Harvesting model rescues castoff food to feed the hungry

Food banks may soon be able to boost the nutritional value of the food they distribute to the hungry, thanks to a new harvesting model created by a team of Cornell economists and their Boston College collaborators. Applying traditional industrial engineering and programming models to gleaning, the ancient practice of gathering produce left in the fields after the main harvest, Miguel Gómez , associate professor in Cornell's Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and his co-authors have developed an algorithm that tells a food bank the optimum number of days to schedule gleaning. His colleagues are Erkut Sönmez and Deishin Lee of Boston College and Xiaoli Fan, a Cornell doctoral candidate in the field of applied economics and management. "You have food waste on one hand and malnutrition on the other. The food banks can make this link, but there's a logistical problem here. Our program contributes to a solution," said Gómez. The research, " Improving Food Bank Gleaning Operations: An Application in New York State ," was published online in December in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.