red Deer Food Bank, at the Feed 500 event on Friday at Rotary Recreation Park. (rdnewsNOW/Alessia Proietti)

By Alessia Proietti

14 months waste-free

Red Deer Food Bank teaches about food waste at Feed 500 event

Oct 14, 2022 | 2:50 PM

The Red Deer Food Bank says they have been a waste free facility for the past 14 months and were teaching the community to do the same this Friday.

On October 14 from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. at Rotary Recreation Park, the Food Bank teamed up with the Kerry Wood Nature Centre, Rethink Red Deer’s Common Ground community garden, the City of Red Deer, Alberta Health Services, and other partners, to host the Feed 500 event which teaches the community about the impacts of food waste.

“Community organizations have come together to use food, that would have otherwise been wasted, to teach the community how to use food properly to ensure that everyone gets fed,” said Mitch Thomson, Executive Director of the Food Bank.

On the menu were bison meatballs with barbeque sauce, potatoes O’Brien made with peppers, apple brown betty made with a breadcrumb topping, and rice pudding. The items were samples from the Food Bank’s Community Kitchen, provided by the Rotary Club of Red Deer East.

He states the organization used the opportunity to show people how to dry, cook, freeze and can food as a means to preserve it rather than throwing it away. Other examples included juicing apples that were going ripe or making bread pudding from stale loaves.

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He says practices like this mixed with a pinch of ingenuity and combined with the organization’s food recovery program, have led the Food Bank to becoming waste-free.

“We’ve diverted 900,000 pounds worth of food from the landfill this year through our collection program,” he said.

The program collects foods that would be thrown away by grocery stores for being near their “sell by” dates or having an imperfect appearance. It also gives fresh produce not suitable for human consumption, due to bad bruising or wilting, to farms for animal use.

Thomson says over 250 people were served on Friday with enough food to go around for seconds as roughly 440 portions were given out.

According to a 2022 study by the National Zero Waste Council, 2.3 million tonnes of edible food is wasted each year costing $20 billion. As well, they state 63 per cent of the food Canadians throw away could have been eaten.

Thomson says not only can minimizing food waste help feed the growing community demand, but can also lead to more nutritional meals for individual families.

“Here, we had whole foods that were wholesome; better for us. They weren’t prepackaged or processed in any way and they would have otherwise gone to waste. So growing a garden, picking an apple, canning something, preserving something, drying it, can provide a healthy food source for you and your family or a neighbor,” he said.

READ: Red Deer Food Bank says Thanksgiving won’t look the same for many central Albertans