Rescue Food, Provide Meals

Team: Almaha Almalki / Christian Feld / Erick Friis / Sam Resnick

The Food for Free dataset leads us to three interesting conclusions:

  1. The sheer amount of food that is produced, stored, and then subsequently dumped in the Boston area alone is massive.
  2. The Food for Free organisation is creating a large impact by simply rerouting that food to become meals for the hungry
  3. Still, so many more people in the Boston area suffer from food insecurity.

We wanted to package those three findings in a compelling story that includes a call to action to help Food for Free. The format we chose is a short video with one clear message: Support Food for Free in their mission to provide more people in need with food. Our target audience is people who shop in supermarkets who could be compelled to tell their supermarket to participate in Food for Free. These people would likely have an interest in social issues and would be looking for ways to make a difference. Our thought was to publish this video in a social media setting. Because of this, we decided to make sure that the basic message could come across in a short time period. The graphic nature of the video would draw in the viewer, then the minimal narration would send the message home. We decided to narrate the video in our sketch presentation, but in our social media version, we would include subtitles with the narration so viewers would not need volume.

To make it a personal story we use establish a central symbol: the plate. One plate,one meal, helping one person. We calculated that every 15 seconds Food for Free rescues an amount of food equivalent to one meal. We illustrate this time span by turning the plate into a ticker.

In second step we show that in those 15 seconds Food For Free can provide a meal for one person, however there are far more people being left hungry. Every second, 8 people are left hungry in the Boston area. As the ticker progresses around a second time, these people appear surrounding it. When the plate is completed, one of the people turns green, symbolizing one person that food for free has fed. It is clear from this that Food for Free is making a difference, but that there is much need for help. That is where the call to action comes in. By providing the audience with the link to the website at the end of the video, they are prompted to click on it and would be greeted with different ways in which they could help.

You can view our (silent) sketch below.