Only 8 of 156 rescued-food 'meals' in an Indonesian city reached the calorie mark for one sitting. Some were a single dish, and 98 came from one donor of burgers, nuggets and fried chicken

Saving food from the bin and feeding people who are short of it sounds like one good deed that does two jobs. A team from universities in Indonesia and Hungary asked the question that tends to come second: how nourishing is the food once it arrives? Their answer, published in Food Science & Nutrition on 25 October, comes from the records of one volunteer group, Berbagi Bites Jogja, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

The group collects surplus from hotels, restaurants, caterers, bakeries and cafes and passes it on, mainly to underprivileged university students at first and later also to orphanages, shelters, elderly homes and others short of food. The analysis covered eight donors (five hotels, two bakeries and a food factory) from July 2024 to October 2025. Each donation to a group of recipients was counted as one meal, whether it was one dish or many, and the total was divided by the number of people. That gave 156 meals. Nutrients were then estimated from dish names using Indonesia's national food composition table and set against the country's recommended daily amounts. The yardstick was 30% of a day's needs per meal.

Adding up the paper's percentages, only 8 of the 156 meals reached 30% of daily energy, 7 reached it for carbohydrate and 26 for fat. Protein did far better, at 62 of 156. On average an adult's meal carried 338 kcal, about half of the 677 kcal that 30% works out to. Children's meals averaged 299 kcal and adolescents' 202 kcal, the lowest of the three even though adolescents have the highest energy target. Protein averaged 23.0 g for children and 21.4 g for adults, both over the line, but only 13.3 g for adolescents.

The supply itself was lopsided. Grains and animal protein dominated, while fruit, beans, nuts and plant protein were scarce. In the paper's menu table, every fruit, the tempeh and every bean and nut dish sit under one donor, which has a single meal in the analysis. Two donors supplied 143 of the 156 meals: one whose listed menu is all burgers, patties, nuggets, fried chicken and meatballs (98 meals, 53% reaching the protein mark), and one listed under bakery products (45 meals, 11%). That mix probably explains an odd result, on our reading: carbohydrate fell furthest short even though grain dishes were among the most common. The authors also flag how much of the food was fried or processed.

The caveats are big, and the authors state most of them. The 30% test assumes a complete meal, and a piece of fruit or bread can't pass it however good it is. Donors whose events bundled several dishes score higher simply because the dishes are added together. Portion weights were volunteers' estimates, some bakery and packaged weights included the wrapper, and dishes missing from the food table were matched to similar ones. Records without full details were dropped, and the paper doesn't say how many. Only calories, protein, fat and carbohydrate were estimated, so fibre, vitamins, minerals and salt are unknown, and nobody recorded what recipients ate for the rest of the day. It is also one organisation, and the authors say the results can't be generalised. What it does support is modest and practical: rescue groups and donors could share the job of asking for more fresh, varied food, and of not treating every donated item as a meal.