Helping to feed the homeless at the Olympics
After seventeen days, the Olympics ended on Sunday. You know most of the stories, good and bad. Bolt, Phelps, Ledecky, Biles, Lochte, etc. There are other behind the scene stories that you never hear about and here's one of them.
At this years Rio games there were 18,000 people that needed to be fed. Each meal required over 250 tons of food. Multiply that by three meals a day and that's a lot of ingredients...and usually a lot of leftover food.
Like all major cities Rio de Janeiro has a problem with homelessness. On any given night an estimated 5,500 people are living on the street of Rio. In addition to shelter, they need to eat.
The Olympic Village kitchen had a lot of leftover food and the homeless people of Rio needed food. For more than two weeks, it was a great fit.
According to this CNN story, one of the Olympic chefs, Massimo Bottura teamed up with a Brazilian entrepreneur to build a restaurant that would serve meals to homeless people using the leftover food from that days feedings.
It served two purposes. They were able to feed over 100 people each day and it cut down on food waste.
The project will continue now that the games are over. The restaurant will be open to paying customers and that will help fund continuing to provide meals for the needy.
"I have to give back to people."-Massimo Bottura
The Olympics have ended but this project lives on and is more important than any gold medal.
Tomorrow I'll feature another organization that feeds the homeless. Here's a story about a wedding that went bad and what they did with the leftover food.