Brown joined St. Paul–based Second Harvest Heartland in 2001, after a career in both the private and public sectors—including eight years as commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Economic Security in the 1990s. Second Harvest distributes about 30 million pounds of food each year.
“The main thing I’ve learned is that there is absolutely no reason anyone should be hungry. It’s a logistical issue: coordinating food producers and trucking companies. Every year in Minnesota, 400,000 tons of food is wasted—a good bit of it plowed under because of overabundance of crops—which is more than enough to feed the hungry. And how can we work more closely with trucking outfits so [that] if they don’t have a full load, we can throw on a couple of pallets of food?
The big surprise is the number of working families and senior citizens who are hungry. According to USDA figures, 380,000 people in Minnesota, or 7.1 percent of the population, are dealing with hunger.”
