How Rockland Fights Against Food Waste

By Ella Delia

In her first weeks as the Food Recovery Program Manager for Rockland Community Against Hunger (RCAH), Magda Durante pulled into her office parking lot bright and early to a surprise: a very tired truck driver with a load full of frozen pancakes he was instructed to dump. He had slept in their parking lot overnight to avoid doing just that. “We were giving out frozen pancakes for months”, she mused.

When it comes to food waste, this incident isn’t just a one-off occurrence. Outside of the rotted produce and moldy bread that end up in your personal trash bin, there are institutional gaps in food distribution that cause so much unseen waste. And in a county where 50% of residents don’t earn enough to comfortably cover their basic necessities every month, mitigating food waste is an obvious way to help Rockland County.

Enter: Rockland Community Against Hunger. They’re a coalition of non-profits dedicated to feeding Rocklanders fresh and healthy foods. In 2025, they reported 1,400,000 pounds of rescued and distributed food. That’s over a million meals made of high-quality food that may have once been destined for the landfill.

RCAH is unique in the fact that they are a true community-based experiment. They are not a charity that receives direct funding, but instead a collaboration of non-profits that banded together to tackle hunger in Rockland. In other words, their continued success is tied to each organization that allocates part of their annual budget towards RCAH.

In 2018, when they started patching together the resources to rescue unsold food, they were running on the most basic start-up necessities– think donated vehicles, a walk-in freezer, and part-time drivers. Their goal was to rescue 12,000 pounds of food that year. They rescued 40,000

Seven years later, they have a small (but mighty) full-time staff that has consistently rescued over 1 million pounds of food each year since 2021. The staff is employed across a variety of Rockland-based non-profits, like Together Our Unity Can Heal (TOUCH), Bridges, Meals on Wheels, and several more organizations.

When it comes to sourcing, there is no shortage of places to divert food from landfills. Sometimes it’s a truckload of frozen pancakes, but more often it’s still-good produce, meat and dry goods from wholesalers and large supermarkets in Rockland County. They even work with an organization that rescues produce straight from farmers’ post-harvest fields. Cornell Cooperative Extensions “Gleanmobile” collects produce right from the field that may not have been attractive enough to make it to market, but is still fresh and full of vital nutrients.

Their operations are a logistical beast: they pick up food from over 20 sources daily, and then distribute it between the 35 pantries and meal programs they work with. Food rescue is both time-sensitive and wildly inconsistent in terms of inventory- no two days hold quite the same harvest. It takes a strategic eye to make sure that the inventory finds a home where it will be consumed without risking spoilage.

The payoff of RCAH’s efforts are undeniable– and not just in the boost to Rockland’s public health. Julian Palmer, Executive Director of TOUCH (the lead non-profit behind RCAH), reported that for every $1 of county funding, $17 worth of food was rescued and distributed to the public. The Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York valued their rescued food in *2024??* at $3.6 million dollars, all for less than $250,000 of county funding.

“It’s hard to imagine a more efficient government program. People talk about government waste… this is government hyper-efficiency,” remarked Palmer with a chuckle.

With sweeping cuts across federal programs like SNAP and Medicaid, strengthening our local emergency food systems has never been more vital. Many soup kitchens and food pantries throughout Rockland are entirely run by volunteers. Their impact is inevitably felt, but there’s so many opportunities for deepening the impact when we invest back into the infrastructure of food rescue in our county.

RCAH as a collective is a testament to Rockland’s commitment to hunger relief and food justice. Palmer says it all comes back to the name of his organization: together, our unity really can heal.