Despite living in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, one in seven US residents is “food insecure”. These 48 million people struggle to reliably find food, even as the rest of the population throw out about 60m tonnes of it a year.

Typically America’s food-insecure population is also low-income and trapped in food deserts, where they lack fresh, healthy, affordable eating options. Residents of food deserts make up almost 18% of the population, or about 54.4 million people, who live more than half a mile away from the nearest supermarket in urban areas or more than 10 miles away in rural areas.

“It’s just ridiculous in a country that is as resource-rich as we are,” says 30-year-old Anu Samarajiva, a graduate student at Washington University in St Louis. “The issue isn’t a lack of food or a lack of resources, but of distribution, pickup and logistics.”

Keen to make a change, Samarajiva and her classmates Irum Javed and Lanxi Zhang came up with a proposal to tackle the issue – by harnessing another service in a predicament of its own.

If the problem is distribution, they thought, then who better able to handle it than the king of delivery: the United States Postal Service (USPS)? The post office department has long been entrenched in America’s neighbourhoods, with more than 30,000 physical branches across the country.

The team’s proposal, which won the Urban SOS: Fair Share competition in January, envisages using the vast postal system network to improve food security in the US. Grocery stores and markets with surplus perishable foods would use the USPS app to schedule pickups, and USPS trucks that are either refrigerated or equipped with refrigerated bags would then deliver those pickups to hunger-relief organisations around the region. USPS offices, 17% of which have shuttered since 1971, could also be reconfigured as food-recovery storage and shopping centres.

A rendering of the proposal to use closed USPS offices as food-recovery storage centres.

First Class Meal, as the project is called, received $7,500 to fund its development alongside the implementation guidance of engineering giant AECOM and the Van Alen Institute, which conducted the ideas competition with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities programme (which also supports Guardian Cities).

As they work to come up with a creative funding model and secure partnerships with the USPS and other groups, First Class Meal is eager to put their plan into action. Their sights are set on the most food-insecure county in the nation, Los Angeles County, where 1.5 million people are food insecure, according to Iesha Siler of the LA Food Policy Council. “With urban sprawl, a lot of communities have been left behind.”

With urban sprawl, a lot of communities have been left behind Iesha Siler

With a model like First Class Meal, Siler says, distributed infrastructure can stay local and continue to benefit the community, only in a reimagined way. “People would like to see those post-office spaces be put to use and come back to life, instead of becoming blighted properties.”

First Class Meal’s proposed application of the postal service would, if successful, do more than just reinvigorate infrastructure. It would knock down the biggest stumbling block facing all the other food-security startups around the country and the globe: sustainable transport. Unlike the First Class Meal idea, the delivery and distribution trips made by these startups have one purpose only.

Nevertheless, the growing number of organisations dedicated to food recovery and redistribution across the US are achieving great things.Food Forward in California and Food for Free in Massachusetts salvage surplus produce from farmers markets, events, farms and wholesale stores and distribute it to food banks. They rescue millions of pounds of surplus produce each year – but rely on employees and volunteers to run the pick-ups and drop-offs. Chicago-based MealConnect, which partners with mega-stores such as Walmart and Target, uses a real-time online platform to match donors with its 46 member food banks – the latter of which become responsible for the transport.

Food For Free staff pick up leftover food from Harvard University graduation events. Photograph: Boston Globe via Getty Images

Also serving Chicago is Zero Percent, a paid service that focuses on restaurant leftovers. So far the startup has donated more than one million meals from commercial kitchens around the city, but charges businesses a fee to make up for the cost of managing its own drivers for deliveries.

Some organisations, including Food for All in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Too Good to Go across Europe, have bypassed the delivery component altogether. These models aggregate surplus restaurant food into a digital marketplace, from which low-income consumers and discount eaters can purchase their meals and pick them up themselves.

“Everybody who is low on their budget, like students and families who don’t earn so much, can still enjoy a nice meal and do something for the environment,” says Klaus Pedersen, CMO of Too Good to Go, which launched in Denmark, expanded to the UK, Norway, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland and Sweden, and may soon open in New York. “When we spend so much energy and resources and money on producing food, it’s very silly to throw it out in the bin.”

For Pedersen and others, the bin represents a major problem in industrialised countries around the globe, whose food waste amounts to 3.3bn tonnes in carbon dioxide emissions each year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Association. But they believe technology can help solve it.

“Food security is such a huge challenge, but it’s also a space that’s ripe with opportunity,” says Greg Behrman, founder of NationSwell, a digital media company focused on innovation. “There’s a perfect lane for tech to come in and address the inefficiencies.”

The First Class Meal student team says they want to use tech in a way that goes beyond a single app, to involve entire systems, spaces and government agencies. For them, this means looking at how to take advantage of existing infrastructures rather than build entirely new ones.

Leveraging a well-established network of offices, routes and delivery people is also, of course, a lot cheaper. And the benefits are manifold, says James Johnson-Piett, CEO of the community development venture Urbane Development. Not only does “activating spaces” bring underused buildings back to life, he says, but it helps the communities they serve “become a lot more dynamic”, by way of new jobs, greater entrepreneurship and increased public interest.

“If you think about the evolution of a space, buildings have a life cycle,” Johnson-Piett says. “They could be a manufacturing space in one era. They could be an artist space in the next era. They could be a residential space in the another era.” The nation’s post offices, then, could well be the food-security centres of the future.

This article was amended on 9 February 2017 to remove references to the US Postal Service being “declining”.

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