For our Intrepid assignment, we were assigned to cover DeWaste, a startup founded by UC Berkeley student Paran Sonthalia to combat food waste. Food waste is a complex issue; it falls in a gray area between an environmental issue and an economic one. For this piece, we decided to take a more neutral focus to it, as bringing in too much of a socioeconomic angle could polarize our viewers, while being too “save the whales” type of environmental could bore our readers to death. Since the Intrepid is based around a theme of entrepreneurism, it gave us a great way to keep the story focused while allowing us to explore the effects of food waste. Paran also gave excellent examples and statistics. Journalism student Tula Pitcher said that she was “grateful that the DeWaste website had a lot of useful statistics that made data visualization relatively simple on my end, while also being easy to understand for the reader!”
The Taco Bell anecdote was perfect. Everyone loves Taco Bell, especially in SLO, where cheap late-night food is harder to find than a Cal Poly student who hasn’t hiked the P. Knowing that they have to throw out beans every 2 hours is shocking to everyone that likes Taco Bell. Plus, one must remember that this happens every 2 hours in every Taco Bell on this planet.
While doing the Community Outreach, I found difficulties in getting people to respond to me as it was purely outreach and not an actual interview. Thankfully, a few people got back to me, and we were able to see that since the pandemic started, the general public has become more passionate about issue of food waste than we initially anticipated. But the true passion was within Paran. When he spoke of food waste and his efforts to combat it, one could see his eyes light up and hear extra gusto in his voice. According to him, “if you’re not passionate about your problem, you’re going to end up going down some route. And when it gets hard, it’s going to be hard to stick with it. It’s all about being passionate about the problem, not just the solution that you’ve come up with, because oftentimes, your solution is going to have to change.” That devotion he has to DeWaste shined through in Megan’s write-up. According to Megan, ‘[she] really enjoyed writing this story because the company and its cofounders are clearly so dedicated to their craft. Paran was very passionate about DeWaste and he gave us a lot of material to work with.”
COVID did make things more difficult as everything had to be virtual. It is shocking how much slower communication gets when you remove in-person learning. “It was rough trying to work with just what was provided for us because of the distance and limitations with COVID, but Paran was very helpful and it was cool to get to interview him,” said Journalism student Lindsey Zang. Thankfully, the quality of the assigned topic made all the struggle worth it.