On a rainy day after Helsinki's annual Slush conference, Finnish entrepreneur Ville Leppala took TechCrunch behind the scenes of a three-party partnership between Irish drone delivery company Manna, DoorDash-owned food delivery platform Wolt, and his own startup, Huuva. Huuva, whose name means kitchen hood, raised a seed round led by General Catalyst in 2022 with the promise of bringing good food to the suburbs. While it branched out of its cloud kitchen origins, its business still relies heavily on delivery tech ' now including drones. 'If available, we'll send your order with a drone.' That's how Wolt has been notifying customers ordering from Huuva's Niittari location in Espoo, which is part of the Helsinki metropolitan area, but which Leppala sees as particularly well suited for this concept. While European suburbs aren't as sprawling as those in the United States, people who work, study, and live in places like Espoo still lack the variety of options they can find in the capital. Huuva lets them order popular items from partner restaurant brands ' and drones help those orders arrive faster, Leppala said....

The U.S. government has caused massive food waste during President Donald Trump's second term. Policies such as immigration raids, tariff changes and temporary and permanent cuts to food assistance programs have left farmers short of workers and money, food rotting in fields and warehouses, and millions of Americans hungry. And that doesn't even include the administration's actual destruction of edible food. The U.S. government estimates that more than 47 million people in America don't have enough food to eat ' even with federal and state governments spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on programs to help them. Yet, huge amounts of food ' on average in the U.S., as much as 40% of it ' rots before being eaten. That amount is equivalent to 120 billion meals a year: more than twice as many meals as would be needed to feed those 47 million hungry Americans three times a day for an entire year. This colossal waste has enormous economic costs and renders useless all the water and resources used to grow the food. In addition, as it rots, the wasted food emits in the U.S. alone over 4 million metric tons of methane ' a heat-trapping greenhouse gas....

The 2025 government shutdown drew widespread attention to how many Americans struggle to get enough food. For 43 days, the more than 42 million Americans who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits had to find other ways to stock their cupboards. Her sentiment reflects an often underappreciated fact about food. Food is not just a matter of survival. What and how you eat is also a symbol of your social status. Being unable to reliably feed your family healthy and nutritious foods in a way that aligns with your values can feel undignified. It can make people feel unseen and less important than others. As researchers who study food inequality, nutrition and food justice, we have spent decades surveying and interviewing Americans about how they eat. We have witnessed firsthand how food assistance does help people meet their basic needs, but how it can also be stigmatizing and diminish their sense of dignity. We have also studied alternatives to typical charitable food programs that, despite good intentions, tend to induce shame. We have learned that it is possible to help people put food on the table while preserving their dignity....

I had been preparing for a summer of field work studying foraged desert plants in a remote part of Australia when the pandemic hit, and my travel plans were abruptly frozen. It was March, right before morel mushrooms emerge in central Pennsylvania. I wasn't doing a lot other than going on long hikes and taking classes remotely at Penn State for my doctoral degree in ecology and anthropology. One of the classes was an agroforestry class with Eric Burkhart. We studied how agriculture and forests benefit people and the environment. Foragers have been harvesting wild mushrooms in what is now Pennsylvania and the rest of the U.S. mid-Atlantic region for generations, but the extent and specifics of the practice in the region had not been formally studied. We conducted a series of surveys in 2022 and 2023 that revealed a wide variety of fungi are foraged in the region ' though morels, chicken of the woods and chanterelles are most common. We also learned that harvesters use the mushrooms primarily for food and medicinal purposes, and that foragers create communities that share knowledge. These community based projects often use social media tools as a way for mushroom harvesters to share pictures, notes and even the results of DNA sequences....