text: If you think young Americans are lazy, spend five minutes talking with Maria Rose Belding. 
   
   The 20-year-old American University sophomore is the co-founder of MEANS Database, which connects people, organizations, and businesses with extra food with food banks and pantries that need it. In its first year, the food recovery notification system rescued about 4,000 pounds of food; became the first non-profit to win the GW New Venture Competition; and just took home a $10,000 prize from L’Oreal Paris through its Women Of Worth campaign. (At the L’Oreal Paris celebration event last week, Belding was the youngest of the 10 honorees.) It’s also figuring out how to make enough money to become self sufficient, a rarity for non-profits. 
   
   meansdatabase.com 
   
   MEANS operates through both a website and an app, creating a simple system: A donor lists what’s available, donees nearby get notifications, someone claims it and arranges for pick-up. As a high school freshman, Belding was volunteering at a local soup pantry in her hometown in Iowa, when she watched the director scramble to find recipients for the 10,000 boxes of macaroni and cheese a church had donated. Not everything found a home before the expiration date, and a lot ended up in the trash. 
   
   In the world of food waste, this is the oft-cited paradox: There are 48 million Americans living in food insecurity, meaning that, at times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food because they didn’t have sufficient money or other resources. Yet Americans waste an estimated 40% of the country’s food. It’s not a problem of supply or demand. It’s connecting the two. 
   
   Hunger is a problem hitting more people than most realize, including college students. “We have several campus food pantries on MEANS,” Belding tells Quartz. “We will be able to funnel food to the same kids we sit in class with.” 
   
   Belding’s idea didn’t become a reality, though, until she met her co-founder, Grant Nelson. He developed the technology while she found the donors, food banks, and pantries that would use the database. 
   
   The technology and wide reach—it currently has over 200 donor and recipient accounts representing more than 2,000 partner agencies and programs, spread out over 27 states—are largely what makes MEANS different from other food rescue organizations. City Harvest, for example, provides a similar service in New York, rescuing a whopping 50 million pounds of food just this year. But it works at a larger scale and arranges the legwork itself, like matching and transporting donations with food kitchens that need them. The MEANS platform allows small organizations and individuals to participate on a scale that might be too small for an organization like City Harvest, but crucial to the people they help. Belding says nearly every donation finds a new home—the only one she could remember that didn’t was 23 individually wrapped cupcakes with a very short window of recovery time. 
   
   Getty Images for L'Oreal Paris Belding strikes a pose at the L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth 2015 Celebration in New York. 
   
   Thanks in part to wins like the one from GW ($42,500 in cash and $20,000 in prizes) and L’Oreal, MEANS now has a staff of 11 people, as well as 10 interns and volunteers. But, says Belding, “I’m not content to be chasing other people’s money.” So she and her team are working on a system to help them become less grant dependent. 
   
   While large retail donors don’t currently claim tax credits for their donation—they’re too small and localized to be worth the trouble—MEANS already tracks all the information they would need. ”For us, it’s a matter of keystrokes,” says Belding. 
   
   Companies can use it to get tax benefits, while MEANS—which is free for users—takes a small fee. ”We haven’t started executing it yet, but every conversation with retailers we’ve had has been, ‘You can build that?'” 
   
   Next year, Belding hopes to launch that program, grow and improve the one already in place, and create a public, searchable directory of food pantries. (She’s found that half the pantries she and her team have called list wrong numbers.) 
   
   This week, though, Belding is focused on finals. On top of the full-time hours she puts into MEANS—she didn’t want to say how many because her parents will read the story—she is still a student. And a very impressive one. Her report card this semester, she says, should be all As and A-minuses. “There might be a B-plus, but I’m hoping not.” ||||| Hear me out. 
   
   I hated math in high school. In my 10th grade diary, I referred to geometry as 'a bunch of self-important shapes searching for nonexistent meaning.' (Sorry, Mr. Cutler.) At 16, I was full of sarcasm and empty of self-awareness, convinced learning trig was a waste of time and a distraction from the side project holding all my interest: trying to build a website for emergency food providers. Math felt like an exercise in frustration and wholly disconnected from trying to feed people struggling with hunger. 
   
   I was wrong. 
   
   I was trying to build a program that made it easier for emergency feeding systems like food pantries to communicate with each other and their donors. The idea, which I called MEANS (Matching Excess And Need for Stability), made sense in my head, but I couldn't get it to translate to a computer. That changed when I met Grant Nelson, a GWU law student who grew up 45 minutes from my Iowa hometown. A self-taught programmer, he looked at my idea and said, "I think I can build that." He did. 
   
