.png)
Against All Odds Podcast, The Less than 1% Chance with Maria Aponte
Maria highlights stories of people that have been the "less than 1% chance" and have come out of their situations thriving and seeing life as happening FOR them and not TO them! Inspiring and empowering stories that will show you that against all odds you can make it through anything!
Against All Odds Podcast, The Less than 1% Chance with Maria Aponte
Transforming Communities: Nutrition and Finding Solutions with Shannon Dobbs
Shannon Dobbs’ life changed in a split second during a catastrophic training jump, but his journey of resilience in the face of life-altering injuries is nothing short of inspirational. Today, we have Shannon with us, sharing his profound story of survival and adaptation. From an elite special operations unit to grappling with severe spinal injuries and a stroke, Shannon’s path to rebuilding his life highlights the incredible human spirit and its capacity to overcome even the toughest odds.
We also shine a light on critical health and nutrition issues that don't just affect soldiers but countless individuals. Hear from another former soldier who turned his life around by embracing healthier eating habits after dealing with severe post-Army health issues. His transformative journey from unhealthy convenience foods to a reinvigorated, healthier lifestyle underscores the broader implications of food-related diseases and the urgent need for equitable food systems.
Furthermore, we tackle the troubling reality of food deserts and their devastating impact on community health. Learn about the marginalization of low-income areas by big box stores, forcing residents into unhealthy eating habits, and the terms “food swamps” and “food apartheid.” We conclude with a powerful personal anecdote on meal planning, emphasizing the critical role of proper nutrition in combating systemic health issues. Prepare to be informed and inspired as we unpack these vital topics to help pave the way for healthier, more resilient communities.
Email Shannon: Contact@foodsystemhackers.com
Instagram: @techniq42
Website: Foodsystemhackers.com
GrowthDay app offers tools, content, coaching, and community for self-improvement and success.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Follow Maria on Facebook HERE
Follow Maria on Instagram HERE
Follow Maria on YouTube HERE
Welcome back to the Against All Odds the Less Than 1% Chance podcast with your host, maria Aponte, where we will hear stories of incredible people thriving against all odds, and my hope is that we can all see how life is always happening for us, even when we are the less than 1% chance.
Speaker 2:Hey, hey, welcome back to Against All Odds, the Less Than 1% Chance podcast, with your host, maria Aponte. I hope you're doing amazing today. I have such a treat. I just got a chance to talk a little bit with our guest, Shannon Dobbs, about his story and, oh my gosh, I can't wait for you to hear, because it's those moments where you just don't know what to expect from a situation that completely changes your life, and then everything that trickles afterwards, but then somehow or another, it brings you to something that you can be passionate about and truly help and work towards bettering this world, to be honest. So I'm going to actually give it over to him so that he can tell you why he became medically retired, and wait till you hear this story, because it is truly mind blowing. So, shannon, welcome to Against All Odds. I'm so excited to have you here.
Speaker 3:Hey Maria, it's a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So give us a little bit of background. What about your story? That kind of put you in this Against All Odds scenario, if you will?
Speaker 3:My story starts back when I joined the army at 19,. All the way back in the early nineties and just a couple of years after I got finished with my training and went to permanent duty at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. I was a paratrooper and so I was doing a training jump and my unit was working with another unit down the street in the 82nd Airborne Division and we all went down the street and we gotnd Airborne Division and we all went down the street and we got into the C-130 and we all started jumping out of the plane and there was a massive wind going on that day. It was like 35 miles an hour and we really shouldn't have come out playing that day. But they made the decision to jump and so we all went out and my parachute partially collapsed on the way down, and so as soon as I realized what was going on, I'm reaching up to my risers and I'm trying to shake it loose and open up the chute so that I can get air in there and stop falling like a rock which I was and because I was working with this other unit, we actually came out of the airplane much lower than what I was used to too. So we came out at 1200 feet.
Speaker 3:I was used to training from 2,500 feet or 2000 feet, and so, as I'm shaking my parachute out, the ground was coming at me a lot faster than I was used to, and I was able to get air into the parachute and start slowing down a little bit. Just as I hit the ground and I didn't see it coming, I didn't realize that it was coming that fast, and so I ended up just feet, butt, head, just in that order, and knocked the wind out of myself, got a huge concussion messed up my spine, almost died that day. I basically bounced and a few months later I had a stroke.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh In my head that ended up getting a blood vessel burst in my brain and went through the whole process where my half my face stopped working for a while and then my brain was able to wrap around the damage and I was able to basically recover from that. But that caused some lifelong issues with processing and what they call executive function. So there's a device, a divider in your brain between the things you know and the things you can do, and a lot of times, when it comes to I know a lot of different things about different subjects, but a lot of times, when it comes to I know a lot of different things about different subjects, but a lot of times, when it comes to taking steps as simple as going into the kitchen and preparing myself a meal, I can forget steps or I'll forget what I'm doing completely and walk away and then burn the meal and almost set fire to the house, and so I constantly running into situations like that throughout my life.
Speaker 2:So Wow, wow. That's a huge beginning, to say the least. That, and you were how old when this happened.
Speaker 3:I was early twenties, I would say probably 22 at the time.
