 So, FoodLink did not begin as a concept. FoodLink didn't begin as a project that we thought would happen. It was more, you might say, by accident. I was picking up a donation from Panera Bread one evening for a school fundraiser at Minuteman High School. And I was conversing with the manager about the different nights because they have a program in place. But you have to be a 501C3 non-profit to qualify to pick up their bread at the end of day donation. So when she mentioned to me they only had one day where someone was picking up, I was a little horrified at the fact that six days of bread and pastry and such was being trashed. And I just couldn't imagine because I know there are people who do not have enough to eat and I was brought up to really never throw out food unless it was bad. You know, you eat all your leftovers. You would think about what food you have in the refrigerator. How do you make it into another meal? But you don't throw out good food. Cold food or frozen food have different shelf-lives, you might say. But we call it now a code date, not an expiration date, because it does say expired on some, says best buy, sell buy. Different terms are used. So, for instance, on a canned good, like beans or tuna, vegetables in a can, generally five years beyond that code date something is still good. When you get into dairy, a lot of people feel like it's near that date I can't drink it or I can't eat that yogurt. According to the Greater Boston Food Bank guidelines, yogurt is suggested to be good 14 days beyond the code date. I personally have kept things way beyond the 14 days to try it and see up to a couple months. Your own guinea pig. Yeah, because the good thing about dairy, number one, you won't get sick by eating dairy because you're going to taste that it's gone. You'll understand that it's sour if it's milk. You won't want to drink it or you could bake with it if it's just starting to turn. But if you see mold or a package is compromised, meaning it's expanded, then you know there's something going on. Right. So then you have to dispose of it. The Greater Boston Food Bank is who provided this matrix to us. And again, it's a guideline. It doesn't mean that you would be ill from doing something else. But if you were cleaning out your cupboard and you had a can that was 10 years old, I would probably compost the ingredients and then recycle the rest. But a couple of years, it's perfectly fine. There's no problem. People used to do, I believe, more cooking at home. And if you are learning how to cook and you are willing to try foods and do different things with foods, you feel a little more comfortable with that. Some people, they see that code. You'll even find a code date on water. Water does not expire. So it's sort of a fear factor. And you sort of have allowed the marketing world to tell you what's okay and what's not okay. So it's really more of get back down to the basics, especially with fresh fruits and vegetables. There's nothing bad about them until you see there's something bad. So if your grapes are moldy, they should be composted. If you have a package of strawberries and one is moldy and the rest is fine, obviously you discard the bad one. But during the day when we sort through all that produce that we receive, so for instance each place that we pick up during the day, whether it's seven o'clock at Trader Joe's or 10 or 12 at Whole Foods, we have a team of people who sort through every piece of produce that comes in those boxes. So for instance, we then have a box that we label Volunteer Bin. So you may get a zucchini that is just broken. Well that's not bad, it's just broken. So we're not going to give it to someone to eat, but we'll put it in the Volunteer Bin so that you can then take it home as a volunteer, chop off the open end that's been exposed. You chop off the ends anyway and you wash your fruit or vegetable and you have something to make with your dinner. We'll get produce of lots of variety. But there's almost always some apples, green peppers, onions, potatoes, whatever. But the seasons change too. So when it's apple season or orange season, you're getting a lot of that. You'll see like today it was a lot of bananas. Then there's days we'll get flats and flats of blueberries or flats and flats of strawberries. You just don't know. So you can make a great meal of anything you like. It's just washing, preparing, eating. And the less processing you do, the better that is. But we do also get food that's prepared. We get frozen meals that are already individually packaged. We get some of everything. And the different places that we deliver the food is different every day. So although we pick up at most of the same stores every day, same time, each day is a different distribution. So where food goes on Monday is different from where food goes on Thursday. And that's how we cover like 38 different organizations in 14 towns. But it is a piece at a time. So it took seven years to get from point A to point G. Wherever we are now. And where, where right now? We're at the future home of FoodLink at 108 Summer Street, Arlington, Massachusetts. And so you're clearly expanding around Arlington. You got a whole second location opening up. So is that because of you're just getting more business and more clients coming to you for more food deliveries or how's that, how's this come about? So for many things is eventually this will