   Grant became MEANS' co-founder and director of tech. He'd only been inside a food pantry once and I'd never seen real computer code. It was a huge learning curve for both of us, and one I couldn't have calculated the arc of if my life depended on it. As Grant introduced me to the concept of data science, it was clear I owed a few high school math teachers an apology. (Sorry, guys. I hope this makes up for some of the masterful eye rolls I sent your subject's way over the years.) 
   
   I'm 20 now, and while my sarcasm supply is still aplenty, I've done a 180 on how I feel about math. (See what I did there?) There are now 11 young people, age 18 to 27, on Team MEANS, and we're working with hundreds of users representing thousands of programs and partnerships to reduce food waste and hunger at the same time. We're using a whole lot of math to do it, from tackling big data to determine the food pantries most likely to need and use MEANS to developing a public directory of emergency food resources around the country. It was because of meticulous record-keeping and data science that we discovered that as many as 50% of online listings for emergency food providers have incorrect contact information, and it is through coding and more data science that we're working to fix it. Math isn't the problem I thought it was - it's the solution. 
   
   MEANS is an incredibly simple idea. Food pantries tell our system where they are, what they need and how far they're willing to travel to get it. The same platform allows pantries to notify their neighbor agencies when they're overwhelmed with a too-large donation, with traditional donors like grocery stores and restaurants able to use the same website to get food into the hands of the hungry. Our concept is simple and the execution extraordinarily complicated. Without math and its cooler cousin data science, we could have never brought MEANS to life. 
   
   Math matters, for developing strategy, discovering the big picture and daring to think as differently as we have about hunger and food waste. Math can draw us a map of where to go next and numbers can lead us down paths we never considered before. There is too much need in this world to be focused solely on doing good - we have to also focus on doing that good well. Hunger is an enormous problem, and with 48 million Americans struggling to put food on the table, we need absolutely every tool we can find to build smart, sustainable solutions. MEANS lives in the space where empathy and entrepreneurship meet, and I'm so proud of a staff that never aims low and is always pushing for new goals. Charity can and should have a big brain to match its big heart. After all, if I remember correctly...with the right team, it's possible to build an equation where the limit does not exist. 
   
   Maria Rose Belding is a (mostly) reformed high school math class nap-taker and co-founder/executive director of the MEANS Database. Now a college sophomore, Maria Rose is a nationally published writer on hunger and poverty, and the resources she developed for high schoolers tackling food insecurity are in the hands of more than a thousand students in schools in nine countries. She was recognized as a L'Oréal Paris Women of Worth in 2015 for making an extraordinary difference in her community. ||||| Maria Rose Belding and Grant Nelson founded a sprawling online network that connects thousands of food pantries in 24 states, allowing those organizations to quickly share surplus food that might have gone to waste otherwise. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) 
   
   One of the most profound contradictions of modern America is that more than 45 million Americans don’t have enough to eat, but the country wastes an estimated 40 percent of its food. The forces fueling this paradox are complex: Grocery stores think they’ll assume legal liability in donating food. Farmers allow edible, but homely fruit to rot in fear it won’t sell. Bananas blacken on all our shelves. 
   
   But the reasons behind this waste didn’t feel so complex to a teenage girl named Maria Rose Belding on a chilly Iowa day five years ago. 
   
   The whole thing felt simple. It felt wrong. It felt like something had to change. 
   
   Belding, then a volunteer at a local food pantry in Pella, had just thrown out hundreds of boxes of expired mac and cheese in front of numerous people lining up outside to collect food. 
   
   “We were throwing away all of this food just because we couldn’t communicate,” Belding, then a freshman in high school, remembers venting that day. That frustration would ultimately lead the American University sophomore to develop a groundbreaking innovation in the long — and often inefficient — war on hunger. 
   
   After years of research, Belding, 20, has founded a sprawling online network that connects thousands of food pantries in 24 states, allowing them to quickly share surplus food that might have otherwise gone to waste. Pantries simply post their excess food to the program — and someone else in the network picks it up and puts it to use. The database has saved an estimated two tons of food. 
   
   L’Oréal Paris has since lauded the program, last week naming Belding one of its 10 women of worth. So has Arianna Huffington. And experts agree programs such as the interactive MEANS website, which stands for Matching Excess and Need for Stability, can close lapses in communication between pantries and chip away at the country’s colossal problem with chronic waste. 
   
   Food waste “needs to be addressed on multiple levels,” said Mathy Stanislaus, a senior official with the Environmental Protection Agency who works on ending food waste. “Part is wider knowledge of the problem, but also tools [like this] to reduce waste.” 
   
   The stakes couldn’t be higher. Food production accounts for around 10 percent of the national energy budget, uses half of the country’s land and consumes around 80 percent of all the freshwater used in the United States, according to a paper published in 2012 by the National Resources Defense Council. 
   
   That means, the study noted, Americans squander $165 billion every year on food destined for landfills, where the decomposition of organic matter emits 16 percent of the country’s methane — a greenhouse gas that’s 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. 
   
