A starting point for more responsible and compassionate living

U.S. cities are increasingly adopting management plans that address the issue of food waste by collecting trashed food scraps and turning them into renewable energy or soil. But some startups are also addressing the problem by catching the food before it ever gets tossed in the garbage, and offering it to people who are hungry.

NPR reports that the website known as Food Cowboy addresses food waste by assisting truckers, who often find themselves forced to throw out their shipments of perfectly good food when supermarkets decide it's not aesthetically pleasing enough to put on store shelves.

Food Cowboy helps those drivers locate food banks along their route, which are happy to take a pallet of fresh, but slightly-bruised produce deemed too ugly to make it inside a store.

In the three months since its soft launch, Food Cowboy estimates it's diverted about 300,000 pounds of food away from landfills and into food banks in states like Texas, Nebraska and Florida.