Opinion: Food. It’s No Longer Waste. It’s Delivery.

By Alexander Rapaport

The great 16th-century Sage Harav Yehuda Loew, known as the Maharal of Prague, in his work on the Pesach Haggadah, explains that while the miracles in the sefer Shemos are epic, an even greater miracle is the everyday occurrence of Hashem feeding the planet.

What first comes to mind is the miracle of growth — that there can be something from nothing, like how a small seed grows into a tree. But if you think deeper, there is an even greater miracle in feeding all living creatures. That miracle is one of logistics and delivery.

There’s the legendary story of what happened to the farmers and scientists who came up with the perfect flavored tomato, which failed for one reason only — lack of logistics. They had not strategized a way of bringing it to the consumer.

There is more than enough food on the planet to feed every living creature. The challenges to fight hunger are mostly with logistics. From the grain stuck in the ports of Ukraine, to crops left to rot in the field, to excess food in the grocery stores being sent to landfills. Plus, we all lived through the great, historic supply chain disruption of the last two years, and even people ready to pay for food had issues getting it. Issues that were all linked to logistics.

Therefore, partnering with DoorDash, a last-mile delivery company, is so vital when fighting hunger. Most importantly, it eliminates the humiliating breadline and gives people their dignity. The most obvious help that comes from delivery is to those who are sick, old, and frail and cannot do pick-up, so  the only way to help them is by doing delivery. In addition, when the trucking industry is under such duress, it has now become the norm that food shipments arrive late. Having people on a breadline when the food hasn’t arrived yet is an emergency food provider’s biggest challenge. But with an innovative home delivery system such as DoorDash, you can simply start delivering whenever the truck actually arrives.

But best of all, it gives those in the trenches a powerful tool to make use of rescued food. Generally, the biggest challenge to doing a food rescue is having the people in need coming to get the rescued food at the random time of the rescue. For example, if you get a surprise donation of a trailer load of ripe bananas on a day when there are only a few hundred people coming for pick-up, the only way to get it to thousands of people on time before they go bad is by delivery.

Saving food from going to waste was always a challenge, but the last-mile delivery option is really a game changer. n

Masbia Soup Kitchen Network recently entered into a partnership with DoorDash, where DoorDash makes deliveries free of charge. Over 50,000 charity food deliveries have been done since March. Doordash is looking for new partners. Yeshivos and Charities are welcome.

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