Speaker 2:Wow, oh my gosh, that it just to think, like all of the things, you're literally just starting your life and that this happens, what? What happens there? Do you stay in the army? Do you get out at that moment? What follows that?
Speaker 3:it took me years to be able to land on my feet. I was planning on being a career soldier and I was in a in an elite special operations unit out of fort bragg doing my training and because of this damage that I had in my brain and in my back, I couldn't. I was what's called no longer deployable or non-deployable status.
Speaker 3:So, they had to basically figure out, like, what are we going to do with this troop while he while we figure out whether he's going to heal or not?
Speaker 3:And they ended up shoving me into the supply sergeant's position over at the headquarters company and I ended up spending a couple of years helping the supply sergeant's position over at the headquarters company and I ended up spending a couple of years helping the supply sergeant and the first sergeant to send hot meals out to the troops and getting supplies in and making sure the weapons were in order, and I was in charge of the range, showing people how to fire their weapons, that kind of thing. But it was very different from what I signed up to do and I basically never went back to that job and so I ended up spending the rest of my time in supply and once it became clear that the damage wasn't going to go away, I ended up out processing as a medical exit and got my own normal discharge and hit the ground, supposedly running, at which point I found out being a college dropout also meant that my job that I was trained at in the military wasn't something that I could transfer into in the civilian world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, which is, I think, really frustrating, because it's something. It's funny how we we put our military people in these positions that then you're, you have the training for it, you can't even transfer out of it. That is mind blowing, that it's okay for the military but it's not okay for the outside world. Yeah, I can imagine how frustrating that was. So what did you get into then after you got out?
Speaker 3:For a few years I was just picking out jobs. I worked security. I drove taxis in Las Vegas. For a few years drove limos. At one point I was even selling vacuum cleaners door to door. I was stretching really hard trying to just figure out.
Speaker 3:What do I do next? In 2000, my girlfriend and I moved up to Northern Nevada and we ended up taking over a bar. It was her dream, and so I went up to support her and a few years later, when we broke up, I ended up taking the bar over completely. She developed some fibromyalgia issues and basically decided hey, if you don't take this, I'm going to have to shut it down. So I somehow managed to be a bar owner, and that was a random situation.
Speaker 3:But I found out that the skills that I had been trained in the Army were really well suited to small business ownership, and so it ended up being a kind of a perfect place for me to land in, and over the next few years I got really successful. We did really well with the business and I learned how to integrate that with my other passions, which was community support, and so I learned how to work with the county and I worked with the city and I worked with the hospital down the street and the blood drives and really turned it into kind of a community center atmosphere, and that actually ended up turning the bar into one of the one of the most sought after places in town too, because everybody recognized what we were doing and we're like hey, we love this place. So just really well as a kismet situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so funny how, like situations that even like a breakup, you know, or places where you didn't even expect life to to gear you towards something, that ends up being oh I'm really good at this how life happens for you, right, because in the moment a breakup is tough, the situations that you've gone through are tough, but it's all prepared you for that purpose of bringing the community together and taking over this place where you didn't expect that to be your dream or your career path, and then it was just like nope, I think I got something for you here that that might be better than what you thought, and it's just. I'm a big, huge believer in life happens for you and not to you it's just yeah oh, it's such is.
Speaker 2:It was a huge mental shift for me and and I'm like every time that something's happening, because that doesn't take away from crappy things happening in your life. However, it does give you that perspective of okay, this might not be the best thing right now. However, how can this? How can I find the blessings in this situation? How can I look for the blessings? And I always try to tell myself that because you get into the oh my gosh, this is really hard. How, why is this happening to me? And then you're like, or I can look for the blessings, and then it just when you start looking for things, they seem to appear funny enough.
Speaker 3:For me, a lot of it has to do with, like, how are you going to let this define your life?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, are you going to?
Speaker 3:let your life happen to you, or are you going to turn this into something positive? Yeah, absolutely yeah.
Speaker 2:I love that so much. So then you are in this amazing scenario that you've been able to turn this, this breakup, to a successful business, to a community like center, if you will. And then what happens from there? Because I don't believe you're there now, Is that correct?
Speaker 3:No. Right around 2014, it started getting really clear that the damage in my spine and the damage in my head were getting to be too severe to even continue running the business, and so I started looking at how I was going to basically transition out. I started turning the business into what's called turnkey, where you can essentially hand the keys over to somebody else and they can operate it just as it is, and so it took me a couple of years to make that transition, and then I was able to find a buyer and sold the bar in the beginning of 2017. And that was when I officially retired, but I had applied to the federal government for disability status prior to that and received that, so I was VA disability because it was a service-connected family that was caused.
Speaker 2:Wow. So from there, from the conversation we had prior, I know that you have now found a passion project volunteering. I want to hear about that and about how you got into it and what you are doing to completely maybe shift things around in terms of what you're doing now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. One of the big challenges that I had when I was coming out of my 20s and my 30s was my health was going down. And I got out of the Army like so many other soldiers and I was dumb as a bag of hammers. I didn't know anything about cooking. I didn't know anything about cooking. I didn't know anything about nutrition, about health. I basically spent my entire career having people hand me food, three meals a day, whether it was in the field or the dining facility, and I didn't have any experience as a kid growing up learning how to cook either. Like so many people.