be our only location. We'll have offices and all operations here where you were this morning at 117 Broadway. We'd been renting space from Arlington Food Pantry for several years. And that location is scheduled to be demolished and affordable housing put there or built there. So it's something good that's going to be happening there. And the Arlington Food Pantry will be moving into space on the main floor of the building, but there was an adequate space available for FoodLink. And so then we embarked on finding a location. And actually while we were looking for a location, we kept getting more food donations and more places to take it. So our needs increased over time. So what exactly was that process like trying to find a new place to put FoodLink? What were you looking for exactly? It was a difficult process because we thought we wanted to stay in Arlington, but initially we were looking at other locations such as Medford, Belmont and Lexington because Arlington has limited real estate, particularly commercial real estate. We wanted a location where we could have a loading dock and some vans going in and out. Once Arlington, once we were awarded a grant, an Arlington Community Development Plot Grant, then the decision to stay in Arlington was confirmed. Came a little easier. Yes. And so then we started looking at other places. We were looking at one place to rent. And after we saw how much we would be spending on leasehold improvements and other costs and then have to vacate in 10 years, it just didn't make sense. And I said, well, let's try to locate something that we can purchase. So on the topic of surrounding towns and such, what exactly is the radius that you work in here? You're located in Arlington, but you do travel over to Medford and other areas? Yes. So in some instances, we do work with a program in South Boston, but they actually collect from us. We don't deliver there. The further south we deliver is Bunker Hill Community College. And then we go as far north as Lowell and Lawrence as far as deliveries go. So we've been talking a lot about the future of FoodLink and your move here, but would you want to tell us a little bit about what exactly it is that you do at FoodLink? Oh, sure. You mean what FoodLink does? Yes. The whole idea behind it. Right. So what we do is we collect food that we call food donations. And for some reason, the retailer or wholesaler who's donating the food, it isn't sellable for their purpose. It could be that you have a bag of apples and there's one apple that's bad, so they donate the full bag. Sometimes they have excess of a product. Sometimes it's just that there's a small bruise on something. In the case of the bananas, they had gotten, for some reason, an overstock of bananas and they were a little bit more ripe than they normally get, so they knew they had a short shelf life. So after holidays, it's usually they had, they overproduced for the holidays and now they have all this excess food and they want to donate it while it's still good and healthy to eat rather than just tossing it and wasting it. So that's where we get some of that. Most of what we get is I would consider overproduction. Right. So you say the case of the bananas, but for our viewers who haven't come into contact with these specific bananas, what exactly is the protocol that you have to run through? Do you even have a protocol for when you get just so many of one item that it honestly seems like you might not know what to do with it? So we keep a list of organizations that might be able to take extra food or we reach out to some additional recipient agencies. So one example is when we have excess bananas or apples, the Arlington Youth Counseling Center is happy to get fruit. They're not on our fruit distribution route. We tend to provide them other snacks, but when we have excess, what we call child-friendly fruit, we'll give them a call and they'll be able to take one or two cases. But there'll be other programs that can take a bit more and so we'll just start making phone calls. Do you have any words maybe of inspiration for people who are trying to get something done in society and it might just feel like it's not possible? Yeah. So I would say if you see a need out there or an issue out there and you say somebody needs to do something about it, that person might be you. If you've identified it, it's often you take it by the horns and you do something with it. And it might not be that you bring it to finish line, but at least get something started. With FoodLink, I think some people were surprised that, particularly in the beginning, that we became a success, but the success was because Julie and I were so dedicated and committed and worked so well together that without two of us, I don't think this would have happened. And it took two to get it to where we are now. Right. So you, let's touch on that a little bit if you don't mind, that dedication and that really wanting to do this, where exactly did that come from? Well, for me, I can't speak for Julie, I had retired and so I had some available time and I have a commitment to the environment and sustainability as well as hunger and knowing that there's a lot of waste, all kinds of waste. I'm not just talking about food waste, but other types of waste out there. And here is two issues in Massachusetts, wasted food and hunger that you can bring the two together to solve, not totally solve