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In the video, piles of pears and leafy greens are stacked on white-clothed tables. People wander through a Mount Pleasant house, smile as they load beets into their canvas bags and wave as they eat salad on the porch. Overlaid onto the clips, in black-on-white font, is a tantalizing description of the scene: “How I spend $0 on groceries living in Washington, D.C.” Anyone living within a hundred-mile radius of the District would perk up at that promise; not having to pay for groceries sounds like winning Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.
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The narrating voice in this TikTok video, which almost immediately went viral, promises homemade sauces, foraged mushrooms and a friendly community. All you have to do is click the link in the poster’s bio to be redirected to the source of this bounty: a community group called ReDelicious.
The voice belongs to Onose Ijewere, a relatively new member of ReDelicious and one of the organization’s social media creators. On the group’s website, you’ll learn that ReDelicious is part co-op, part food lab — created to reduce food waste and provide free groceries to people in need.
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Members of ReDelicious collect leftover produce, baked goods and other food items that would otherwise be thrown away from two local farmers markets. As six of the members emphasized, both on TikTok and in a Zoom call with me, they take their leftovers — a process called “gleaning” — only after a slate of local nonprofits and food banks have had a first pass at the goods.
The team admits that the claim in the viral video is a bit exaggerated. All the members still spend some money on food, as their gleaning doesn’t provide them with dairy products, meat or other easily perishable goods. But they do spend less and waste less.
The group gathers on Sundays, distributing food to members and cooking with the ingredients they’ve gleaned. They never know exactly what they’ll get, but their signature dish is a pesto sauce made from the tops of carrots and other root vegetables — pieces of the plant that most would throw away. Once, they made chlodnik, a Polish stew, with an abundance of leftover beets they weren’t quite sure what to do with. As Ijewere mentions in her TikTok, ReDelicious members also experiment with mycology and foraging for fresh mushrooms — an endeavor that requires some measure of caution and expertise — as well as fermentation and pickling. Every week, members set aside a portion of this gleaned produce for people who are food-insecure.
The co-op originated, in fact, from a now-defunct D.C. picklery whose owner wanted to donate its tools to co-ops and mutual aid organizations. The founding members of ReDelicious, initially united by their interest in sustainable eating, activism and mycology, inherited equipment from the picklery in 2022 and began using it to pickle their own vegetables. But after about two months, the pickling project became unsustainable.
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“We were like, ‘Well, what if we just did the fun, experimental side of things and figured it out from there?’” says Sam Bonar, a founding member of Delicious Democracy, the parent organization of ReDelicious. “We started going to some markets. We found that there were places that weren’t gleaning but still had extras, or had seconds that the gleaners didn’t want to take because it was too squishy, or ugly or whatever. We started experimenting. … ‘Well, maybe we could collect the tops of carrots and turn them into pesto and give the pesto away.’ And we just started to focus on that.”
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The team established a social media presence and website (enter Ijewere, just about a month ago), but until recently, its primary drive in membership came from word of mouth. Members come from all over the D.C. area and work in fields ranging from artificial intelligence to communications to, yes, cooking.
When I met the six members via Zoom, they had gathered to discuss the future of the organization — a future that needs reevaluating because of the leap in interest generated by that viral TikTok, which has been viewed more than 291,000 times.
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“We started with maybe 10 showing up to the Sundays,” says member Lior Wolf. “And last week we had over a hundred.”
They want to remain committed to a community ownership model and to be thoughtful about how they increase their membership. The group’s guiding principle is displayed prominently on ReDelicious’s website: “Scarcity is a myth.”
“Because there’s food, there’s resources,” says Tiffany Pauls, a new member who enters toward the end of our call. “It’s really about putting in the work to redistribute what’s available and build community around that.”
Everyone agrees they would like to have a designated space so they no longer have to operate out of that Mount Pleasant house, which now exceeds its capacity on those busy Sundays.
“It feels like we’re doing something that people can relate to,” says Brianna Gomez McGowan. “What I want people to take away is that there are ways to be creative with community. We’re a bunch of folks who have similar interests and [want] to be able to turn what would have been waste into something delicious, meaningful and nourishing.”
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