On Wednesday, organizers and speakers will spend the day harvesting vegetables from Petaluma’s Bloomfield Organics to be used in the meal. On Thursday and Friday, a conference on reducing food waste dubbed the First Zero Food Waste Forum will take place at UC Berkeley timed to coincide with World Food Day on October 16. Sponsored by the Northern California Recycling Association, National Resources Defense Council and Food Shift, the conference is expected to draw 300 people, and features many of those who will be speaking at Saturday’s event, but also such locals as Sam Mogannam of Bi-Rite Market, speaking from a grocer’s perspective on food waste, and Cassie Bartholomew of Stop Waste, speaking about how Alameda County is trying to lessen its food waste through prevention and donation.

On Friday night, volunteers and organizers will spend their time prepping and chopping in what’s been dubbed “Disco Soup.” Music will be blaring at the commercial kitchen of St. Vincent de Paul of Alameda County, where organizers and volunteers will doing much of the prep work for Saturday’s meal.

Dana Frasz, left, and her Food Shift team collect food from the Jack London Square Farmers Market. Photo: Sivashankar Pattamadai

In addition to the meal on Saturday, 3000 pounds of groceries will be given away. Keynote speakers that day include Tristam Stuart, founder of the first Feeding the 5000 in the U.K.; Dana Gunders of the NRDC who wrote a widely distributed report called “Wasted: How America is Losing Up to 40 percent of its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill;” Jonathan Bloom, author of “American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of its Food;” and Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen and LA Kitchen, both of which train low-income adults for culinary careers, as well as use recycled food. There will also be a special presentation by Rob Greenfield, who rode his bike across the country, stopping in various cities making displays of food he found in dumpsters.

Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen, will be a keynote speaker at Feeding the 5000 on Saturday. Photo: Capitol File Magazine

There will also be cooking demos by chefs showing how to waste less food.

Jordan Figueiredo, whose day job is as a Solid Waste Professional at Castro Valley Sanitary District, but is volunteer event coordinator as well as “coordinator of chaos” for the conference and Saturday event, has been working closely with organizers in London.

He noted that one in five residents of Alameda County depend on their local food bank or pantry, which is higher than the national figure. And food waste isn’t just about people going hungry, he said, it’s also taking a major toll on the environment. “Food systems are responsible for 33 percent of our human-made emissions, which, if you extrapolate that out, 14 percent of all of our human-made emissions come from just food waste.”

Feeding the 5000 is cosponsored by Feedback, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sustainable America, GRACE Communications Foundation, Food Shift, People’s Grocery, Ecology Center, Oakland Unified School District and St. Vincent de Paul of Alameda County.

Keeping food out of the landfill and compost and getting it to hungry people is a mission all of these groups support.

“This issue wasn’t really part of the conversation three years ago, but now it’s very much part of it,” said Frasz. “Part of what we’re doing here is encouraging people to think beyond compost. We’re doing a good job of developing a compost system, but we need to cultivate a system in which we capture food before it goes into the trash or compost.”

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