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Food waste
Dec. 9th, 2016 09:09 pmI'm pretty enthusiastic about my church's food program, where once a week we have a meal and food pantry for the food insecure in the area. We work with Second Harvest, and a fairly new program is one where volunteers from the program go to local grocery store recruited by the food bank and pick up food that is still good, but that has reached it's 'sell by' date, meaning it can't be sold. Before this program, they had to throw it away. Now, as long as it is in good shape, they can donate it.
We get food to give away, they get a tax break. The folks who come get a few days worth of food. Everyone wins, right?
We pick up from three stores in the area. This is understandably all perishable stuff that need refridgeration, bread, and fresh baked goods that go bad quickly (the kind of things you find on the "oops, we overbaked" shelf or cart". We have three refridgerators and three large freezers- and every week they are stuffed. The shelves are stuffed with the bread and baked goods. We sort it before it goes out because sometimes the bread molds or the frozen stuff has freezer burn or the produce goes bad.
That woke me up to just how much food- good, edible food- gets wasted every day. The solution- to give it away- sounds simple. It's not. Part of the issue is how to get it to who needs it.
Someone must pick the food up DAILY, weigh it, and keep records. There must be room to store it, and it needs to be sorted and disposal found for what is not edible and must be discarded. One of the freezers died on us, and that means that we have problems storing the frozen stuff. That means we need daytime volunteers, which are not easy to find.
Ah well. We're doing our part so far. And sometimes that's the best we can hope for.
We get food to give away, they get a tax break. The folks who come get a few days worth of food. Everyone wins, right?
We pick up from three stores in the area. This is understandably all perishable stuff that need refridgeration, bread, and fresh baked goods that go bad quickly (the kind of things you find on the "oops, we overbaked" shelf or cart". We have three refridgerators and three large freezers- and every week they are stuffed. The shelves are stuffed with the bread and baked goods. We sort it before it goes out because sometimes the bread molds or the frozen stuff has freezer burn or the produce goes bad.
That woke me up to just how much food- good, edible food- gets wasted every day. The solution- to give it away- sounds simple. It's not. Part of the issue is how to get it to who needs it.
Someone must pick the food up DAILY, weigh it, and keep records. There must be room to store it, and it needs to be sorted and disposal found for what is not edible and must be discarded. One of the freezers died on us, and that means that we have problems storing the frozen stuff. That means we need daytime volunteers, which are not easy to find.
Ah well. We're doing our part so far. And sometimes that's the best we can hope for.
