Longtime Wasted Food reader and Binghamton, N.Y., food recovery mensch Dan Livingston recently emailed to say he had a bit of a dilemma. I’ll let him explain it in his own words and hopefully we can help him out:
I’ve frequented the Wasted Food blog since starting my Americorps position at the Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse (CHOW) over nine-months ago. For me, working with a large-scale food-recovery program (we recovered over a million pounds of food last year alone, and distributed it to over 75 agencies), the blog has been a way to put some of the things I see going on around me into a national and international context. Supplemental to the research assistance and inspiration I’ve been getting from the blog, recently I’ve noticed more collaboration going on through the blog, and thus I come to you with a serious food waste quagmire.
After reading the Produce Project pages, I set out to leverage local wholesalers and retailers into donating their culled produce. This has accounted for more than 10,000 pounds a month, with the most significant portion coming from the Maines Paper and Food Service Warehouse in Conklin, N.Y. just a few miles away.
As it works out, we pick up about a ton of produce from the warehouse three times a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), and we distribute it to soup kitchen cooks who pick it up directly from the warehouse (on Tuesday and Friday). Now, when this new produce started coming in, the cooks were astounded that it had been thrown away so regularly in the past.
This is where you come in. With the Fourth of July holiday coming up, we’re going to be closed on Friday, and are probably going to end up throwing away a lot of food as a result. There are some rural food give-aways that normally manage these large quantities of food when we can’t distribute in our normal fashion, but they too will be closed.
It seems to me, that our only option is to send the food to our local pig farmer, and maybe recover some of that value next year in the form of manure for our gardens. I hate to throw it to the pigs though, but because the culled produce is generally so unstable, it won’t make it the five days to the next soup-kitchen distribution. So, I put it to you fine folks: are there any creative ways to distribute a ton of fresh-ish produce to the hungry (and I don’t mean the hungry pigs)?
Peace and Love,
Dan
9 Comments
Perhaps if Maines Paper and Food is open on Friday, the soup kitchen workers could organize and pick up the Friday load themselves?
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?
How about getting the word out to local churches, YMCAs, etc that the food will be available for pick up on a certain day/time. The churches could let individual families know.
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.
First, Dan you deserve a huge “thumbs up” for the work you are doing. Bravo. I hope you are documenting it well so that it can be used as a model in other communities. Second, I think Emily’s idea is a good one. It can be taken a step further. Why not put the word out to as many people as possible via craigslist, freecycle, facebook, etc. Not everyone who resonds is going to be “deserving.” Even though you want as much food as possible to go to people in need, isn’t it better that it just go to people, rather than pigs? Not that I have anything against pigs! The manure trade will be great for the gardens but perhaps they’ll get just a little.
Please, Jon, if I’m going to be given any Yiddish taglines, I’d much prefer curmudgeon.
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
P.S. Dee Dee,
I believe you are referring to the farmer outside of Denver, Colorado who put out a call for anyone to come and glean the rest of his fields after the harvest. If you look back into the NPR archives, there’s a great story about it. I distinctly remember the farmer saying something to the effect that “It was the worst day I’ve ever had on the farm.” Which isn’t to say that he didn’t end the interview by saying that he would probably do it again next season, just differently. I suppose that if we did such a mass-food-give-away, we’d probably want to have a couple dozen volunteers to help keep things under control.
Well, if you’re hesitant about the mensch (quite a compliment) classification, we can always go with meshuggeneh (crazy guy). Not sure curmudgeon qualifies as Yiddish…
Dan,
Let us know what happens! I hope you come up with a decent compromise, as it sounds like there’s no perfect answer. But we’ll be thinking of you.
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.
What ended up happening was, that through some creative distribution, we ended up giving away all of the produce. Of course, we’d never tell the other soup kitchens that some got called in on special assignment to come collect the food, while others were left out.
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
Hey, that’s GREAT news, Dan! Glad to hear you were able to get creative with your distribution. That’s why you’re my favorite curmudgeonly mensch.