Speaker 3:I was 27 years old and I hit the civilian world and I'm like now what? So I in my head a reheated microwave burrito from the corner store was a viable meal. That was a good idea at the time, and so I just got into this really bad series of habits and my health just went to crap and, years later, fast forward. I was up in Northern Nevada. I'm running a bar, I'm surrounded by alcohol, I'm in downtown Reno, which is a food desert, and just kept going and kept going and I was almost a hundred pounds overweight at one point.
Speaker 3:Wow I was almost 300 pounds. I had high cholesterol, hypertension, fatty liver disease. Like the doctor at the VA was basically saying, if you don't make a change, you're going to die. Like you might as well start putting your affairs in order and right. About the same time as about 10 years ago in 2014, I started really taking that seriously and trying to figure out, like, what different path can I take? And it was a long and painful process and I ended up dropping about 80 pounds and getting back in shape. I was able to come off with statin medications, my liver normalized. Like all the different things that were basically threatening my life at the time backed off and I felt really proud of myself and I was like this is a big, this is a huge transition.
Speaker 3:And what that got for me is I started looking around and realizing that I had a lot of other people that I knew and cared about that were dealing with a lot of the same situations, and many of them didn't have the same advantages as me. Like I had good money coming in. Like my bar was incredibly successful, so I was doing okay. I had my own vehicle. I was able to go down to Costco or to the store, wherever I needed to go to get my food and I had access to the internet. I was an educated person, I was in the process of getting my bachelor's degree, finally and so I was like you've got these other people that I cared about. I had some employees, customers, some good friends that were really struggling with their health, and some of them were working their way into diabetes and some of them were working their way into heart disease, and one of my friends had a congestive heart failure whereas his heart was like three times the size of what it should be.
Speaker 3:And it turns out that these are all food-related problems. These are all directly tied into the diets that they were dealing with, and so that got me really interested in do these additional barriers exist? And like, why are we having so many problems? And then, in 2015, the mayor of the city of Reno popped up in an article and was quoted as asking like, why can't we get a grocery store in a downtown Reno? Yeah, and that was the first time I realized our leadership doesn't have a handle on this.
Speaker 3:They don't know how to solve these problems. Up until then, I had assumed, I think, like most of us, that the people that are in charge, that we put in charge, more or less have a handle on what's going on and that we're doing the best we can and we're moving forward in some sort of logical fashion. And that was about the time that I started realizing that's not true at all and that we're just flying by the seat of our pants and a lot of the organizations and government groups that we as a society depend on to move forward are just as lost as we are.
Speaker 3:And that's the scary situation that we find ourselves in, because, if you look at the problems that we're dealing with as a nation, the United States is losing over $411 billion per year in food waste, and heart disease is the number one killer in the United States and it's killing well over half a million people a year, and the next three killers after that diabetes, hypertension. All of these different issues are preventable food-related diseases.
Speaker 3:And so we've got this kind of rolling situation that's getting worse and worse. All across the country, people are starting to hear about the diet, about the obesity epidemic. What was it? 13 years ago, the Pentagon even released a paper saying that it was a national defense problem and that, as a nation, we're not even able to recruit enough troops to be able to do the things that we need to do as far as national defense. And so this is something that, like everybody's screaming from the rooftops hey, this is a major problem, but nobody's really diving in to try and figure out what we can actually do to solve these problems.
Speaker 3:And a lot of reasons. Why is because we're invested in this charity system that we've bought into for generations and so we've got this whole idea that if we just take this food over here and then we distribute it over there, we're going to somehow solve the problem. We're going to somehow close the gap and fix this situation of access inequality and not having enough food in certain areas and poor people in low-income communities that can't support a supermarket, somehow just magically being able to fix these problems on their own. And we just can't do that. And I basically dug into my background and I started looking at other options haven't we tried yet, and what else is on the table and what other opportunities do we have to try and move the needle and make a difference? And so I started diving into the food system and just really striving to get an understanding of what these challenges were and how I can make a difference, and it's been a huge passion of mine for the last decade.
Speaker 2:That's incredible. I heard you say that Reno was a food desert. So what is a food desert number one? And how do they negatively impact community health while obviously contributing to global warming and climate change and all of that? How does that all tie together?
Speaker 3:The United States Department of Agriculture popped out this term that basically defines a phenomenon that's been growing across the United States in underserved, low-income communities, and this is both on the urban and the rural side, but basically it's areas that can't support a supermarket. So we have a dominant model in the United States where we've got the supermarket is the grocery store that we're used to and it's these miles of aisles of competing brands and fresh produce and you can see it all day long and you can basically drive a car down this thing and that's our norm, you know. But there's a lot of communities that can't support that model and what's happened since the 1960s is certain big box stores have come in and essentially dominated the landscape to the point where they're driving all the mom and pop stores out of business, and so you've got this hyper competitive atmosphere and this combination of issues has essentially created this weird scenario that's unique to the US.
Speaker 3:If you go around the world you don't see food desert situations.
