FoodCommune rescues food from landfills to help feed the community
This story is part of an ongoing series about Atlantans helping Atlantans. Learn more about this city’s mutual aid network in an upcoming photo essay by Jesse Pratt López.
Pam Noud was driving through her neighborhood when a small fruit stand on the corner caught her attention. She pulled over and noticed several boxes placed off to the side. Curious, she peeked inside and found hundreds of pounds of perfectly edible (albeit imperfect) produce. Because customers tend to want aesthetically pleasing food, the stand’s owner explained, these boxes were headed for the landfill. Pam offered to take them off his hands instead.
She made fruit salad—more than 200 pounds of it—to share with friends and neighbors. “I had more fruit salads than I knew what to do with,” she says. “All my friends and neighbors were saying, ‘Please don’t bring us any more.’” Still, every week, she’d return to rescue the stand’s leftovers. Eventually, she connected with a soup kitchen downtown and started sending fruit salad through a volunteer.
“I had more fruit salads than I knew what to do with. All my friends and neighbors were saying, ‘Please don’t bring us any more.’” —Pam Noud, FoodCommune
Noud eventually decided to visit the kitchen herself. Toward the end of the day, she noticed a five-gallon bucket of excess soup set aside to be thrown away. “I had to call my friend to come pick me up so we could rescue the soup,” says Noud, who then set up under a tree in Grant Park and shared it with passersby.
Since that day, Noud has dedicated her life to reducing waste in Atlanta by rescuing food before it ends up in a landfill. In 2014, she founded FoodCommune, a co-op that redistributes around 6,000 pounds of food per week.
Nearly 40 percent of all food in the U.S. is wasted; that amounts to more than 106 million tons of food waste a year. According to the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, “food residuals” in this state account for 12 percent of the waste sent to landfills annually—more than 800,000 tons. This translates to nearly $2 billion of waste. Almost half of that is from metro Atlanta. At the same time, more than 1.4 million people in Georgia face hunger, including one in five children.
Hunger in the U.S. isn't caused by scarcity, Noud says, so she’s working to raise awareness about overproduction and waste. “Every time I see food destined for the landfill, my convictions are reinforced,” Noud says. “There’s much work to be done.”
“Every time I see food destined for the landfill, my convictions are reinforced. There’s much work to be done.” —Pam Noud, FoodCommune
Food waste happens for many reasons: Stores and restaurants struggle to predict demand and overstock or overprepare. Spills, broken equipment, and damaged or improper packaging make food unfit to eat. Grocery stores often remove misshaped or blemished produce to match what they think customers want.
FoodCommune gathers food from all sorts of places: farmer’s markets, grocery stores, restaurants, churches, catered corporate events, cafeterias, individuals, other nonprofits. Over the years, Noud has built a network of people and organizations who call her when they have food to donate; she comes around to pick it up in a van with a trailer. A lot of the problem, she says, begins at the corporate level: “The retailers [supermarkets] are participating in a very wasteful system. And their food is too expensive for people.”
In the 1980s, around the same time she was studying economics at Duke University, Noud stumbled across Frances Moore Lappé’s 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet. The book was about environmental vegetarianism but also argued that hunger is caused more by ineffective policy than a lack of food. It introduced Noud to the idea that humans can and should feed themselves with more efficiency.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1985, Noud dabbled in the corporate world, working in IT and end-user software training. She’d been practicing massage therapy for two decades when she founded FoodCommune, which she operated out of public parks for years before partnering with Edgewood Church on Memorial Drive. Finally, in January of this year, she was able to purchase some land at 368 Candler Road.
Now, Noud sets up every Saturday, from noon to 7 p.m., relying on more than a dozen volunteers to rescue food, organize, clean up, and help with marketing. Tamara Harris, a learning consultant at IBM, has volunteered with FoodCommune for a year, dedicating about eight hours to the event every weekend. “I initially came to FoodCommune as a customer after learning about it online,” she says. “Once I understood their mission and witnessed the effort involved in preparing this space, I felt compelled to contribute.”
“The retailers are participating in a very wasteful system. And their food is too expensive for people.” —Pam Noud, FoodCommune
While FoodCommune aims to help financially struggling families by reducing their grocery costs and improving their access to fresh produce, the market is open to anyone, at any income level, who wants to save money: The food is generally 50 to 90 percent cheaper than it might be at a traditional grocery store. Customers pay $10 a crate for meats, dairy, and fresh fruits and vegetables. Some food is free. At the end of the day, local farmers collect leftover produce for livestock or to compost. Everything else is shared with partner organizations.
Now in its tenth year, FoodCommune is facing some challenges: It needs more volunteers, more funds, and a building. “Every week, we’re just hoping it doesn’t rain because it’s frustrating,” Noud says. She dreams of a building open five days a week. For now, when there’s inclement weather, Noud postpones distribution until conditions improve or she delivers the food to other local organizations.
Although Noud estimates that FoodCommune rescues enough food to serve 300 people each week, only about 80 shoppers routinely show up. Noud says they use social media to find volunteers and customers, but reaching folks isn’t easy. “You’d think this whole place would be packed with shoppers, but that’s not the case,” she says. “So, we’ve got to get the word out.”
Phil Horowitz, a retired nutritional supplement specialist, volunteers with FoodCommune. “You can get kids things like Gatorade. You’re not gonna find that at the food bank,” he says. “Anyone who’s hungry, if they come after six, can take what they need. If you only have a dollar, take a dollar’s worth of food.” •
FoodCommune collaborates with Feeding GA Families, a nonprofit dedicated to combating food waste that also helps folks secure housing and job training, and Food2Life Rescue Food Foundation, which distributes food every Friday at Bethel Original Freewill Baptist Church in East Lake.