Giving Compass' Take:

• The New Food Economy explores the relationship between food and faith communities pointing out that 70 percent of food pantries in the U.S. are based in or sponsored by a house of worship. 

• The majority of charitable dollars in the U.S. goes to religion, according to the Giving USA 2018 report. How can donors ensure their faith-based organizations are tackling food waste?

• Here's another example of food waste and ways to reduce it. 

On a Sunday morning in September, Kate Urbank stepped onto the podium at the Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington, D.C., to talk about food. Urbank is not a pastor or a member of the congregation. Instead, she is the D.C. site director for Food Rescue US, a food recovery nonprofit that helps organize volunteer deliveries of leftover food to shelters and food banks.

“I’m not particularly a churchgoer myself, but I was embraced,” Urbank says. “I told them about the statistics of hunger in D.C. and the fact that our neighbors can be hungry.”

It’s not the kind of message heard often in religious services, but Urbank’s audience didn’t seem to mind the shift from salvation and forgiveness to matters of wasted food. About 30 congregants were present, Urbank says, and they described feeling a range of emotions—anywhere from “moved” to “agitated”—at the story she told: namely, why families in the nation’s capital routinely go hungry.

Read the full article on religion and food waste by Jimin Kang at The New Food Economy