   Even people who donate to their local pantries are contributing, to some degree, to the problem. Emergency food centers have long been the last stop for whatever’s lurking in the back of America’s cupboards. And so, people donate an endless supply of near-expired creamed corn, beans and Honeybuns. The excess of product often does one of two things. It expires on the shelf and gets thrown out. Or it clutters the pantry so much that nonprofits can’t accept premium donations that could immediately serve a community. 
   
   “It’s very common for grocers to give poorly selling products in bulk to emergency food providers,” Belding said. “That’s just fine. But when you get 400 jars of peanut butter and you have two weeks to get rid of them and serve 100 people a month, total, and only distribute four times a month, that rapidly becomes a problem.” 
   
   When Belding started researching the concept behind the MEANS database while in high school, she was sure someone had beaten her to it. But she soon realized that the emergent technologies that had upended so many industries — tools to discern opportunity in unlikely places — hadn’t yet found their way to the nation’s nonprofit food pantries. Around half of the phone numbers listed under food pantries, she said, didn’t even work. 
   
   Belding thought she might be onto something. In her mind, there was clear need for a network. And so, at the beginning of her freshman year, she arrived at a friend’s house and got to talking with his 24-year-old brother, Grant Nelson. Nelson, now a third-year law student at George Washington University and program co-founder, had experience with building programs. So she asked him if he could help. 
   
   He wasn’t sure he wanted to. “This struck me as a changing-people’s-behavior problem, rather than providing a tool to fulfill a need,” he said. “I said: ‘Phones exist. Emails exist. Twitter exists. Facebook exists. What could we possibly build that would be slicker for all of the food banks and food pantries to communicate with each other that isn’t already solved by something else?’ ” 
   
   In the end, he helped anyway. It took more than a year. A year of planning, researching and building program after program. Then in February, the website launched. 
   
   Months passed. In May, Belding was sitting in class when she saw one of their nascent users had posted an item to the site. This was the moment, she realized, when the project would either succeed or fail. A sense of panic seized her when she saw someone was giving away assorted varieties of canned beans. “They’re like the off-brand Mountain Dew in the food world,” Belding said. “You’ll take it only if you have no other option. . . . So we were all anxiously sitting by our computers hitting refresh, and I said, ‘Please, someone take this.’ And then, it’s gone. It just disappeared. . . . The beans had moved.” 
   
   “We were kind of desperate,” said Stephanie Shallah, an official with the District’s So Others Might Eat who had posted the item. “Beans come so often to me that I didn’t think anyone would want them. So I said, ‘I’m going to just post it and see what happens.’ I said, ‘I have nothing to lose.’ ” She said a Landover pantry serving a large Hispanic population took the goods. 
   
   Things then happened very quickly for MEANS. The organization now commands a staff of several programmers paid through grant money and even a few interns who Belding concedes are older than she. The number of members on the site has grown from around 50 larger food banks in June to more than 200, opening up a network of thousands of smaller-shop pantries that work under the umbrella of those banks. 
   
   But there’s still a lot of work to do, Belding said. There are still 26 states that remain untapped. There’s still the world. Belding said she had more calls to make. More connections to forge.
target: – There are 48 million Americans who, at some point each year, may be unable to get enough food. Meanwhile, a third of the country's food goes to waste. This isn't as easy an issue to solve as it sounds—something Maria Rose Belding realized while volunteering at a soup pantry as a teen. At one point, the pantry received 10,000 boxes of mac 'n cheese, but couldn't find enough people in need before the stuff expired, reports Quartz. "We were throwing away all of this food just because we couldn't communicate," Belding tells the Washington Post. Now a 20-year-old American University student, Belding hopes the app and website she co-created can help: Overflowing pantries list what extra food they have available on the MEANS (Matching Excess and Need for Stability) Database, and neighboring pantries get notifications, Belding writes at the Huffington Post. Grocery stores and restaurants with food to unload can make use of the site, too. Belding remembers watching the first donation of canned beans pop up after MEANS launched in February. "We were all anxiously sitting by our computers hitting refresh," she says—the anxiety intensified by the fact that beans are donated so regularly they aren't a hot commodity. Suddenly, "it just disappeared." Since then, the database has kept 4,000 pounds of food from the trash. While a similar service saved 50 million pounds of food in New York in 2015 by matching donations with food kitchens, MEANS allows smaller organizations to do the ground work themselves, and currently has 200 accounts across 27 states. While grants and awards keep the site running for now, Belding has plans: to track large retailers' donations from a tax-benefit perspective, something most don't currently do since those donations are made on such a local level. MEANS would charge a small fee for doing all the tracking. (On the food front, this young chef has left one of the world's best restaurants to try to save America's school lunch program.)