The Missing Link
By Lillien Waller
The United States produces more than enough food to feed all of its citizens. The longstanding myth of scarcity is quite simply that: a myth. But if this is the case, why does food insecurity persist?
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), as of 2023, more than thirteen percent of American households—and thirty percent of Massachusetts residents—were food insecure, which means they lacked consistent resources to obtain nutritious, affordable food and were often forced to make tradeoffs between buying food and paying for other necessities such as housing, transportation, and medication. Food-insecure households are everywhere, in every community, including those perceived to be affluent.
Rachel Albert ’93, Executive Director at Food Link, a food-rescue nonprofit in Arlington, Massachusetts, explains that food insecurity is the inevitable outcome of economic and social policy decisions. “We talk about food insecurity as its own issue,” she says. “And I think that makes it a little more palatable, and it also makes it an issue that can be more unifying across political lines. But the reality is, if you’re going to trace its causes, it’s all economic,” referring to the deregulation, wealth inequality, low wages, and frayed social safety net at its root. “The bottom line is that food insecurity is no mystery to anyone. And the government has left the nonprofit sector to pick up the pieces.”
An Operatic Intermission
Rachel joined Food Link in spring 2021 after many years working with mission-driven organizations, a decision that can be traced back to her Boston upbringing in a family that prioritized social justice. But her first passion—or, rather, parallel passion—was opera and performance, which she pursued while a student at Commonwealth.
“It really was, for me, a time of feeling like I had found my people,” she recalls of Commonwealth. “I felt as if I could be my nerdy self who wasn’t ashamed of being a good student and of wanting to learn. I found a lot of people who were intellectually curious, with a really wide range of passions and interests. My passion was to become an opera singer. And in my senior year, the wonderful David Hodgkins [Commonwealth’s Director of Music] noticed that we had just enough interest and talent in our small school to put on a fully staged production of Dido and Aeneas [an English-language opera by Henry Purcell], and I got to play Dido.”
Maintaining her interest in music, Rachel pursued a dual degree at the University of Rochester in psychology and vocal performance at the school’s Eastman School of Music. The realities of such a competitive field, however, soon began to hit home. “You’re young, you’re idealistic, you think, ‘This is amazing,’” Rachel recalls. “You’re told you have talent. You win competitions. But in the opera world there are 100 people vying for every role. I hadn’t wrapped my head around that, and I didn’t understand the business side of things.
“My interest in social justice work was always there, this interest in trying to make the world a better place in whatever way I could. So I started to think, what would it look like to pursue this professionally?” Rachel went on to earn advanced degrees in both business and social work from Columbia University, and her consulting work in strategic planning for such nonprofits as Veterans Legal Services, Rhode Island Community Food Bank, and 2Life Communities would eventually lead her to Food Link. “What drew me to Food Link’s mission is that it employs an elegant solution: we’re basically working toward solving one problem—food insecurity—by addressing another—food waste.”
Solving One Problem by Addressing Another
Founded by DeAnne Dupont and Julie Kremer in 2012 as the Food Recovery Project, Food Link rescues food from more than 100 supermarkets and other retailers, farms, and wholesalers and distributes their fresh, high-quality surplus to food pantries, low-income housing facilities, after-school programs, veterans programs, group homes, addiction services, and other hubs in under-resourced communities. The nonprofit sorts the food, composts what isn’t viable, and distributes the rest. “We pack boxes of only what each recipient agency wants,” Rachel says. “So, it’s a very individualized service. And we break down barriers to access by bringing the food directly to where people need it, so they don’t have to make an extra trip. It’s right there where they live or gather.”
Food Link accomplishes a lot with a little. Serving forty-six communities in Greater Boston, a staff of twelve and hundreds of volunteers distribute upwards of 1.4 million pounds of food annually to 100,000 people via 106 community-based nonprofits. To date, the organization has recovered more than five million pounds of food. But if more than forty million American households do not have enough to eat—and forty percent of the food produced in the United States remains “unsold or uneaten,” according to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC)—where does the waste come from? And more importantly, where does it go?
