The annual summer Fancy Food Show at New York’s Javits Center ended yesterday at 4 p.m. About five hours later, two tractor trailers full of perishables had been picked up and four more trailer loads of dry goods were collected this morning. Who were those masked food rescuers that made it happen? City Harvest.
As you can see, the Fancy Food Show had a wide variety of food on display. From pistachio-studded salami to sweet corn ice cream, New York’s hungry will receive a well-deserved bite of fanciness today. And there’s plenty of it to go around, as City Harvest recovered more than 120,000 pounds of food.
At its end, City Harvest’s 300 volunteers “were swarming, looking for perishables like big hunks of mozzarella and premium cuts of meat,” said Jennifer McLean, City Harvest’s V.P. of Operations. After that, the worker bees boxed and wrapped non-perishable items for this morning’s pick up.
“Time is money in this world. The vendors don’t want to throw their goods away, but they’ve gotta move on to the next show,” said McLean. “If we didn’t pick it up, the food would be pilfered a bit by the Javits Center people, but the majority of it wouldn’t get saved.”
What I’m trying to figure out now is whether exposition food recovery happens elsewhere. As I wrote previously, there’s some food recovery from events at Boston’s Convention Center. And the Greater Chicago Food Depository rescues food from the annual spring Fancy Food Show and other events at McCormick Place. Stay tuned for more sightings of caped food rescuers in action…