Speaker 3:Where you've got these huge box stores are concentrated near freeway exits and in well-to-do neighborhoods and in communities that can support those stores exits and in well-to-do neighborhoods and in communities that can support those stores.
Speaker 3:And then you've got these pockets all over the city of areas where, if you live in that community and you don't have your own personal car, especially out here in the West, like on the East Coast, a lot of times you can get by in public transportation. But out here I'm in Colorado, I used to live in California, I grew up in New Mexico, all of these states around here. The bus system is not enough to be able to get you around town and so it could take you three or four hours just to get to work. The commute is ridiculous and then trying to juggle a basket of food and then maybe you've got a walker or you're trying to deal with your kids and all these other things. It just makes an impossible situation. And what's going on is that these areas that are identified as food deserts because they don't have a healthy, consistent access to healthy food, unhealthy options like corner stores and bodegas and gas stations end up flooding into that area to fill that vacuum.
Speaker 3:And so the USDA has another term for that and it's called food swamps. So this is the federal government kind of labeling these situations for convenience, but a lot of grassroots organizations and advocates in the community what they're calling it is food apartheid, because a lot of these communities it's almost by intent You've got these communities that are basically being denied access to healthy food. And then one of the things we saw during COVID is that communities like this are struggling even harder than everybody else and they're getting hit harder because they're, because if your body's messed up, you're fighting diabetes and you've got heart disease and you've got all these other things that you're struggling with.
Speaker 2:It's not even your body's not strong enough to deal with any of the things that are already happening. And let's bring on COVID.
Speaker 3:And then COVID like its whole thing is, it goes in and finds cracks in your system and it just tears it open. And so whatever's happening, if it's in your brain, if it's in your gut, if it's in wherever it's at, it's going to go in there, it's going to attack that weakness, and so that's what's happening is a lot of our communities are just in a situation of permanent almost fight or flight. You're constantly fighting against the crap food and the preservatives and just the nasty stuff that we've got in our food, and really it's these marginalized communities that are getting hit hardest because of this situation as well, and I just had a conversation with my my ex-husband's wife my ex-husband in construction and doesn't take very good care of his nutrition, and I was like I'm creating him a meal plan.
Speaker 2:I'll send this to you. We have a great relationship. I'm very thankful for that, but I'm like I need my kid's dad to be good, and he was just in the hospital because of, like this, chest pain and I'm like I come from a. I'm Puerto Rican and I come from a culture that doesn't regularly know what a vegetable is, for example. It is so not in our culture that it is, so I didn't learn how to eat properly until I was like in my 30s and how like a well-balanced meal can help you fight disease. It helped happen with me, and so I feel like this is so important how food can determine mental health and it can determine your physical health and emotional health, and it is, I'm so with you on this I
Speaker 3:think a lot of people know that this is a problem the food access thing. It's hard to describe for people that don't really understand the system and the back end of what's going on. It's a complex system and so the reasons why we are where we are this is going back multiple generations. There was decisions made back in 1930 that the United States made as a nation that are still reverberating. We're still seeing side effects of that to the day and the unintended consequences of some of those decisions like that's really what led us where we're at. It's almost inevitable If you look back at history like this is exactly what we asked for. We just didn't know it at the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's so funny, my kids I have one just graduated high school, but I have one going into high school. I have two graduates now and I'm like, oh my God, how did this even happen? But my last one is going into high school and she's oh, I hate history and I'm like kid. History, if you pay attention, is the best subject, because if we actually learn from history, we can actually make some change for the, for your future, not even mine for your future if we don't learn from history, we're guaranteed to repeat it yeah
Speaker 2:and, and I'm, and I've made fun of it with clothing. I'm like you know the clothes that you're wearing, that's what I was wearing in the 90s and it just it's. We are learning, we don't. When we don't learn from history, it just continues to come back. And I it just yeah, I'm all in with this. So yeah, I'm all in with this. So what? Why don't we as a society have an effective way to keep food produced by restaurants out of landfills? And what community? What can communities do to combat this problem and get more food out of the trash and back into the communities? Because that's something that's really frustrating when I have friends that work in the restaurant industry and they throw away so much when if we're going to throw it away, can't we just give it to people that need it Exactly?
Speaker 3:So it's super exciting. We're in an inflection point right now because when I was up in northern Nevada and so I was working on the food access side and I actually figured out a business model for a type of grocery store the one that we use before supermarkets were invented that you can actually put into low income communities and it'll survive in those areas. So I developed this model and this is one of the things that I advocated for. But while I was doing my volunteer work up in Northern Nevada, I found out about an amazing program that was going on in Southern Nevada.
Speaker 3:Down in Las Vegas, their food bank figured out how to use a piece of manufacturing equipment called a blast chiller, that if you ever go into a grocery store and you go in the freezer section, all the food that's frozen there was frozen by a blast chiller, and so it's used pretty much exclusively on the manufacturing side. Some restaurants know about it because you can use it for, like chocolate making and some certain things, but for the most part you've never seen this put on the other side of the food system and this piece of equipment. What it can do is it can take restaurant food that is prepared and ready to eat and you can take giant hotel pans of it, like at buffets, and you can slot it into this piece of equipment and you hit start and less than 90 minutes later that food has gone from service temperature down to rock solid frozen. Wow.
