From Food Waste to Culturally Valued Communities

Que No Se Pierda La Cosecha is a rural grassroots initiative of El Departamento de la Comida, a food hub that transforms food loss into food culture through educational materials, recipes, community gatherings, and value-added products. “El Depa” is a nonprofit food sovereignty organization in San Salvador, which is a barrio in the municipality of Caguas, Puerto Rico.

Our mission is food sovereignty, and right now our organization has a food hub where we have a commercial kitchen. We serve lunches weekly to the community. We also have what we call an “agroteca”, or agricultural library, where we rent out tools. We have seeds, plants, a nursery, a walk-in cooler, and a lot of components that you could define as a food hub.

Our SARE project expands on what we're already doing, because we have agreements with some markets and farmers where we receive food, especially food that would otherwise be wasted, and we process it in our kitchen into value-added products.

I think we can divide this project into three segments. The first segment is to look over our own standards of practice, and understand how we can diminish food waste within our own food hub. Our second component would be to partner up with different small food projects and farmers, so that we can evaluate their standards of practice, and see how we can diminish food waste. This would include creating educational materials, and coordinating events where we talk about and educate about these subjects. And then the third component that we have is a map of assets and vulnerabilities. We wish to have updated maps on our website where we can pinpoint areas in our community that are the most vulnerable and others where there is the most food waste, and then also the assets. Part of this would be to show not only our food projects, but also our community, where they can go or where they can also leave food so that it won't become waste.