Pay It Forward: Maryland man recovers food to make an impact on hunger

ROCKVILLE, Md. - Here's a staggering statistic -133 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States each year. That translates to 161 billion dollars spent on food...that ended up in the trash.

Even still, 2.9 million households are what the USDA considers food insecure, meaning they don't have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs. While some are struggling to find answers.

Others are working to be the answer, the solution to the problem. And Brett Meyers is one of them. Years ago he managed a fast food establishment and says the amount of food he had to throw away each night was depressing.

"It's really unacceptable that there's so much food going to waste when there are so many people in need," Meyers says. "If you have this much food waste and this much hunger. Let's have those two problems be each other's solutions."

It's a solution Mama Lucia owners, Bruno Fabi and Jimmy Fragoyannis are getting behind wholeheartedly. They give fresh food to the program daily.

Fabi says, "There are plenty of people that are not having meals. Fragoyannis agrees, "In the mornings kids go to school hungry and in the night they go to bed and they don't eat dinner. It's staggering."

Easterns Automotive Group contributed more than 50 30-pound turkeys and dozens sweet-potato pies.

If you know someone who should be featured on Pay It Forward, you can nominate them here. In your email, be sure to include who they are and why they deserve to be recognized.