Speaker 3:And so the challenge that we've had is restaurant food, because it's hot at the end of the day that if you put that into a regular freezer it's not going to freeze fast enough to keep the food safe. And not only that, but if you put it in with other food it can actually endanger that food too.
Speaker 3:And so this has been the major logistics challenge that's kept us from being able to get restaurant food back into the community. And so if you look at all the food banks and the food pantries and all the things that are going on in every community across the United States, they're pretty much exclusively focused on packaged food coming out of grocery stores. That's all they touch.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so restaurant food has been this kind of no man's land third rail type of situation that nobody wants to mess with because of this challenge. And so this Three Square is the name of the nonprofit down in Las Vegas, and they collaborated with the MGM Grand Resort, which is a massive casino organization. I think they own like a third or a half of the strip I have no idea how much they are, but they're huge. And so they did this collaboration and they started with one hotel and they kept adding and adding and now they're up to 20 locations and they're rescuing almost 400,000 pounds of food a year off of the strip. And it's this huge kind of thing that's important, right, it's a massive thing, and you would think that we would start replicating this solution all across the country and around the world. But what's happening is the nonprofit organizations really don't talk to each other. And so I talked to the food bank here in Colorado and they had never heard of it eight years in. And I talked to them in New Mexico they'd never heard of it. Even Northern Nevada had never heard of it. And so I've been for the last few years. I've been just going around and talking to people and talking to these organizations and saying, hey, we've got this solution, can we put it in place and can we work with you guys and collaborate and everything like that. And I'm finding out.
Speaker 3:Just the damnedest thing is that these large organizations that are even the ones that are dedicated to food rescue they don't want to pivot in this direction because they don't want to put the commercial kitchen in place and they don't want to get a completely different model in place. And a lot of them are saying that they're just too big to even go after restaurant food. If they were to take a truck and go around and just stop at individual restaurants and pick up a few meals at a time, it's not even worth their bottom line to make these decisions. And the problem is that's 85% of the food that we're wasting in there, and this is food that's ready to eat, like it's already been prepared, it's already been cooked, grown, it's been transported, it's been processed, it's been all of the differences maybe sent around the world. If you're picking up strawberries in February, that thing's going around the planet once or twice. And so this is just incredibly frustrating for me, to know as much as I do about how easy this situation is to fix and then just be running into brick wall after brick wall where the pantries don't want to pick it up and they don't want to make these changes.
Speaker 3:So what I did is I said you know what, if these guys don't want to play ball and they don't want to make a difference in this new direction, then why don't we educate people who aren't food banks and who aren't food pantries and who are just people in the community Maybe they're a pastor of a church, maybe they're working with a Boys and Girls Club, maybe they're working with a Kiwanis, maybe they're just connected somewhere in the community and just show them how to create a grassroots community initiative using this equipment and to be able to to create a grassroots community initiative using this equipment and to be able to actually create a coalition around it. And so I developed a masterclass that I literally just recorded it last Thursday to do just that. I'm basically educating anybody who wants to learn, and you don't have to be connected to a food bank, you don't have to be connected to a pantry, you don't have to know anything about this, and all you have to do is go around and find out who's got a commercial kitchen. Maybe your local church does, maybe your Lions Club does, maybe you're.
Speaker 3:You know, there's all kinds of different organizations that have commercial kitchens, for whatever reason, and guess what? They're nine times out of 10, they're not operating at 10 o'clock 11 o'clock at night, when the restaurants close. So you can add this one piece of equipment in there and now you could use this facility off hours. You could work with the restaurants and actually have a place where you can take this hot food, drop it down into frozen, then just stick it into a regular freezer and the next day somebody can come by and pick it up and redistribute it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's kind of how it starts.
Speaker 2:If we can find a gazillion Amazon drivers, I feel like we can find people to get this mechanism of oh, that's yeah.
Speaker 3:So here's the thing this is a problem, that is a solution.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So one of the things that I've done over the last few years is I've just talked with and volunteered with and worked with so many small, struggling, grassroots nonprofit organizations around where I live, and I've talked to people. I talked to one nonprofit organization up in Denver that they have about 150 clients and they exclusively provide food for indigenous elders who are housebound and they can't go to the grocery store, and so this nonprofit organization basically exists to get food to those people and they spend thousands of dollars a week on this food and they have grant programs and they're scrambling to try and get resources and every year they're like are we going to be able to do?
Speaker 3:this we're going to be able to keep doing this year after year. And there's a community center that I talked to the boss, the guy that was running it, and that community center provides two meals a day to people that are getting out of prison and they're trying to transition back into the community. And so you've got all of these little organizations all around the country and around the world that are struggling to survive and they're struggling to get resources. And those are the organizations that I'm talking to, the ones that, again, we're not a food pantry, we're not a food bank. We don't do this on a regular basis, but we have this need for these resources, we have this need for this food, and if we get our hands on this piece of equipment, our existing volunteer corps could just add this into the thing. And now, all of a sudden, instead of spending $2,300 a week on food, you're bringing in this food for free, that's donated, and now you can divert it directly into that community that you're already serving. So that's the people that I'm talking to.
