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With the loss of income due to the pandemic, the issue of food insecurity for state residents has drastically increased and doesn't show signs of abating, according to Russell Redding, the state's Secretary of Agriculture.
"It's been devastating at one point, just to look at it and know that in a normal year, we had roughly 1.4 million people that were food insecure. That number has been two million plus," Redding said, referring to the increase during the pandemic.
"We have served about 20 million individuals since late March at our food banks. That's an average of 500,000 a week and that is continuing," he added.
Redding recently spoke at a virtual panel discussion on food security and its environmental impact during the Pennsylvania Farm Show.
Also part of the discussion was Patrick McDonnell, Secretary of Environmental Protection, who highlighted his department's food recovery infrastructure grant program. Funded through the recycling fund, the grants offer non-profits up to a maximum of $200,000 in order to procure equipment, such as refrigerators, freezers and hand forklifts in order to reduce food waste from food retailers and wholesalers.
"That's all to reduce food waste disposal from food retailers and wholesalers by repurposing and redistributing apparently safe food to nonprofits in the Commonwealth that provide food to segments of the public," McDonnell said.
He cited the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank as one of the recipients of the grant program.
Representing the food bank on the panel, Executive Director Joe Arthur stated that his organization had received one of the $200,000 grants which they used to acquire three refurbished refrigeration trucks and a van.
"That really had a direct impact during COVID-19 actually rescuing a lot more food," Arthur said.
He noted that the food bank has over 500 retail sites where they can pick up food. Last year about 15 million pounds of food was picked up at these retail sites, Arthur said.
"That amount of food would actually go to landfills were it not going to kitchen tables," Arthur added.
McDonnell also highlighted how food waste also has an environmental impact as well as being wasteful for people who need food.
"It may seem like food security isn't an environmental concern, but it certainly is," McDonnell stressed.
"Every bit of food that could have been eaten that goes to a landfill is instead increasing the volume of waste in our landfills," he said.
McDonnell explained that food waste is also a climate change issue because of the methane gas, which is a greenhouse gas that is produced by food when it is discarded in a landfill. He cited statistics from the EPA that stated that three -fourths of the 39.7 million tons of food waste generated went to landfills, which represents nearly a quarter of all the waste entering landfills.
In addressing the issue of food waste as it relates to his department's initiatives, Redding referred to the a program initiated in his department, the Pennsylvania Agricultural Surplus System, which takes products from the farms or processors in the state which may not have a market because of some type of interruption and brings them into the tradable food system.
"It provides an alternative way to market that product and also keeps it out of the waste stream," Redding said.
Redding noted two examples of how this program has benefited state residents since the pandemic began.
"We've all watched the milk being dumped back in the spring and summer and each of us were heartbroken because of the good nutrition and knowing that on the other side we had all of these needs," Redding said, adding that because of the PASS program, that product was brought into a tradable food stream.
Because of the pandemic, county fairs across the state were canceled last year, leaving FFA an 4-H youth without a way to market the animals they had raised.
"We found a way through PASS to have some of the local farms and processors process that product and move it into the charitable system," he stated.
Redding added that farmers are doing other waste recovery as well, by donating or moving their products into any charitable outlet. He noted that a critical part of the program is the funding.
"We had a half million dollars prior to the pandemic to work with Put another $10 million in with the federal CARES Act funding. When you put all that together in the last couple of years it's been about 18 billion pound of food that otherwise would have gone to waste," Redding said.