National Food Drive Day is approaching: 174 stores in Sardinia are participating.
The solidarity event is Saturday, November 14th, and supermarkets will be filled with volunteers and information on how you can help those in need, even with a small gesture.
The 30th National Food Drive Day, themed "Gestures that Build Peace," will involve over 12,000 supermarkets and more than 160,000 volunteers across Italy, including over 30,000 under 25. The collected food will be donated to 1,793,000 people in need, through the 7,600 local partner organizations supported by Banco Alimentare.
In 2025, 8,600 tons of food were donated, with 5 million Italians participating.
The goal of this event is to raise awareness among civil society about the problem of poverty, recalling the concepts of sharing, generosity, and charity, and to collect food through donations from participants according to the educational principle "Sharing needs to share the meaning of life."
"It all began in 1995, during a meeting of the European Food Banks Federation in Paris," recounts Marco Lucchini, secretary general of Fondazione Banco Alimentare Onlus, in "Don Gius: stories of an encounter and changed lives." Mario Amati (a longtime friend) and I learned from colleagues at the Fédération Francaise des Banques Alimentarires about an initiative called the "National Food Collection," which they organized every year on the last Saturday of November. We couldn't return the following month to see how it actually worked, so we waited a year. November 30, 1996 arrived, and we returned to Paris with great curiosity. We were deeply moved by the gesture: in one of the temples of consumption—a huge hypermarket—people of all ages, social classes, and backgrounds were inviting people to purchase an extra item to donate to the poor. We were amazed by the extreme simplicity of the gesture, but also by the "power" each encounter generated. Better than any other communication tool, it expressed our desire: to meet people, tell them who we were, and propose a concrete gesture everyone could make to contribute to a serious problem. Once we returned home, we got to work organizing our first "National Food Drive Day." And on November 29, 1997, the first National Food Drive Day was held. We were just amateurs, but it immediately surpassed our wildest dreams: 1,500 tons of food collected thanks to the heroic help of a couple of dozen thousand volunteers.
Every year in the European Union, over 58 million tons of food are wasted, equivalent to approximately 130 kg per inhabitant, with an estimated economic value of €132 billion (Eurostat, 2025). This is a paradox considering that, at the same time, over 42 million people cannot afford a quality meal every other day. More than half of food waste (53%) occurs in citizens' homes, making consumers key players in both the problem and its potential solution. However, food waste is not only an ethical problem and a loss of economic value: it also has a serious environmental impact, consuming limited natural resources and compromising the sustainability of our future.
It is against this backdrop that the Take Eat Seriously – Don't play with food! project was born, promoted by the Fondazione Banco Alimentare in partnership with the Polytechnic University of Milan, Shair.Tech, and Confconsumatori, and funded by the European Commission (Health and Digital Executive Agency – HaDEA). The initiative focuses on consumer food waste at home and aims to encourage the adoption of more responsible daily habits by combining interactive experiences that foster behavioral change with awareness-raising activities aimed specifically at young people and residents of the metropolitan areas of Milan, Rome, and Catania. The goal is to extend it to the rest of the country.