Speaker 3:Rather than really focus on the business community, because Amazon, they're not going to do this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, obviously I'm just, I look at-.
Speaker 3:But these small organizations like if it's almost, if you have a river or a stream passing by your house and then one day you go down there and you build a water wheel and now all of a sudden you're spinning that water wheel and you're powering a motor and maybe you're keeping the lights on in your house. That little water wheel is so incredibly important to the right organization, to the right people, for the right reasons.
Speaker 3:And so this solution that I've created is essentially designed to be able to provide that water wheel in the food system and be able to divert it away from the landfill, provide us with an opportunity to get our hands on that resources. And what's cool about it is it acts as a seed, because if you can start here and you can get to the point where, hey, we're rescuing a significant amount of food and we're starting this process, now you've got something to talk about where you can grow it into the next level and you can maybe take over a dead restaurant space and convert that commercial kitchen into a full time food rescue organization. You can rip out the seating area, turn it into a grocery store and you can use my model I can get the whole grocery store that I developed into under a thousand square feet. So it's really easy to start providing consistent food access into these food desert areas when you start putting together the mechanism and start realizing how you can tie in with the existing market situation.
Speaker 2:That's amazing and mind-blowing all at the same time.
Speaker 3:I mean it's a solution that we're hemorrhaging $411 billion a year in wasted food. We're starting to run out of water. The federal government is starting to put out panic notices that the water that we're using is starting to go away. Climate change is advancing. One of the things a lot of people don't know about is that the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change somewhere around 20% of those are actually coming from the food that's rotting in our landfills. Because you get that food creates methane, and methane is 90 times more powerful than co2. So we've been sitting here talking about the energy production and talking about exhaust coming out of cars and everything like that, and meanwhile our rotting food is actually causing a bigger problem and we're not even touching it.
Speaker 3:so this, these are things that we can actually really push back at significantly and create systemic change at the grassroots level, and that's what I want to advocate for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, Okay. Wow, Like you're blowing my mind. This is. It's just so interesting how. But this is what it takes. It takes somebody that feels very passionate, that has done the research, that has, that knows the information, to make that change, and I commend you for just being that person. That is just okay. I know this information. I can't just sit with it. I can't just be like man. That just sucks that we're wasting so much.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and going back to the first part of our conversation, I'm not going to be able to run around and build a bunch of these. I don't have the mental or the physical capacity to go around and just build this stuff myself. Creating this as a knowledge broker situation where I'm just amplifying this message and say, hey, go to food system hackerscom, forward slash, food, rescue and sign up for the masterclass and I'll just send it to you for free and you can spend 45 minutes listening to me talk about this and you can write down some notes and then you will understand at a deep level how this works and how you can set this up in your community. That's really all it takes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, because it isn't just. You can't just do it for the whole nation or the world, and the world yeah.
Speaker 3:I can't. I certainly am not going to be able to pound the street and make this happen myself, but there's people that are connected to their own communities in ways that I can't even imagine and if they resonate with this message to the point where they're like, oh shit, that's excuse me.
Speaker 3:Oh, this is something that can actually benefit my community in x, y and z ways. Hey, let's figure this out. And and then you know, this is again, this is a semi-complex process, like you've got to work with the health department, you've got to work with donors, you've got to put together a protocol and everything like that. So I'm not expecting everybody to jump in and be like, hey, what do I do next? We are planning on building a membership program and I'm going to create a knowledge base and the idea is for leaders in the community to step up and get into this program and then start adding their own solutions and their own success stories into it.
Speaker 2:And so we all start really growing together and creating these solutions as we go. Yeah, that's what making waves would be. It would be making waves and doing it as a whole rather than just an individual. I think that's super powerful. So what would a healthy food system even look like, and how do we get? I think we touched on this too, but how do we get from here to there when big businesses and nonprofits are heavily invested in maintaining like status quo, even if it hurts the communities?
Speaker 3:heavily invested in maintaining like status quo, even if it hurts the communities. Yeah, they really are. And so one of the challenges is coming in too big If we created a regional food hub that's designed to go after us, because we're talking about not just local restaurants, we're also talking about hospitals and schools and military facilities and buffets and hotels and, like all these major producers are hemorrhaging this food, and so we need to create a robust system that's actually big enough to be able to handle all of that need. But we do have to start small If we're.
Speaker 3:You know, I'm down in the Springs, we've got half a million people in this town and I've got I can point to about a dozen different areas that are food deserts in this city, and so any one of those areas has nonprofits that are focused on that area and they have nonprofits that are focused on the problems and the challenges in those communities.
Speaker 3:And so if we start stepping up one at a time and just supporting each of those organizations and each of those community leaders as they're stepping up and we can show them hey, this is how you write a grant proposal, this is how I create an entity structure and definitely talk to your legal representative and your CPA and don't depend on me for that type of advice. But I can tell you what I did and what I continue to do, and so we can walk through these success stories of this. Is how we walk the walk. And as we start doing this, let's say you've got a half a dozen of these locations. Well, now you can start looking at okay, what are we going to do at the next level, we start looking for a dead restaurant space.
