How many times have you actually finished that huge plate of food most restaurants give you? If you’re anything like me, you are constantly having to bring half your dinner home with you. And if we’re being completely honest, we usually forget about the leftovers in the fridge, and throw them out a week later when we notice a rotten smell permeating our house.
Well, a popular restaurant in India is trying to change our wasteful habits. Minu Pauline owns the Pappadavada restaurant, and she’s urging her customers to put their leftover food in a fridge located outside the restaurant for those in need to take.
Pauline has named the fridge nanma maram or “tree of goodness,” and she encourages anyone in need to grab a meal from it.
You don’t have to fill out some application or prove how “hungry” you are. It’s always open and it’s always filled with food, thanks to Pauline and the wonderful community that supports the restaurant.
Pauline got the idea one night when she noticed a lady searching for food in the garbage. She had a horrible thought, “That the woman had been sleeping and was woken up by her hunger, so she had to go in search of food instead of sleeping.” And then she thought about how much extra food her restaurant was throwing away and knew she had to do something to correct the problem.
Now she is focused on avoiding waste. She told The Huffington Post the following…
“Money is yours but resources belong to society. That’s the message I want to send out. If you’re wasting your money, it’s your money, but you’re wasting the society’s resources. Don’t waste the resource, don’t waste the food.”
The fridge is open 24-hours a day, seven days a week. And it’s never locked. You don’t need a key to open it. Pauline adds at least 80 portions of food to the fridge every single day, and that’s not even counting the food left by her customers and the community.
And all that food never goes to waste. In fact, the fridge has to be restocked regularly because there are so many hungry people out there. Oh, and Pauline says the media attention from all over the world is nice, but it’s nothing compared to the smiles she sees on peoples’ faces when they grab a quality meal from the fridge.
Images via: huffingtonpost
