Most university students don’t spend reading week picking up thousands of pounds of pumpkins, but Newmarket’s Sebastian Stanescu and Aryan Sadghian did just that while they were catching up over the break.
It all started when Stanescu saw a social-media post from Hubbub, an environmental charity in the United Kingdom, on the Sunday before Halloween about eating pumpkins. The post detailed how 15.8 million pumpkins go to waste after Halloween, which is enough for 95 million meals.
That got Stanescu thinking that he and Sadghian could probably do some good while they were hanging out over the week; they’re both passionate about food waste, after all.
On the Monday afternoon before Halloween, the duo got to work and did what they would describe as “minimal” planning without knowing what would exactly happen and reached out to a few different places just hoping for the best.
“We didn’t have time,” Stanescu said. “But we were confident we could do something.”
After calling different local schools about a potential pumpkin drive, one request worked out at Canadian Martyrs Catholic Elementary School in Newmarket.
They also went to as many grocery stores as they could from Bradford West Gwillimbury to Aurora looking for leftover pumpkins the stores would be willing to donate and then went to various farms where farmers let them pick the pumpkins they still had.
From Halloween night to Nov. 3, Stanescu and Sadghian drove over, fitting as many pumpkins in their Honda CR-V as they could and they would weigh them with a goal of donating 500 pounds of pumpkins.
But in less than a week, they collected 3,300 pounds of pumpkin that would have gone to waste and donated it to the Newmarket Food Pantry and DogTales Rescue and Sanctuary in King City.
“Carved pumpkins can be donated still because animals can eat them,” Stanescu said.
“Just under half of the donations went to the food pantry and over half went to DogTales,” added Sadghian. “DogTales said it would be enough to feed their rescues for the rest of the winter.”
It was an interesting experience for the pair, Sadghian said, because everyone was willing to give them the pumpkins and the organizations were so happy to accept the donations.
“As long as we did the work, people wanted to help,” he said. “Grocery stores were going to throw everything out after Halloween and farms can’t sell them if they don’t pass appearance checks.”
While Stanescu and Sadghian are proud of what they accomplished, they don’t think what they did was anything extraordinary. They said they were just the middle man between a community that was happy to give and organizations that were in need of support.
“All we really did was just pass it off,” said Sadghian. “It was easy, we just put time in.”
Both Stanescu and Sadghian are in agreement that the most important aspect of this was awareness because it was shocking to them how much could be done between two friends with a little time on their hands.
It opened their eyes so much that they’re planning to do something to help with food waste during the holidays and will be continuing the pumpkin drive next year with a goal of making 3,300 pounds look like nothing.
“We’re confident we can get so much more saved,” Stanescu said. “At the end of the day, if people know what can be done, awareness is so much further reaching than what two guys can do.”