Speaker 3:There's plenty of those communities all over the place and they've already got a commercial kitchen. They've got this seating area that can be repurposed into a grocery store. Now you're starting to do it at a community level. Boom, this is a solution that we can start focusing at, where we can continue to grow. Then we start getting into bigger city situations, like up in Denver, two and a half million people. We need a larger solution. So we start looking at a regional food hub that's going to have a large scale commercial kitchen.
Speaker 3:That's going to have some other advantages to where, if you need more processing capability for the local school system to be able to get, wash, the fruits and everything and get in there that can start doing double duty, they can start working as a place for small business owners to go in and be able to use some of the equipment during off hours and actually support themselves. You get one level above that. You start working with the urban community, working with the rural community. Now you've got the rural producers. They're harvesting their food and a lot of times they don't have any place to process their food.
Speaker 3:In Colorado, they got to ship that stuff out of state. Same thing in Northern Nevada, and so you start looking at these solutions. Okay, how do we grow to a point where we can start encompassing and enfolding and including all of these different groups that are struggling? Because, at the end of the day, what people need to understand is our food system is working the way it's intended, but there's parts missing and those parts aren't in existence because no organization has really been able to figure out how to profit from them.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I created this public benefit corporation here in Colorado because my focus isn't on profit, it's on creating a mechanism that ties all these situations together, and so that's one of the things that people can do is they can tie in with their local community development corporation. They can start advocating for these solutions and start getting these support organizations that are there to do these things and say, hey, we've got a plan that we pulled off the Internet that says, hey, we can do this and this. And then you point down to Las Vegas and be like here's the success story. This isn't just a pie in the sky solution. Here's an organization that's actually doing this, and I know a ski resort up here in northern Colorado that's doing the same thing. They've been using a blast chiller for a few years to be able to get their food down off the mountain. So you start talking directly to businesses Some of these big businesses.
Speaker 3:They're trying, they're looking at ways to solve these problems internally. You start talking to them about hey, you can get this equipment, boom, you can start rescuing food, you can reduce food waste internally. You can actually save on your bottom line, like you can actually save on your bottom line. These are the types of conversations we get, and this is when I talk about market alignment, because we're stepping away from this idea that we have to just do charity, everything and now we're starting to figure out how do we actually solve the problems, how do we actually address the root causes of these issues and actually make it to where it's a benefit not just for the people that we're trying to help, but also for the people that are donating and the people that are getting involved, and reducing the burden of government, increasing the infrastructural capability of our community. These are all conversations that we need to have over and over again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's powerful. Yeah, I agree. So what are the first steps and how can listeners take action at home to create that positive and lasting change toward a healthier, more resilient food system for us?
Speaker 3:First step is get the plan. Send an email to me at contact at foodsystemhackerscom, and I will send you a link to the plan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'll put it. I just got finished recording the masterclass, so I'll just send it out to anybody who wants it yeah, I'll put that also in the show notes so that our listeners can have access to that, because, yeah, absolutely as many, as much as possible. And then I think, from the knowledge, whoever is connected to more people that can, that can put the word out there to local communities. I think that's where it starts to impact more.
Speaker 3:I love that and a big way to start like. I know that people have a tendency to feel like this. I'm just one person.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's a tough place to be.
Speaker 3:And the biggest thing that you can really do to move the needle in your community and to get allies is to just publicize a community engagement meeting.
Speaker 3:So you can put flyers in a local coffee shop, you can borrow space, convention space at your local library, you can put the word out on meetup. There's lots of different ways to reach out to your community. You can say, hey, we got a plan, let's get everybody that's interested together and let's start having this conversation. Then you start identifying, like, who wants to lead, who wants to be in charge, who wants to do the footwork, who wants to stand in front of city hall, who wants to go down to the health department and really just spread the work around. This is a volunteer effort and it's going to take a village. I don't want to smoke up anybody's ass that this is going to be something that you can just snap your fingers and make happen, but it is a path to get from there to there and that's what people need to understand is that we do have a path. My goal is to just light that path so that people can follow it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. So let me ask you what limiting beliefs or roadblocks did you have to overcome in order to get where you are today? So what things did you feel like at where you are today? So what things did you feel like Because this doesn't just come from oh yeah, I got this and this is what I'm going to do. What? Because we're human. So what do you feel like? What you had to overcome to go from all of this that you've gone through to now making a difference in your local communities?
Speaker 3:For me, a big part of this was coming to a recognition that I can't do everything myself. I've constantly had this voice in my head that says you can do it. You can do it, just shut up and make it happen. A lot of that comes from the military, drive-on soldier type of a mental state, and it was really freeing when I finally accepted that I'm not going to fix these problems. That actually opened my mind up to be able to start looking for other solutions, to be able to bring other people into this and to really center other people's journey and needs.
