Welcome to the May Newsletter, we hope the April showers have brought May flowers wherever you may be! A big thank you to our volunteer stellar chefs and our dashing delivery people for helping us make the most out of our donations.
In the month of April, we received $11,261 worth of produce, dry goods, and more which we supplemented and processed into $23,743 worth of donations, bringing us to a grand total of 3,820 meals delivered to our food insecure neighbors in need. As spring blooms ahead of us, we are so grateful to our donors and volunteers who bring us renewed energy month after month.
With government programs being reduced, many individuals and families will be left wondering where their next meal will come from. Your support helps fill that gap, bringing kindness and nutrition to those who need it most. Together, we can do our best to Sustain Sussex and make sure no one in our community goes hungry.
Meet the ORCA,
Food Bank of Delaware’s New ‘Digester’
From WBOC.com…
On Monday, the Food Bank of Delaware introduced a new food digester, a solution it says could help tackle the state’s food waste problems.
The ORCA, short for Organic Recycling Conversion Alternative, is a $35,000 machine that acts like a mechanical stomach, turning spoiled, expired, or damaged food into an environmentally safe solution.
It liquefies food waste and safely discharges the liquid into the sewer system, offering a sustainable alternative to traditional disposal.
Since installing the ORCA, the Food Bank of Delaware says it has diverted nearly 6,000 pounds of food from landfills.
“Making sure that food waste is also handled appropriately has become, you know, as important as making sure you drop that bottle or that can in a recyclable bin.”
Says Douglas Horner, a managing partner at EarthBio Technologies. Horner adds that small, local efforts can build up to a major environmental impact.
“This thousand pounds and that thousand pounds over here will really start to make a dent in diverting from landfill and make a change for greenhouse gases.”
Read the full story on WBOC.com
The clock starts ticking the second an orange is plucked from the tree.
“It’s like a ticking time bomb,” Jenny Du of Apeel Sciences said on April 10, kicking off her TED Talk at the TED 2025 main stage in Vancouver, Canada earlier this month.
“It’s literally this living and breathing thing that’s slowly cannibalizing its own stores of energy and nutrients, just trying to stay alive until it ultimately gets eaten by microbes or some other animal like us.”
Waste exists at every step of food production, from the second the orange is picked to the transportation it requires to make it to the store shelves, to the refrigeration it takes to keep it on those shelves. The sad fact is that half of oranges that are harvested, don’t get eaten at all.
But what if we could take the specific arrangement of nutrients that makes the skin of a strawberry last so much longer than other fruits and apply it to the orange? Apeel Sciences aims to do just that, with the help of their A-peel Protected Produce.
Since Apeel Sciences was formed in 2021, the start-up has hit some astonishing milestones.
“We’ve prevented 166 million pieces of produce from going to waste,” Du stated. “In doing that, that’s avoided the emissions of more than 29,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, which is equivalent to planting 485,000 trees, and saved almost seven billion liters of water, or enough to fill 2,800 Olympic-size swimming pools.”
“We’re optimistic that our one small innovation using common ingredients inspired by the ancient wisdom of plants is playing its part in having an impact, reinventing the food system, and helping it create abundance for it.”
Read the full article on Good Good Good News
To learn more about Apeel Science’s Research visit their website here
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