Feeding 9 Billion People Starts with Rescuing Produce

The world's largest inland port of entry is in Nogales, both Mexico and Arizona, just south of where I live in Tucson. Billions of pounds of food and thousands of semi-trailer trucks cross the border, bringing in 25-30% of the produce we in the U.S. eat year round.  But if prices on produce drop, there's no profit in hauling it any farther. Instead, thousands and thousands of pounds of fresh, edible produce is dumped in landfills. That statistic you hear, that 30% of food is wasted, this is what it means. And it's happening in lots of places. In May, fruit transporters in Washington state began dumping millions of pounds of apples on sagebrush-covered hillsides and leaving them to rot. It's the result of the biggest crop of apples on record in combination with labor disputes at the ports that left the apples sitting for weeks until they were unusable. It would be easy to say that our food distribution system is a mess. But that implies that I actually know something about the logistics involved and what people are already doing to manage something so complex. Part of the solution is finding ways to rescue food that would have been dumped and putting it in the kitchens of people who need it. Borderlands Food Bank is one example of this. Located in Nogales, Arizona, Borderlands rescues 35 to 40 million pounds of p