California Woman Creates a Hunger App and Feeds Half Million in One Year

25-year-old Komal Ahmad, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley in 2012, and her team launched an app they designed last year in San Francisco. The app is meant to connect businesses with food surpluses to homeless shelters in the area, Daily News reported.

Ahmad called the issue of hunger "the world's dumbest problem," and added "Hunger is bad- it's terrible everywhere- but in America, in the most prosperous, industrialized country in the world, this just shouldn't exist," according to Daily News.

Ahmad says that is why they came up with the idea and created "The Feeding Forward" app to help businesses and even event planners to share the amount of the food they do not need with people who are in need.

Most of this work of coordination can be easily done with a couple of clicks, using the app. Companies or individuals with extra food contact Feeding Forward drivers via the app and disclose their location and then the drivers pick up the food to deliver it to wherever there is need in the San Francisco area.

Ahmad told Daily News that there are so many people in need, especially in the San Francisco area, where the situation is worse than the national average, according to statistics. Ahmad also noted like many others did before that the root of the hunger problem is not the lack of food on Earth, but the inequitable distribution of food. "We need to figure out how to establish sustainable solutions that can distribute the food we already have faster and get it to people who need it faster and safely."

Food waste is a big problem, not only in the U.S. but also worldwide. About one third of the food we produce goes to waste, while hunger and malnutrition are still threats to survival of many people in the world. Daily News reported that US Environmental Protection Agency statistics show that food is the second biggest source of waste in the United States.