LETTER 7: An Eye Opening Experience

We are starting a Food & Clothing Drive Initiative during the month of December, called Spread A Little Love. I’ll keep y’all in the loop as we begin to roll out this initiative! Alsooooo, I have some new music releasing real real soon…I’m excited for y’all to hear this one!

No new releases these past 2 weeks!

THE CAVA STORY

I am sharing this story to help bring awareness to the worldwide food waste problem. Through this experience, my eyes were opened to how I can begin wasting less in my day-to-day life. I hope, by reading this & vicariously having the eye-opening experience I did, you will also analyze your daily choices that might contribute to this problem & make changes where needed. Together, through change in our individual lives, we can overcome any problem we are faced with. All the best.

I walked into a CAVA looking for a warm meal on a cold night a couple weeks ago. Being right before closing time, the store was desolate, aside from one couple finishing their late-night date and a few staff members dreading the impeding closing shift. I walked up to the bar, wearing a smile, excited to get my hands pressed around a promptly-prepared pita. After a few friendly remarks asking how the employee’s night was going, knowing the answer before it was said, I began ordering my regular irregular meal. A Greek Chicken Pita with several substitutions stemming from a combination of what my late-night appetite craved & the employee’s creativity counseled.

As we walked down the line together engaging in a conversation over food, literally, my attention got averted to the assortment of surplus sustenance. It was 9:45pm and there was still a smorgasbord of Greek specialties stocked at the food bar. There were containers full of chicken, stashes of steak, troughs of tzatziki, many a meatball, and a variety of vegetables that remained untouched. Candidly, I asked the employee what they do with the extra food every night, thinking surely they store it and reheat it for the opening shift. Her response was jarring…startling…nearly inconceivable. Every night, every single night, she said, they take all the still-steaming surplus directly to the one place where the sun doesn’t shine and the grass doesn’t grow…the dumpster out back.

Completely shocked and taken aback, my eyes started sweeping across the food line back and forth in rapid fire fashion in an attempt to process this never-before-heard news. There was no way this could be true, right? At a loss for words, I asked the question three more times, holding onto hope with each utterance that either my ears had failed me or her mouth her, but neither was true. Each repeated response rang through my body. You’re telling me every single night, pounds of fresh food, just at this one location alone, gets put into a plastic bag, that plastic bag slung into a dumpster, and that dumpster emptied by a truck that is headed straight for the local landfill? Of course, as most laymen do, I knew food waste was a problem, but with not having any direct day-to-day experiences with it, this fact seemingly slips into fiction then slowly out of mind. Being exposed to it first hand, in a moment of vulnerability from an innocent & inquisitive line of questioning like this, shakes one up. The veil being lifted right in front of my eyes revealed a grim world that I am sure is hard to stay sensitized to, especially as more exposure to the systematic scale of this problem gets added to one’s perspective.

After further discussions with the employees on shift, long after my pita met room temperature, I learned that they throw out all the meats every night, regardless of quantity, and sometimes keep the vegetables for the next morning’s shift. The employees informed me that they personally do not like to have a hand in such intentional waste. That such mandatory actions often bring rise to internal conflicts regarding their own contributions to the worldwide waste problem, but, at the end of the day, company policy is company policy. I left that CAVA that night on a mission, promising the employees I would be back with a plan in hand. That there was no way I could turn away from such a paramount problem pertaining to our local community. That night I began my research into this problem and possible solutions, reached out to a close friend of mine who I do charity work with to fill him in on the story, and together, we committed to enacting change.

We are now on a mission to work with the Greater Baton Rouge Food bank to host our own food drive, promote the ongoing food drives around the city, state, and country, and help those who need it. We are on a mission to Spread A Little Love.