the problems, but have something that helps to remedy both of those issues here in Massachusetts. So for me, it was touching on two things that I was passionate about and bringing them together to help each other. Do you sometimes feel as though you're kind of low on the pipeline that you're like cleaning up a mess that could be solved possibly with legislation or with more proper city planning that these people that you're supplying are often, despite some being disabled, they're often low income in poverty or in projects. Do you think that there are ways that we can fix this sort of food desert situation that one day might in a weird way hopefully put food link out of business? Yeah, I mean, so I wouldn't say if you say one of our top ten goals. But a goal we have out there is that there's no wasted food and no hunger. We would love for food link to be out of business if there were neither of those two happening. We don't see that happening, but I do think we can work with education and policy. So what has happened in Massachusetts, there's more food that's being recovered because of some of the policies in Massachusetts, the waste ban policies. So if a vendor has or a retailer has over 2,000 pounds of food waste in a given week, they are required to either compost it, convert it to energy or donate it. It's tax advantage for them to donate to organizations like us. So, and they're trying to bring that quantity down. So that helps at least on the wasted food side. Then they're also from the state policies that provide more funding for people to have more access to food at farmers markets and such like that. But I don't... I can see where we can support policy to help make changes. Right. And so that addressed mostly the, you know, one half of your mission is the food availability and then another half is food waste, which you help out with and turn that into food availability. Do you feel that there's room for improvement with educating the general population about how you can handle your food waste or properly buying? Absolutely, absolutely. And that's what we have that is like one of the things we feel that we want to do and we do do is education. One of the things we try to do is educate the public about dates on food and to help them reduce their food waste. Well, also if we give a presentation or talk, we'll talk about how your freezer is your friend. So like if you bring home leftovers from a restaurant or you've cooked something up and you don't feel like eating it, freeze it. You know, you'll have it in a couple of weeks or in a month. And so we do try to provide information about reducing one-owned wasted food or food waste. We have presented at the Green Team and gotten the Green Teams at some of the schools involved with doing different things. They get a box of food and figure out why it was donated to us. And we start to... So the children try to figure out why something was donated to us and then we provide them information. I do know the town of Arlington is working with the schools about food waste and making sure things are at least composted at a minimum. And I think in the future, there'll be more about saving some of the food that is still good that a child may not want, like a carton of milk or an apple, things like that. But I would hope that they could somehow integrate it in the curriculum. That would be quite wonderful. Because when children know about these things, they bring it home and their parents and they embarrass their parents into getting the knowledge so that the parents can raise up to the child's knowledge. I grew up in the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, pretty much right on the water in a town that had historically-benefitting town. Our roads were literally paved over oyster shells. And it was an industry that at the time was really on the downhill slant. Previously, lots of boats would go out to rake oysters and catch crabs, and every year it felt like they were coming in later and later. I wasn't directly involved, but that knowledge of that really affected me in ways that I couldn't understand until I was older and working with farmers really. But another part of that too was just kind of my family's relationship with food in general. We grew, you know, had like a little vegetable garden out back. And I was really encouraged to be part of it. One year, when I was only like four years old, my parents gave me a section of it to kind of tend to myself, and I grew zucchinis. And when you grow zucchinis, if you don't harvest them pretty much right away, they grow massive. And so there's this great photo of me with a zucchini that's about twice the size as I am at that point in time, and just a lot of pride that I had grown that thing. And that really instilled in me a love of fresh food and an appreciation for what it takes to produce it. These folks who grow our food work incredibly hard to get it to our tables, and it's a complicated thing. It's hard to predict what the market's going to want the next year or how the weather is going to be, and those things drastically affect what they should be growing and planting. And yet they do it every day, and it's hard work. So that has really impacted the way I think about the food that we handle and kind of the care that we should have for it. We waste 40% of what we produce every day while one in eight folks in this country experience food insecurity