As for my comment about the proper label for my activity: I gladly accept the title of mensch, but I believe that many of the folks who I coax into donating would consider me quite the kermudgeon. You folks, gladly, see the situation differently.

Peace and Love,
Dan

This is a long shot, but I wonder if the police would volunteer some officers to help keep order during an open warehouse? If not, perhaps you could draft in some boy scouts, Future Farmers of America, congregants, campers or school group…
Maybe if you made it quite clear that this was a one-day thing, people wouldn’t return to the warehouse instead of their local soup kitchen.

Whatever happens, don’t lose sight of the big picture: You’re diverting tons of food each week from the landfill to the hungry. Even those who occasionally wield baguettes. Be well.

Just to respond though, thanks for the brainstorming support. I’ll tell you, in a slightly better world, there wouldn’t be any CHOWs or Food Banks, and part of bringing that about would be a situation where soup kitchens could go right to the Maines’ of the world and repurpose their food waste that way. As it works out, those big wholesalers are sometimes quite reluctant to even work with a Food Bank or a CHOW, but they do because we create, amongst other things, a comfortable distance between them and the hungry. Thank you for your idea Missy, and I’m not at all unsympathetic to it, but I know that there are few if any business owners who want to get their business that closely integrated with charity.

Also, I like the idea of changing up our hours and our distribution by allowing the soup kitchens to come on a different day, or just letting a line form of hungry people outside the warehouse, but I think that that’s a bit complicated by certain things too. Things are getting rough out there; donations are way down, and the peak of the mountain of the hungry climbs upwards into the clouds, where we don’t know when it ends. The Food Bank of the Southern Tier does a mobile food pantry, and when they come to Binghamton, they routinely see over a thousand people line up. The mobile food pantry can do that though, because the vehicle is there, and gone the next day. Our warehouse is here day after day, and I think there is reasonable concern that there will be an impression formed in people’s minds about the warehouse, that it’s a better place to get food than the pantries and soup kitchens. It’s strange, and I wouldn’t see the validity in the concern if our driver hadn’t been accosted by baguette wielding old ladies who were on the Salvation Army Bread Line one day a few weeks back. He was delivering the bread and other baked goods, when a couple of women who were frustrated and angry and weren’t getting what they wanted by talking to him, decided to take a couple of loaves and take out their frustration.

It’s difficult for me to accept that we can’t just bend our schedule a little, or flex our distribution network in the slightest, but the more I do this work the more I understand why that’s a tall order.

Peace and Love,
Dan

Wasn’t there a story of someone opening their farm up to gleaning and then the turnout was unbelievably high? Families are struggling right now -they might be really glad to come out to the location and pick up food for themselves and their neighbors.

Or you could make an additional pickup at Maines on Thursday and stay open a little later so the Food Workers could pick up then?