Food Too "Ugly" to Sell Becomes a Feast for 5,000 People | National Geographic

Feeding the 5,000 is a celebration of the solutions to food waste, where we feed 5,000 people a delicious meal made entirely out of food that would otherwise have gone to waste. America is a country which has a massive problem of food waste. Forty percent of the food isn't consumed. A huge amount of perfectly good food is being wasted all the way up and down the supply chain.

You start on the farms, you go to manufacturers, wholesalers, restaurants, and of course in our homes. Food has been rejected because it's too ugly, the wrong shape or size. So these cauliflowers, for example, perfectly delicious and edible, they've just got a few blemishes and the wholesalers weren't able to sell them. And we go in, we intervene, we say don't chuck that away, give it to us.

We're going to cook it up for 5,000 people. We had 800 lbs of just the sweet potatoes today, and that's just the beginning. We have hundreds and hundreds of pounds of food that would otherwise have gone to waste that we're putting to good use. We've got teams of four to six chopping vegetables around big round tables while they listen to the music and enjoy the day.

So right now, we are putting the finishing touches on the 5,000 meals of vegetable curry that we've started preparing yesterday and we'll be serving to the community today. It's up to us, the citizens of this country, of this world, to say we're fed up with food waste and it's time to take food waste off the table.

Some people call them Franken fish. Some people think that they look like a snake, that they're ugly.