or hunger. And that doesn't have to happen if we're wasting so much food. So we already have an abundant society. We really are good at producing food. It's a matter of figuring out where it goes. So we're able to leverage those resources that exist in our community of the excess food that's happening at grocery stores and cafes to make sure that folks have enough. Food insecurity in the U.S. is an interesting thing because it sometimes goes a bit unnoticed. It doesn't look like hunger does in other countries. You're not necessarily seeing people who are skinny because they're not eating enough or malnourished in those ways, but they tend to still be malnourished. There's high rates of obesity and diabetes and other diet-related illnesses within food insecure populations in part because the food that is available tends to be high in sugar and high in other kinds of bad calories. And this in part exists because of the way we've built our food system. Healthy, fresh, affordable foods are not in all communities and oftentimes the healthier foods are more expensive. So food deserts exist across this country. What a food desert is is a place that in an urban area there is not a grocery store within a one-mile radius within a rural area, it's within a five-mile radius. And not having access to a grocery store can really limit folks' ability to have fresh and affordable foods. Oftentimes you'll see folks in these communities relying on corner stores for their food. And the other thing is food is actually fairly expensive in this country, especially on the fresher end. So being able to afford it when you're on a limited budget, especially if you look within the greater Boston area where our housing prices and our housing costs continue to expand, that leaves less and less money for folks to be able to buy food for their families. We tend to have so much food waste in part because of our expectations. We want to walk into a grocery store and have this kind of plethora of food. We want to be able to buy whatever we want for the new recipe we're trying. And that tends to create a bit of waste because if only five people are going to buy this cool new kind of kale, then the rest of that kale is going to go into the waste stream. And what we do is we are the people standing between the grocery store and the waste stream and trying to get that food while it's still good and can feed people. One of the challenges that we've been having with FoodLink over the last few years is that we keep getting more food and we need to store it. As much as possible we kind of work on this just-in-time model where we're taking food directly from one place to another. But that's not the best for some of our agencies that don't have any storage and would really like to get things like dairy and meat. So that means we need more refrigeration as well as a clean and food-safe operating space to be in. Our current location is being demolished sometime this year and so we have been- we were searching for a long time for something and we're really excited when we found the building on Summer Street because we could see the potential. It certainly was in an interesting shape when we got it. It was an auto part store and it kind of felt like someone's garage. And so we were so thankful to be able to purchase it and it's been quite the road to try to envision what that's going to look like once we get in it. There's quite a bit of TLC that needs to happen to the building and we're excited on how we can create that to be more of a community space and something that is beautiful to walk by and that the community feels welcomed into once it's done. But probably one of the things I'm most excited about is that when we finish getting this space together we're going to have a lot of cold storage. We'll have a walk-in refrigerator and a walk-in freezer so we can better manage the food that we receive and also start to take more perishable foods. And I'm also really excited to have all of our operations in one space. Currently we have an operation space as well as some off-site freezers and our office is in a different place in town. So once we're all in one place we think we're going to be able to rescue even more food efficiently. We think we'll get close to quadrupling what we do. We've grown in the time I've been here from two staff members to four and we've expanded our intake of food greatly. I think we're doing around 300,000 pounds when I started and we're doing over half a million pounds every year now. So I see that growth and I see it for a number of reasons. I think it's in part because of the great leadership of our co-founders but also that there's a growing interest in this issue in this community. People are becoming more and more aware both of food waste and of hunger and they're hungry to be involved in that. And so we are always onboarding new volunteers who are just really passionate about this and that has helped us kind of sustain that growth. Most of our deliveries are done by volunteers and I love that about the work we do because it gives people a chance to see something they might not have seen before in their own neighborhood as well as connect with people that they may have never connected with. There's lots of folks who have formed friendships through that kind of thing and that's a really impactful thing and I think speaks a lot to this town and how much they just care.