Food equity is the expansive concept that all people have the ability and opportunity to grow and consume healthful, affordable, and culturally significant foods.

—Randomacts.org

Systems thinking is a holistic way to investigate factors and interactions that could contribute to a possible outcome.

-Southern New Hampshire University

Food waste occurs along the entire spectrum of production, from the farm to distribution to retailers to the consumer. Reasons include losses from mold, pests, or inadequate climate control; losses from cooking; and intentional food waste.

-Harvard University The Nutrition Source

“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”

-Declaration of Nyéléni, the first global forum on food sovereignty, Mali, 2007

A community food system is a food system in which food production, processing, distribution and consumption are integrated to enhance the environmental, economic, social and nutritional health of a particular place.

-University of Wisconsin

the integration of environmental health, social equity and economic vitality in order to create thriving, healthy, diverse and resilient communities for this generation and generations to come. The practice of sustainability recognizes how these issues are interconnected and requires a systems approach and an acknowledgement of complexity.

-University of California, Los Angeles

The practice of collecting and donating excess foods – helps simultaneously address these pressing issues. Importantly, it also gives low-income individuals access to fresh and locally grown foods that are not always available in their communities.

-USDA

n. the act or practice of donating (i.e., without pay) one’s time and energy to activities that contribute to the common good.

-Dictionary.org

Food justice is a holistic and structural view of the food system that sees healthy food as a human right and addresses structural barriers to that right. The movement draws in part on environmental justice, which emerged in the 1980s as a critique of how environmentalism became more mainstream as it became more elite, more white, and more focused on wilderness and scenery than on human communities vulnerable to pollution (the effects of which are at once disparate and racialized). 5 Environmental justice is a movement primarily led by the people most impacted by environmental problems, connecting environmental health and preservation with the health of vulnerable communities. Food justice efforts (which are generally led by indigenous peoples and people of color) work not only for access to healthy food, but for an end to the structural inequities that lead to unequal health outcomes.

— Foodjustice.org

Black, Indigenous, People of Color