Indian Restaurant Owner Leaves a Fridge on the Street to Feed Those in Need

Photo via Facebook

Two weeks ago, GOOD reported on a new Italian law that incentivizes supermarkets to donate their food waste to help the hungry. Recently, a restaurant owner in Kochi, India, created her own program to reduce food waste by making it available to the local hungry as well. This program is important being that in India, a country of 1.2 billion people, 194.6 million people go hungry every day.

Minu Pauline, the owner of a popular restaurant called Pappadavada, saw a woman foraging through a trash can for food one night, and she was deeply moved by the experience. She figured “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,” she told the Huffington Post. This moved Pauline to think about repurposing the food that goes uneaten at her restaurant.

Pauline decided to place a refrigerator in front of her restaurant where her customers could deposit their leftovers. People who are in need of food can stop by and take what’s in the fridge, no questions asked. Pauline has nicknamed her fridge the “tree of goodness.” There’s no lock on the fridge, and it’s available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The food goes pretty quickly, even though Pauline adds 75 to 80 portions of leftovers to it every day.

“Money is yours but resources belong to society,” she told the Huffington Post. “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.” Pauline’s program is a fantastic example of how nobody would go hungry if everyone committed to a few simple acts of kindness.