When doors close, another opens The Leftovers Foundation BY DANIEL BONTJE
Keg donation to the Dream Centre
2020
has seen many restaurants and businesses making the tough decision to close their doors, even temporarily. Whenever this happens, we think of all the people affected—front of house, chefs, suppliers, customers—but how often do we consider the food that is in their fridges? For Lourdes Juan, founder of The Leftovers Foundation, that’s exactly where her mind goes, and she has been redirecting food to those who need it for almost a decade. Always passionate about her work, Juan is more than happy to chat about how busy The Leftovers Foundation is currently. The work took on a new urgency in March as COVID-19 suddenly saw a spike in donations like never before. “It’s been crazy,” she says. “March felt like (it was) 100 days long, and somehow also not nearly long enough. With Leftovers, it wasn’t a pivot so much as a complete explosion and expansion of what we normally do.”
18 Culinaire | May/June 2020
Juan has been working with food waste and food access for years now. “The spark kind of happened back in 2012, when my cousin asked me to pick up some excess bread. I thought it would be a couple loaves, but when he said he might need an extra car…” Juan laughs, remembering: “there was roughly 200 pounds of bread,
the Drop in Centre said that they would have it all used up by noon the next day. That really shocked me again—when you look at it, its so much food but when you start thinking about how many people there are living and working there, how many bagged lunches… it adds up so quickly.”
“In March, we redirected about 45,000 pounds of food,” Juan says. “Restaurants were closing left and right but even at their most vulnerable, they were giving. As we were cleaning out these refrigerators, which was so sad, people were still smiling. People still loved knowing that they could help someone else.” and I was completely shocked! I kept thinking that if we hadn’t gone and picked it up it would have all ended up at the landfill, it would have all gone to waste.” “We took this bread from the bakery to the Drop-In Centre, and the gentleman at
Juan has always been an entrepreneur, so that first delivery quickly grew into more. “We really started building what we have today—a 600-person army of volunteers in Calgary and another 100 in Edmonton working seven days a week.”
