No food Waste | Mr Padmanaban Gopalan | TEDxCoimbatore

“One day a gaunt elderly lady, emaciated to the bones in a torn saree, approached me for alms, just as I left a wedding reception hall where food was carelessly discarded on used plates simply because the guests could not finish,” explains Padmanaban Gopalan, a young activist in India. “I couldn’t stand by and watch anymore. I had to do something about it.” In India, over 214 million citizens struggle with chronic food insecurity, despite an abundance of unused, uneaten food being thrown away at universities, weddings and banquets.

Padmanaban decided to create a solution. He founded No Food Waste in Coimbatore, India to redirect untouched excess wasted food to local hungry citizens, rather than seeing it go in the trash. Padmanaban’s team runs a volunteer-staffed hotline for wedding, banquet, and school organizers who wish to donate their excess food to the hungry in Coimbatore. To date, volunteers have donated approximately 5100 excess meals to hungry families and individuals. Padmanaban Gopalan is like Robin Hood. The 22-year-old social entrepreneur, a student of Government College of Technology, has sparked off a movement in the city, called No Food Waste (NFW). His team is a 10-member brigade of agile youngsters, who zip around the city in their omni van. They hunt for marriage halls, homes and institutions that have excess food, which they collect and quickly dispatch to the poor and the needy. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

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