Potato Provider Heroes: Ray Buchanan and Ken Horne and their "Pass the Potatoes" Projects

Two Methodist ministers, Virginians Ken Horne and Ray Buchanan wanted to do something about hunger. They started by putting on seminars about food waste by industry and families. At one such session a farmer stood up and said ‘I see what you’re talking about. I’ve got 100,000 pounds of potatoes I can’t sell. I can give you now. Can you do something with them?’ and they didn’t know what to do. They had never even thought of moving food but they said sure.
A day later they figured out a plan. called the farmer and said, ‘We’re ready for your potatoes,’ and the farmer said, ‘Great, I have six friends and each one of them has 100,000 pounds of potatoes. Can you do something with those?’ and that’s how this idea of saving fresh food from going to waste and using it to feed the hungry got started again thousands of years after it showed up in the bible.
That was the beginning of The Society of St Andrew’s Potato and Produce Program. The group now has various training programs and a Seed Potato Project that distributes certified seed potatoes to food insecure communities especially in Applachian states for people to learn to grow their own food.
The Society’s volunteers and affiliates collect and distribute potatoes from thousands of farmers across the country.
The Society’s potato project focuses on two main areas where large volumes of food is going to waste in America. Produce mainly potatoes left after harvest.The second place where a lot of food goes to waste is in what we call packing facilities or distribution centers.
At those locations, another grade-out process occurs where produce, whether it’s potatoes or other produce that are not good enough for grocery stores gets rejected. Semi tractor-trailers take the rejected loads to landfills and dumped as waste.
The Society's volunteers take control of these unwanted truckloads and distribute them to affiliated groups across the country where they are distributed to food banks and other networks.
The groups website EndHunger.org displays and updates USDA’s estimates that 96 billion pounds of food is going to waste in America every single year. Some 45 million Americans are food insecure. So we are throwing away about one and a half tons of food for every hungry man, woman, and child in this country. For instance, statistics for July 2013 claims that 18 million pounds were “gleaned” meaning 43 million servings.
“Gleaning” comes from the Jewish tradition, where God commanded the people to let the poor and the sojourner come to their fields and glean or pick the edges. The farmer was not supposed to harvest the full field but leave kind of the edges and the corner for people to come and pick the good food left behind. The modern sense of gleaning, is picking perfectly good food, nothing wrong with it but it’s just not good enough for market use for one reason or another.