By Michaela Wang ‘21, Staff Writer

The aroma of roast turkey beguiles you to the kitchen; Mom’s making stuffing from scratch while Grandma ridicules modern cooking techniques. Dad rests his odorous feet on the fancy coffee table he’s not supposed to; football plays while he cracks open his third bottle of beer. You and your sibling are making the sweet potato casserole and fight over who gets to whisk in the flour.  

Every Thanksgiving, we expect the perfumes of this meal to hover under our noses, invigorate our taste buds, and leave us in a two-day food coma as we regret bringing the fork to our mouths. However, something else has been lingering under my nose this year– a fundamental privilege that many lack.

Despite Ms. Fischer’s consistent morning meeting announcements to bring in canned goods for the homeless, I’m still blinded to poverty and extreme hunger due to the privileged community surrounding me. Consequently, I believed I can only help by sympathizing with the poor. It was necessary to take a moment to reevaluate simple luxuries that I took for granted, attend community service events, and educate myself on the conditions of people without voices in society; but I wanted to go further and change something about my life that could make a greater impact on others.  With such a holiday where coming together is so important, it reminded me that we forget about the “giving” and put ourselves in the role of the receivers.

Many of us have had the experience of opening a refrigerator door and tip-toeing to reach the back where remains of a Thanksgiving meal sit. Though no mold had grown, the mashed potatoes smelled strange so we threw it away, guilty but never questioning our ability to reuse it. Or in the lunch line, we overestimate the amount of spinach we can consume at the salad bar and end up throwing it away carelessly. I never realized the amount of food I wasted until the day an NA student scolded me, “You’re wasting a lot of guacamole.  That would be worth ten dollars at Chipotle.” You are probably doing this too.

A lot of wasted food could have fed the mouths of people in need instead of the garbage can. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, 30 percent of food is wasted globally across the supply chain, contributing 8 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. Restaurants, especially, produce a lot of food and never sell it all. We need to encourage local restaurants to connect with food recovery programs and soup kitchens, opening up generosity that is crucial to society.  

A program called “Rescuing Leftover Cuisine” helps the hungry by rescuing and donating leftover food to homeless shelters. It is a national non-profit food rescue organization, operating in 16 cities and headquartered in New York City. The company localizes issues into sets of communities that can help sustain themselves, and leverages technology to facilitate the identification and handling of excess food. If you are interested in participating, there are locations in Hillsborough, NJ, or New York City.

I reached out to Elaine Meehan, who is in charge of Rescuing Leftover Cuisine in Hillsborough County. I asked her for advice on hesitant teenagers who want to make an impact, and her response was, “We are a small branch of RLC here in central Jersey, and I don’t have a lot of time to work on this [sustaining food] and sometimes others don’t either (everyone is a volunteer), but every little bit helps! So even if you can give only a little time and you might not think it’s a big impact, it IS helping for that moment in time, and it’s worth it to give that time. Also, sometimes it can be daunting to start something new, but when there wasn’t any RLC branch here in central Jersey, I took small steps and just picked up what little amount I could to deliver to food pantries. Sometimes thinking big is too daunting and prevents people from doing anything, but thinking small makes it doable, and doing something small is still better than NOT doing something big.”

No matter your position in society, you can make change. No one is ever powerless in the helping of others.