On a recent Tuesday, Samantha Luu and Arun Goswami are sorting day-old cupcakes and loaves of artisan bread in a warehouse on Alvarado Street as they wait for texts to come in from TV shoots across Los Angeles.
But “Nobody Wants This,” filming in Eagle Rock, doesn’t have any leftovers from its crew meal, and neither does “The Lincoln Lawyer,” shooting at L.A. Center Studios. So Arun moves on to plan B: delivering hundreds of pounds of leftover Whole Foods baked goods to partners like the Hollywood Food Coalition.
It’s a typical day at Every Day Action, which was launched by former assistant directors Hillary Cohen and Luu in 2020 to help eliminate waste on productions. Drivers from the nonprofit crisscross the city, stopping by the sets of shows including “Abbott Elementary,” “NCIS,” “9-1-1” and “The Pitt.”
“We were kind of sick of how much food was thrown out, and during COVID, we decided to do something about it,” says Cohen, who now runs Every Day Action full time.
Today, the organization distributes more than 85,000 meals a year, feeding unhoused people, veterans and families through charities such as Bridge to Home, SELAH and Alexandria House.
“We go from Santa Clarita to San Pedro every day following film production, and we pick up the gourmet leftover catering at the end of lunch and then deliver it,” explains Cohen.
Luu and Cohen work out of a warehouse in Historic Filipinotown called the Food Insecurity Shared Hub or FISH, where several organizations coordinate storage of food and other supplies before redistributing it.
The goal is to expand the warehouse for cold and pallet storage so that food can also be accepted at night and stored until the next day. To that end, Every Day Action’s third annual celebrity fundraising gala is set for May 17, with Rachel Bloom tapped to host. At the gala, Noah Wyle will present the Heart of Humanity award to “The Pitt” showrunner R. Scott Gemmil. Tickets for a pre-gala happy hour are still available.
Though film and TV production is down across the city, Cohen says commercials are holding strong. “We haven’t seen that big of a decline, and commercials actually do have a significant amount of food waste because they’re just like a two-day shoot,” she says.
Funded by grants from the Annenberg Foundation and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, along with support from entertainment companies, Every Day Action is helping to employ film industry workers too.
“We pay production assistants and background artists and really anyone in the business who is struggling, when we can afford to, to be our drivers,” says Cohen.
Van driver Goswami worked in craft services for eight years, then saw jobs taper off. “It was never this slow,” he says, “I wasn’t really ready for a career change.” Cohen says the Every Day approach is three-pronged — addressing the problem of food waste, hiring embattled production workers and feeding people in need. She worries the pressure will only mount.
“It’s going to become a much bigger crisis over the next two years as the cost of food goes up, as job loss continues to increase,” she predicts. “Food insecurity in Los Angeles and the United States is really going to grow at an exponential rate.”
