Feed Louisville is a nonprofit that makes meals for unhoused and food-insecure residents. Rhona Kamar is its executive director. She spoke with LPM’s Bill Burton about how food insecurity is increasing in Louisville and how her organization is helping.
This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Bill Burton: Feed Louisville provides hunger relief. That's a pretty obvious one, but let's take a look at what you do with food rescue. What exactly is food rescue?
Rhona Kamar: We use that term “food rescue” to describe this amazing effort to prevent perfectly good food from going into the landfill. We know that in the U.S., up to 40% of food that's produced, and that includes food coming from farms, grocers, restaurants, all of it, up to 40% of that food is thrown away without ever being touched, without being eaten. This is really good food, so we call it rescue because we divert it from the landfill.
BB: That leads us to an initiative that Feed Louisville is starting. Can you tell us about it?
RK: We are launching now our “no waste, no hunger” campaign. It's a holiday campaign that is in its second year. We have 17 restaurants who are participating with us, who donate their still-good surplus food to us on a regular basis. With this campaign, we wanted to bring attention to the work that they do with us. They are really the foundation of our work. Without these ingredients, we would be spending a lot more money purchasing what we need. All of these partners have made a commitment to setting up systems within their own businesses, with their staff, training staff, making space, calling us to get this good food to us. So we want to celebrate that commitment. We want to send people to them this holiday season.
BB: Food insecurity has been on the rise nationally for some time. At this point, the government shutdown just exacerbated it. What did you see locally?
RK: What we see is that this has made a really bad situation worse, and people were already struggling. Since the beginning of the pandemic, which is when we started, we thought that after things sort of went back to whatever normal is after the pandemic, that food insecurity would also lessen, but that's not true. We see that it has continued to rise. We know that by the data. We get calls every day from our partners who we work with. We distribute food. We're a commissary kitchen, so the food that we make every day and rescue goes back out through a network of what we call feeding partners. These are human service organizations, grassroots organizations who are on the front lines every day, working with our community, helping them through a variety of issues, mental health issues, substance use, homelessness. What we know to be true is that all of the people that our partners are serving, that we serve together, are already struggling, so this has just exacerbated, as you said, this problem.
BB: The shutdown is over at this point. Have you seen any change? Or are you even expecting to see any change, any lessening of the impact?
RK: No, I don't expect to see a lessening of the impact. I think one of the things that we really need to be aware of is that SNAP, it is a resource. It doesn't take care of all of any family's food needs. The average payout a month on SNAP is $332 for a family of four. That's not a lot of money. It's $177 for an individual. So what we're already talking about is just a portion of a person's or a family's needs every month. With this change, the government opening back up, and SNAP getting back to whatever normal is, it’s not enough.
BB: That is the executive director of Feed Louisville, Rhona Kamar. Rhona, thank you so much for your time.
RK: Thank you for having me.
