What We're Working On» December 2023

Cook County Farm Bureau Board approved a resolution addressing the tremendous amount of food that is landfilled. In Illinois, twenty percent of the nineteen million tons of general landfilled waste is comprised of food.


Forty percent of all food in the United State gets wasted. One in seven Americans are food insecure. In Illinois, more than one million people struggle with hunger and food insecurity. While rescuing and redistributing surplus food is not a cure for hunger, it is an important stopgap in meeting immediate anti-hunger efforts.

Food insecurity is defined as the lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. It affects approximately 33.8 million people in the United States and is linked to lower food quality and a higher probability of chronic disease diagnosis.


The Greater Chicagoland Food Depository projects that over 613,000 Cook County residents live in food insecure households. According to data from the Cook County Department of Public Health, the south and west suburbs of Cook County shoulder the greatest burden of low income and low food access, with over 35 percent of the population living in these land tracts are either low income or low food access.