white lotus. please welcome aubrey plaza. it takes a special kind of person to see that mounds of food meant for a landfill could be turned into a beautiful meal for a family. that s what aidan reilly did during the pandemic. he was home from college scared like the rest of us and decided to channel his uneasiness to solve a problem. the reason that so many people go hungry and so much food goes to waste is a logistics problem. there s no easy way to connect farmers with the food banks and no ability to transport the food, so from his pandemic couch aidan and his friends cofounded the farmlink project. in just two years he and a mobilized force of students and young people from around the country have moved more than 70 million pounds of food, prevented nearly 41 million
pounds of co2 going into the air. and just think of all those people who can now make a good breakfast, lunch, and dinner because of aidan saw nourishment instead of waste. when the pandemic happened like everybody else we re stuck inside our houses watching the news and just seeing the next piece of terrible news come in. my friend was like this is one of the most significant things that might ever happen in our lives, how do you want to look at it? and i told him shut up, man, i want to watch tv and play video games. but it got us thinking. we ended up seeing an article of farmers having to throw out their food like mountains of potatoes in someone s backyard or milk being dumped into the dirt. at the same time food banks were getting overwhelmed, running out of food. we would see lines of people miles and miles long, thousands of cars lining up to get a bag ora box of groceries.