The primary mission of community Food Shelves is to feed the hungry and providing support for families and individuals in economic distress. But they also provide an important link in the dynamic struggle to combat climate change.

The US Department of Agriculture says that, in the United States, over 1/3 of all available food goes uneaten through loss or waste. Community or faith-based food shelves provide an avenue for rescuing edible food from commercial entities and redistributing it to people in need. But many of those food shelves provide an extra service that would otherwise not happen, programs like Mission Outpost at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church (ELCA, St Paul Area Synod) in Burnsville, MN.

Mission Outpost, in collaboration with the Salvation Army operates several programs, including a food shelf, to meet the needs of the communities around Burnsville. They receive food items from local commercial businesses as well as from Second Harvest Heartland (a Minneapolis/St. Paul food bank) and individual donors. Some of those commercial businesses, such as the major grocery chains, may have some arrangement to send dated produce to local farmers for animal feed. But they otherwise do not have a mechanism for converting that organic waste. This would require separating the organics from any packaging and sending it to a commercial compost site. Therefore, much wasted food ends up in local landfill where it rots and produces unwanted methane gas, a potent environmental hazard. But here is the “special service” that the food shelf provides.

Through its contract with a local waste management provider, Mission Outpost’s unusable organics are collected and sent to one of two commercial compost sites in the South Metro area. There, the organics are converted to commercial grade compost and re-sold. Eric Elton, Director of the Prince of Peace Mission Outreach, provides some impressive figures. For the time period of June-September 2019 (a more “typical” quarter of activity in the pre-Covid times), Mission Outpost received 386,256 lbs of rescued food items. Of that amount, 251,857 lbs was distributed to families. An additional 50,000 lbs of non-perishables remained on the shelves for future distribution. The remainder, a full 84,399 lbs of unusable food was separated from its containers and collected as organics waste to be converted to compost. That compost is then used to help replenish soil health and contribute to future growth.

Wow!! Who would have known that the mission of feeding the people would also help the planet? Thank you, Mission Outpost and all other Food Shelf programs that provide a similar service.