Canmore Food Recovery Barn

Canada has a $31 billion food waste problem.  That’s the amount of food that ends up in landfills or composting bins in our country every year, contributing to the 1.3 billion tonnes of annual discarded food around the globe.  Food waste is also a major contributor to climate change.  And a lot of this waste is created at the grocery store level.

Do you find those numbers shocking?  Danielle Leigh did and decided to do something about it locally.  Seeing the success of Alanna Pettigrew’s Banff Food Rescue (profiled in October by Marcus on Mountain FM), she began seeking out supermarkets willing to give some of the still-edible food they were unable to keep on the shelves for various reasons and found a partner in Canmore’s Safeway.  She also needed a venue to host this type of program and ended up connecting with Laurelle Burke and others at Alpine Edible Schoolyards and Organic Box who were also working towards a similar goal.  Thus, the Canmore Food Recovery Barn was born!

Danielle and Laurelle joined me on the program this morning to talk about this great new initiative that allows people to fill an entire bag with yummy produce and baked goods, like those pictured above from yesterday’s selection, for a suggested $5 donation.  They say that while the cost savings to families in our expensive town is definitely a factor, the main goal is to do our part in reducing food that needlessly ends up in the trash.

The Canmore Food Recovery Barn is open to the public from 4 – 6 PM Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays in the ‘barn’ beside the Paintbox Lodge.  Follow them on Facebook to keep tabs on this fantastic new idea!