***Oct 22: We’ll have an announcement about a special 2022 event and a large 2023 event soon!***
Project Pizza is an ongoing series of faux pop-up restaurant events that fight hunger by selling pizza-themed art to benefit the awesome non-profit Food Forward. Over the past 4 years, we’ve raised enough to get over 190,000 pounds of food to those at need in the Los Angeles community. Collaborating with Shing Yin Khor, we started Project Pizza as a way to bring together two parts of our lives: First, the love of eating and sharing food. Second, as artists, many of us are often frustrated about our capacity to help make the world better. Like most other artists, I have way more creativity, energy, and visibility than money. So with over 17 million homes across America facing food insecurity, it felt urgent to come up with a way to use our and our friends’ art to multiply our community’s artistic endeavors to help out the hungry far beyond our otherwise limited pocketbooks.
All the art, resources, pizza, and time for Project Pizza are donated, with 100% of the proceeds going to Food Forward and other Los Angeles county food justice organizations. Food Foward’s project was a big inspiration since it is both simple and radical: Combating both the epidemics of food waste and hunger, they travel to farmer’s markets, local orchards, collect pallets from the grocery store supply chain, and even backyard trees, to collect the surplus bounty that would otherwise be thrown away. This is the same top-quality produce in restaurants and stores—delicious but with a very short shelf life. Food Forward collects and transports all those cases of otherwise unwanted peak-ripeness produce to hunger relief groups in underserved and at-need communities. Every $1 redirects about 16 pounds of food from waste to the hungry, and in the process reconnects the oft-fragmented groups in our local communities.