Speaker 3:To really center other people's journey and needs rather than and I think it's a common issue in the nonprofit circles too is everybody comes in with this savior mentality, is we're going to fix the problems for so and such, and you really have to step away from that and just provide, you just create space, because the communities that you're trying to serve, like there, there's a ton of really smart people living in those communities and they're not looking for handouts, they're looking for empowerment, they're looking for a way to step out of the situation that they're in to create something greater for themselves and, just like all of us are, yeah and so I think recognizing that is is that's been a huge growth path for me to really understand that this is, uh, a smarter way not just to take the burden off my shoulders but also like it's a much more empowering strategy is to let's just spread the information.
Speaker 3:Information is a virus. It wants to be free, so let's get it all out there, let everybody know, hey, this is a thing that exists, and then just let people choose.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. So what daily habits did you or rituals would you say you have? You have that has helped you reach the level of success to continue to reach, like your potential man, that's a tough answer.
Speaker 3:I still struggle with eating. I still struggle with just taking care of myself in the kitchen day to day. As far as rituals, I've got some stuff that I do to automate the situation. I buy a lot of pantry staples. This is actually a really good advice for anybody living in a situation like mine is get a lot of pantry staples. That's dried food that you can put in a closet that doesn't require refrigeration or get frozen food.
Speaker 3:Learn how to batch cook so you can get like a big instant pot. Even if you don't even have a functional kitchen at home, you can do a double load in an instant pot of whatever. It is like a bean recipe, or if you pull pork, you want to do whatever you need to do, cook a lot of it at once, and that way you're only having to cook once and then you freeze the rest of those meals and you pull them out when you need them. And now it's a huge labor saver to be able to do it like that, like you just take a Sunday afternoon and be like okay, I'm going to knock out a bunch of breakfast burritos, I'm going to create some bento boxes, I'm going to do whatever, whatever your solution is, but cook in large volumes and get the big equipment to be able to do that, and then don't do it as often.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. That's why I meal prep, because if not, then I would never. I would reach for whatever is not good for me, and so I I make shredded chicken every week and that is like something that's in the refrigerator and now everyone can come in Again. I have teenagers, so you never know. They're always hungry and and instead of them like what's for dinner, go look in the fridge. We already got stuff in there, like all you have to do is heat it back up. That's it.
Speaker 2:And yeah, definitely, so I am going to put all of the information for the masterclass and everything in the show notes. This is so important. I am so incredibly, I don't even know you and I'm proud of you for everything that you've done, because this is such an important issue that needs to be addressed, and so I'm thank you. I'm honored that that you were able to get on and share your passion, because it is so important, and I really truly wish you so much success in this, in getting everything out there and letting, and hopefully this will be an avenue to get it to more people as well.
Speaker 3:And I want to thank you so much for letting me on your platform and sharing this information with people that listen to you and they care about your message, because that's how we're going to. That's how we're going to solve this problem. We need to amplify and we need to get a lot of people that are in touch with a lot of people and really just get this into common discourse to where we're all starting to think about it, Because right now, not enough people are aware of even the problem.
Speaker 3:This is one of the things about food insecurity and food waste is that if you're not directly impacted by it, you don't see it. These are invisible problems. You know they're not happening in your neighborhood. You don't live in a food desert.
Speaker 2:Therefore, it's just not real.
Speaker 3:You have no idea Like grocery store down the street. What are you talking about this is something that I run into over and over again is the need to just educate people like the majority in the problems of the minority, because it's about 15% of our population, but if you spread that across the US, that's 10 million. That's a lot. That's a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I definitely agree. I think that taking this one community at a time is going to be, and then multiplying that by the people that are impacted, that are bringing in that knowledge Because, again, like you said, it's something that I didn't know that it was that severe and didn't think to even think how much is wasted from restaurants and from all these. You don't sit there and ponder that because it's not a problem that's in your face and but it's a problem that's creating issues for all of us that we're obviously like feeling in other ways.
Speaker 3:And it's a systemic problem because the way our system set up is pretty much going to guarantee if you go into a grocery store and you had empty shelves and you didn't have a whole lot of stuff on there, what type of what would you think about that grocery store?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And you think, like you guys don't know what you're doing, like you've got a crap business model right. It's the same problem in restaurants. If you walk in and they're like, oh, we're out of this item today or we ran out or whatever, you're going to walk out and probably never go back and trash talk. The reality is they're guessing every day and they have to start at the beginning of the day and they have to guess like how much do we?
Speaker 3:have to satisfy the whole day. And if you get a road closure that day, or there was a ball game or it got rained out or just whatever things happen, that restaurant's SOL, they're out of luck for the day and they're sitting here with all that food that they cooked and then it's hot and it's ready to go and they're like they don't have a mechanism to do anything with the food. At that point Our system is just set up so wonky because of that.
Speaker 3:It's up to us as a community to help the restaurants out. A lot of things we're doing right now is just yelling at restaurants like you need to do better, and it's not our system designed to set them up. Setting them up to fail, so let's us do better about helping them get this food back into the community and get it out of landfills and then see where we're at.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Shannon. I so appreciate it. Listeners, I hope that you learned so much. I know that I did, and I will again put the information for the masterclass and and even how to get in contact with Shannon, because this is definitely a problem that we need to take on because it's going to affect us in one way or the other. So thank you again for listening. Peace out, guys. Love your life. Bye.
