We Can Solve Hunger

Well let's start by talking about when you got to UC Berkeley. You came there planning to have a career as a doctor in the US Navy but then somehow along the way you became a leader on hunger issues how did all of that happen?

Yeah, so I was actually in my senior year at Berkeley and I was walking down Telegraph Avenue when I encountered a homeless man who was begging for food. You know most people beg for money and he was begging for food and that really compelled me to stop and invite him to join me for lunch and during lunch he sat across from me just like you are wolfing down his food. So he was unbelievably hungry it wasn't like a ploy for anything else and in between bites he shared a story he said my name is John I just came back from my second tour in Iraq. I've been waiting weeks for my military benefits to kick in and because they haven't you know I haven't eaten in three days and this really hit home for me.

I mean this is a veteran someone who had given the most selfless sacrifice for our country only to come home to face yet another battle that of hunger and then adding insult to injury right across the street Berkeley's dining hall is throwing away thousands of pounds of perfectly edible food and so it's this very stark reality of those who have and waste and those who are in need and starve and those two people right across the street from one another and what I realized that this is emblematic of a much larger problem and that's that we waste over 365 million pounds of perfectly edible food every single day. Meaning that hunger is not a scarcity problem it's a logistics problem and that's essentially the logistics problem we went off to solve.