As with the parallel problem of food insecurity, the answers are complex. It starts in the home, where the majority of food waste happens, an accumulation of little losses—overbuying groceries, tossing leftovers— that seem harmless but add up significantly. There are non-human factors, too, such as crops that are rendered inedible by blight or mold. “There are many, many factors contributing to this,” Rachel says, citing consumers’ unrealistic cosmetic standards for groceries, long transportation times, and storage methods among them. Then there are less obvious factors, such as food expiration dating. There are more than forty different systems, used on everything from eggs and dairy to bread and canned goods. These dates often have nothing to do with the actual shelf life of the product, and the lack of consistency from one brand to another confuses consumers, who throw away food that may continue to be viable for days or even weeks.
All of this food ends up in landfills or incinerators as part of the thirty-three million tons Americans waste each year, according to the NRDC: “What we toss contains enough calories to feed [food-insecure Americans] more than four times over.” The price of all this waste? $414 billion per year.
Rachel points out that the problems with how we waste food should be understood alongside the problems wasted food causes. Food waste in landfills is one of the largest contributors to methane gas emissions and is a significant driver of the climate crisis. “If food waste were its own country, it would be the third-largest global contributor to greenhouse gases after the U.S. and China. But it hasn’t been talked about in the same way that we talk about fossil fuels and cars on the road. When you are looking for the biggest levers of change and what’s going to move the needle the fastest, addressing food waste should be right up there. Getting this waste out of our landfills has to be a climate priority.”
The commercialization of agriculture is another huge piece of the puzzle, Rachel says, noting that most of us no longer live close to the sources of our food, so our instincts about what’s safe to eat have begun to disappear.
A small number of big corporations produce and control a majority of what we eat, Rachel says, with companies like Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, and Conagra monopolizing everything from meat to cereal to toothpaste production. “Then factor in transporting it all over the country. When you start breaking down the food system today, what you have is a lot of food being produced at scale in a way that is much worse for the environment and for people.”
Food Link Post-Pandemic
When Rachel arrived at Food Link in 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic was roiling, and the nonprofit was reeling from a dramatically heightened demand for food. On one hand, Rachel explains, the organization was able to take advantage of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which funneled more than $550,000 into their budget. On the other hand, the staff was very quickly burning out. “Before I arrived, in late 2019, early 2020, Food Link was moving 600,000 pounds of food a year. Within a year, when the pandemic hit, that number doubled to 1.2 million, and now we’re at 1.4 million and rising.”
One of Rachel’s first goals was to stabilize things, “because we had grown so quickly and there was so much hustling going on. There were opportunities to recover food from parts of the supply chain that had never been available before,” she explains, due to the sweep of restaurant closures. “So there was lots of food available, and folks were scrambling to rescue it and connect it to the community.” Food Link and other nonprofits in the same space were able to take advantage of the surge in federal and state earmarks, as well as individual donations. And Rachel was able to shore up Food Link’s infrastructure during this period, including hiring more staff, so they could move more food.
But it wasn’t to last. The ARPA funding has dried up, food costs have skyrocketed, and the net investment by the government into food programs hasn’t increased—the money has just been shuffled around. Rachel also notes that the Healthy Incentives Program in Massachusetts, which was meant to double residents’ purchasing power of produce, was not refunded at the level necessary for families to make ends meet.
In the fight to decrease food waste and food insecurity, however, it’s not all bad news. As The Washington Post reported on a University of Texas study of nine food waste bans across the United States, aimed primarily at chain restaurants and grocery stores, “from 2014–2018, Massachusetts reduced its solid waste by an average of 7.3 percent.” And in 2023, Food Link participated in a coalition to advocate for a bill funding universal school meals in the state, which passed.
Rachel understands that it’s still an uphill fight, as food insecurity in the state and around the country continues to rise and food waste still piles up in America’s landfills. It is not, however, a fight that she, Food Link, and other food-based nonprofits are willing to give up on.
“Ideally, the numerous broken links in the food supply chain would be fixed,” says Rachel. “But until that day comes, I believe that Food Link’s approach of mobilizing a community of volunteers to recover unsold food is replicable to many other communities. That’s what I’m excited to think about next.”
Lillien Waller is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her essays focus primarily on the intersection of art and personal history. In 2023, she was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to profile interdisciplinary artists of color in her hometown, Detroit. This article originally appeared in the winter 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.