Date: 28 February 2022

To: Dr. Ying Xu

cc: OWL @ CAPS
From: Paul Douglas Irwin
Subject: Project Two Topic Proposal

The topic for my Project 2 is about all the perfectly good food that Albuquerque restaurants
throw away into the garbage. It’s shameful that edible food is disposed of rather than given to the
hungry and needy that reside within Albuquerque and its surrounding towns and cities. There has
to be other alternatives than this, especially considering that this state is recovering from the
COVID pandemic, when and where our food supply has become rather unpredictable over the
past couple of years.

My research question for my analytical report is: Can edible and good food be given to people in
need rather than being discarded into garbage dumpsters? This is rather personal to me for I have
worked in a great deal of restaurants over my lifetime. I have worked in three restaurants, here in
Albuquerque, and all three have thrown away gigantic amounts of food, and not even offering it
to their loyal employees.

The purpose of my report is to investigate why so much perfectly good and edible food is thrown
out into the garbage dumpsters, rather than given to those who are hungry, when there are so
many hungry mouths living here in Albuquerque; especially when New Mexico is one of the
leading states, in the United States, where more people go without food and remain hungry.

The Methodology that I will use for creating this report are the following: gathering information,
conducting interviews, conducting surveys, searching for other options, and analyzing my
results. I plan on gathering information from UNM Library, public libraries, the internet for
Google and Google Scholar, as well as other databases and search engines. I plan on
interviewing cooks and restaurant owners form several different restaurants. I would like to also
conduct a survey for the homeless and those who are hungry on their thoughts about restaurants
throwing away edible food when they typically go without. I want to search for other options for
what to do with this food, such as giving it to the homeless, shelters, foodbanks, reservations
(where this is scarce resources for extra food), and to non-profit organizations that may have
solutions on what to do with the food. There are three questions that need to be addressed with
this report and they are the following:
1. What is the impact on the economy because edible food is going to waste in Albuquerque
by restaurants?
2. What is the environmental impact of edible food going to waste in Albuquerque by
restaurants?
 3. What are the humanitarian impacts because good food is thrown out instead of given to
those who are hungry and without resources in Albuquerque?

The results that I hope to find hopefully places where this food can go in order to be distributed
to those who are hungry and in need of quality food to eat. I am hoping to find some sort of logic
to why restaurant owners choose to throw away the food instead of giving it to charity, where it
won’t be wasted, and where some good comes out of their choices. There has to be answers that
go beyond the profit made or lost because of the food left over each evening in most of the
restaurants that operate within Albuquerque’s city limits.