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Boulder Food Rescue sounds like the name of an organization dedicated to providing food to people who need it. And that’s what it is.

But the nonprofit started by three friends dedicated to the ideas of environmental justice and sustainability is also literally about “rescuing” food. Since the group was founded in August 2011, it has recovered more than 200,000 pounds of edible food from local grocery stores and restaurants that otherwise would have gone into a landfill or compost heap because of minor blemishes or overstocking.

It’s all done on bicycles, to boot.

To co-founder Hana Dansky, who graduated from CU-Boulder with a degree in philosophy and environmental biology in May 2011, the thriving organization is all about the biggest of big pictures: conserving the energy put into food production.

“It’s thinking about all the energy that goes into a food item. If you rescue a banana from Ecuador … you are taking all that energy that would have been wasted,” says Dansky, who started the rescue with friends Caleb Phillips and Becky Higbee. “If you use a car to rescue that banana, you are putting more energy into the system and consuming even more. … It’s teaching people about how much energy goes into each food item.”

Thus the bicycles.

“There’s kind of a cool community in Boulder around biking, food justice and social justice,” says Dansky, who recently was named executive director of the organization. “If you can bike with 150 pounds of food across the city, you can bike anywhere.”

Volunteers from Boulder Food Rescue daily visit some 19 local stores, caterers and restaurants, load up their bike trailers, and pedal those vital calories across town—or sometimes just down the block—to more than 40 organizations, including the Emergency Family Assistance Association, The Bridge House Community Table and Attention Homes, where it is used within 24 to 48 hours. That eliminates the need for storage space, another way to reduce resource use, Dansky says.

An estimated 40 percent of food goes uneaten in the United States, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. That’s enough to fill the Rose Bowl stadium “to the brim” every single day, according to Jonathan Bloom in “American Wasteland.”

“It’s as big a problem in Boulder as anywhere,” she says. “It’s a matter, I think, of our perception of perfection in food. Anybody who buys an apple is not going to buy the bruised one.”

All food is collected in bins placed strategically between sales areas and garbage or composting receptacles.

For all the good Boulder Food Rescue is doing on a local level, its unique bicycle-based transportation approach has made it a model for other cities. The organization started a chapter in Denver, another has sprung up in Oakland, Calif., and groups in other cities, including Boston, San Francisco, Eugene, Ore., and Fort Collins are in the planning stages.

“We’re giving our model away and helping those places to develop the logistics of how to start their own” program, Dansky says. “If all goes well, they’ll be popping up around the country.”

The Boulder group also has added other programs such as Pastries on the Path, in which volunteers hand out baked goods to cyclists at 17th Street and the Boulder Creek Path every Friday morning in an effort to encourage cycling. The organization also teaches people how to can their own vegetables, start a garden or even repair their bicycles.

Dansky says she “became a vegetarian, learned more, became a vegan, then learned more, then became a freegan”—a person who seldom buys and often eats rescued food; she also lives in a co-op—but emphasizes that there are simple ways for anyone to reduce their impact on the system.

“You can keep your refrigerator organized so you know what’s in there and it doesn’t go bad. You can eat leftovers and take home food from restaurants. And you can cook just enough to feed yourself” or your family, she says.

Dansky credits Daniel Sturgis, a senior instructor in philosophy at CU-Boulder and an academic adviser in philosophy and history, with helping to set her on this path. In Sturgis’ 2009 environmental ethics class, Dansky did a semester project about becoming a freegan.”

As she told Sturgis recently: “It changed my life completely. In fact, it was the beginning of a passion and career for me.”

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