Indianapolis man's goal — feed families, not landfills
A man who didn't know where his local pantry was now seeks to divert tons of edible food that otherwise might be lost to landfills.
- Our Children: How you can help hungry kids in our community this holiday season.
John Williamson was at a low point in 2007.
He had started a real estate business in Hamilton County — just as the housing market was about to collapse. To make ends meet, he, his wife and their three daughters began cleaning apartments. A teacher by training, he began scouring the internet for jobs.
As he was focused on the job listings one day, Williamson’s wife, Carol, came by chattering about a newspaper article she wanted to read to him. Impatiently, he tuned into her dutifully, he confesses now, but more out of a sense of spousal obligation than interest.
What followed would soon change his life.
The story was about people who protested food waste in America by diving into trash bins outside grocery stores and gathering up still-edible food to eat — a movement of people called freegans.
What stuck in John’s craw was that the people doing the diving didn’t actually need the food, they were just making a political statement. John knew there were hungry people in the world, going without.
For a couple of days, that idea gnawed at him. “He was grinding on it,” Carol says. So much so that John got up from his job search to investigate the food waste further. He went to stores near their Noblesville home — Wal-Mart, Marsh, Panera Bread — and each confirmed what the story implied: On a daily basis, stores throw away bread, pastries and other foods that were perfectly safe to eat, just not perfect enough to sell. Large quantities. Going in the trash.
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“When you go to the store, you will only buy perfectly shaped and perfectly colored food. If it doesn’t look right, you won’t buy it,” Williamson said. “If it is not just perfect…”
The phenomenon is well-documented.
Up to 40 percent of the food produced in America winds up in the trash, according to a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council. That includes when foods are misshapen to the point grocers won’t stock them. But it also includes food that goes unharvested in fields when market prices drop too low. There’s also uneaten food from buffets and restaurants where portion sizes have grown too large for appetites. Then there’s also the food that represents the single largest source in your stream of household trash — your unused leftovers, limp lettuce in the fridge, bowls of apples surrounded by a halo of fruit flies.
Williamson, now 49, began looking to make a dent in the lost food problem. Once a week, he started picking up excess items from a Panera and taking it to a food pantry. Then he did it twice a week. Soon, he was getting friends involved. They began to visit more stores and restaurants — picking up $5 pizzas that had spent a few minutes too long in Little Caesars and side items from City Barbeque.
He and his friends were diverting carloads of food from the landfill, and better yet, they were feeding hungry people. His new motto: “Feed families, not landfills.”
Williamson’s real estate business was going nowhere, but everything he was doing on the Food Rescue front began to take off. His Christian faith told him it was God pointing him in a new direction.
“It just went crazy,” Williamson said.
One of Williamson’s biggest breaks came from a couple of volunteer drivers who introduced Williamson to their boss, ExactTarget founder Scott Dorsey.
Dorsey, one of Indianapolis’ most prominent and successful entrepreneurs, set up a foundation through his business that focused on entrepreneurship, education and hunger. Immediately, he liked what he saw in Williamson’s Food Rescue network.
“I describe John as a social entrepreneur,” Dorsey said. “He saw a problem in the world and built a solution and threw himself into that with a tremendous amount of will and faith and determination.”
Dorsey helped Williamson set up a nonprofit corporation. His company’s foundation began offering email and mobile technology help. And, soon, Dorsey was an annual contributor. Without trying, Williamson had found a job in food rescue. And his network began to grow.
Within a couple of years, it spread to 19 states and 40 chapters.
Williamson began seeing other ways to further the cause of food rescue. Donna Brooks, a counselor at Hinkle Creek Elementary School in Noblesville, was assigned cafeteria duty and immediately noticed the steady stream of unopened milk cartons, bags of sliced fruit and other items the kids tossed into the trash. “It became evident that we are teaching our children to waste food,” she said.
Brooks heard about Williamson’s Food Rescue work and began talking to him and the staff at Hinkle Creek about what they could do. In 2012, they decided to put a collection bin in the cafeteria in a conspicuous place and started coaching kids to toss in their unopened items. Brooks took the stuff to the White River Food Pantry. The contributions quickly piled up. It worked well enough that school officials expanded the school Food Rescue to other Noblesville schools.
By 2014, a volunteer was able to make a Food Rescue arrangement with the South Madison Schools — and Williamson realized he had a new operational model, one more oriented in schools, with kids playing important roles. Early successes got traction on social media and the model grew to nearly 400 schools.
These days, Williamson seems most proud of the scores of Food Rescue schools in about nine states that are not only diverting their food waste, but keeping track of the items they save for the hungry.
Among the student foot soldiers is Hinkle Creek fifth-grader Liam Fitzgerald. He and a small cadre of friends sort the rescued food items, count them and enter the data on a spreadsheet. A mother of one of the children drives the food to the food pantry.
Fitzgerald, 10, said he’s aware that there are children who are hungry. “It’s kind of depressing,” he said. “And I want to help.”
Williamson loves it when the students report their findings and share their successes on social media because he says the kids are the best ambassadors of the cause of food rescue. “Good stories travel,” he said, “and nobody can say no to kids.”
Williamson’s story has changed, too.
Nine years ago, he was a hapless real estate salesman looking for a new job. He was adrift. And, as hunger issues were concerned, he didn’t know the location of the nearest food pantry.
Now, he’s an encyclopedia of Food Rescue who can speak with some familiarity about the ugly fruit movement in Europe and the profitability of grocery store waste in America. He can talk about the waste influences of the National School Lunch Program and how food donors are protected from liabilities by Good Samaritan laws. He spouts quotes about such as: “There’s enough food in America wasted to fill up Lucas Oil Stadium every day for a year.”
More than that, he understands better now what one of his favorite Christian authors, Bill Hybels, was referring to when he spoke of having a “white hot why” for living, a “holy discontent.”
“This particular issue,” he said, “became my holy discontent.”
Call IndyStar reporter Robert King at (317) 444-6089. Follow him on Twitter: @RbtKing.
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Food Rescue
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