Princeton Public Schools has partnered with Share My Meals, a local nonprofit, to help families who need food while reducing waste.
This program collects extra meals from school cafeterias and delivers them to families in Princeton to prevent surplus prepared meals from being thrown away.
As part of the launch, the first pickup happened on January 10, which now happens every week.
Instead of letting surplus prepared meals go to waste, the schools are making sure they reach people who really need them.
Thus, the district is working with Pomptonian Food Service, which prepares school meals.
Share My Meals has done this with other schools, like the Morris School District, and it’s been very successful.
Now that Princeton has joined in, even more families can get good meals while also helping to reduce food waste.
In Mercer County, about 10% of people struggle with food insecurity, meaning they don’t always have enough to eat.
At the same time, places like schools that prepare food in large amounts often have leftovers that aren’t eaten.
Most of the time, this extra food is still perfectly fine, but it usually gets thrown away.
Because of this program, that won’t happen anymore since the food is now being given to families who need it.
Evidently, food waste is a huge problem in the U.S.
Right now, about 42 million people in the U.S. struggle with food insecurity.
In New Jersey alone, about 1.2 million people don’t always have enough food, a number that has increased since the pandemic.
Every year, about 108 billion pounds of food are wasted, which is nearly 30-40% of all the food in the country.
Even worse, prepared meals, like the ones made in school cafeterias, make up about 20% of that waste.
Not only that, throwing away food also harms the environment.
It takes up space in landfills, creates pollution, and wastes important resources like water and farmland.
Consequently, Princeton Public Schools and Share My Meals are working to fix both problems by sharing extra food instead of tossing it.
To understand why this effort matters, it helps to look at how Share My Meals started.
In 2020, a group of Princeton residents wanted to address food insecurity in their community.
While helping at local food pantries, co-founder Isabelle Lambotte saw how hard it was for families to find healthy, ready-to-eat meals.
After seeing a similar program in California, she and her co-founders created a way for volunteers to collect extra meals and bring them to families.
But just a few months later, everything changed when the COVID-19 pandemic started.
Because corporate cafeterias were one of the main places where extra food was recovered, things slowed down when people started working from home.
More families were struggling to put food on the table, and local restaurants were having a hard time staying open.
So, share My Meals adjusted using a state program to buy meals from restaurants at a lower cost and deliver them to families and seniors.
During that time, they worked non-stop to deliver over 140,000 meals to people who needed them.
Now that things are returning to normal, Share My Meals is returning to its original goal of recovering extra meals.
By teaming up with Princeton Public Schools, they’ve created a system for collecting and delivering meals quickly and safely.
They also hope to expand this program to other schools so even more families can benefit.
And since volunteers mostly run it, Share My Meals has only ten employees.
Most of the food deliveries are handled by volunteers, which helps keep costs low while reaching more families.
At the heart of its work, the organization believes in ensuring that no food goes to waste and that everyone has access to healthy meals.
