I volunteer at a food bank, and the company that sends us our food decides what we get. Last Tuesday they sent so much produce we could not fit it all into fridges. We were trying to give away cases of the food on Wednesday, but people were turning it down because they had no place to store a case of tomatoes, or cauliflower. This was what we had left after last Wednesday’s morning give away. Not pictured the 5000lbs of watermelons, the 2500lbs of onions (those will last a lot longer).
The company that supplies us wants to move from sending shipments every other week, to once a month. This would cause even more no produce loss.
It is so frustrating to have all this food for it to go bad. Even if we got the same volume of produce, but there was variation in what it is we could give it away easier.
Edit: I posted this in a comment.
Because of bureaucracy we have to request this. If it is found out we are giving away the food to unapproved recipients we can lose all of our funding. If we give to unapproved recipients and they in turn give us prepared food to give out, that is okay.
Word got out that we were loading up my pickup with food and taking it to the homeless camps. I did get a number of them to start coming to the bank to get food. But it was easier when I could take stuff to them.
We are not allowed to simply give it out to anyone. This is not like a church pantry where all of the food is donated by the community and’s parishioners. There is government funding, as well as private businesses, which I am guessing get their money back from the government for funding this. If we could simply give it to anyone we would not be in this situation.
It’s not the bureaucracy. It’s the capitalist that run the bureaucracy. In a society like this, it’s all about managing perception. It’s all about your brand. It’s about looking good and not doing good. As things start to centralize further and further, you’ll see what this is all about. In my town we have hooverviles. The homeless are there to remind you to work harder, or you’ll become homeless. Working inside the system will not work. Capitalism in the US Empire need overthrown.
The branding is one aspect, they definitely publicize the food bank donations and it’s often one of the few things food manufacturers do that sounds good. The rest is just profit and employing mass contract labor at near minimum wage.
If they threw out thousands of pounds of product it would look like a bad number if publicized… if they donate ten thousand pounds of tomatoes a couple days before they go bad they get to look like they donated ten thousand pounds of tomatoes in value, and then they get to write that off as a donation.
I’m pretty sure when they do said “donations” they get to write off the retail value, whereas if they just wrote it off as a loss to the business it would only be the actual cost.
At the food bank where my mother works, she finds pig farmers are a good source to get rid of almost gone food. While it’s not solving the feeding people part, it does help with disposal. Good luck, hopefully you can pickle some of it too.
This happens ( was exposed) at our local foodbank. (London, UK)
You could give it to a pig/chicken farm, or compost it at the very least.
Not being funny, but what the fuck is a homeless person going to do with a raw cauliflower?
I often see carrier bags of dry pasta, tinned tomatoes and stuff just dumped at the roadside, because the person they’d given it to has no way of doing anything with it. Apparently they’re supposed to give only food they can prepare, but that clearly doesn’t always happen.
Food waste is part of the system. It’s fine. It’s what stops a shortage from becoming a famine.
Not everyone who comes through the food bank is homeless.
I’m unsure I get your point, how does waste prevent a shortage from becoming a famine ?
Also, both raw cauliflower and tinned tomatoes can be eaten almost as is.
how does waste prevent a shortage from becoming a famine ?
Making the expected production a higher number than the expected need will give the headroom necessary to deal with a shortage without people starving.
If you’re aiming to produce food for a population of 100,000, but have the capacity to make food for 200,000, then you can afford to waste half of your food without starvation. You can also accommodate a 50% drop in production without starvation.
So that buffer is expected waste, but it’s also starvation resistance.
That potential waste of food can be transported to another group of people
If you’re accommodating another group of people you should produce enough to always feed them, too, not just sometimes in surplus years. The whole point is that you’ve gotta plan for a surplus, otherwise you risk starvation in bad years (and it doesn’t make it any better, morally, if the people who bear the risk of starving are “another group or people”).
I think the point is that if you do that, then you’re just increasing the amount of people in the equation, and if they become dependent on you and the production drops, somebody will be lacking food again.
Don’t feed because they might be in need?
Overproduce to cover everybody’s needs, and if you want to use that overproduction to cover somebody else’s problems, make that the new target and produce over it to keep a safety margin. Otherwise you’re just going to hide the problem and run into trouble when production dips.
Not saying this is the right approach, but this is the idea I’m getting from the thread. I feel like it might not work with the economics of supply and demand combined with capitalistic greed, but if a margin exists as safety, allocating it removes that safety.
So different expectations at different periods, telling people there will be extra food and mentioning a rough duration solves it. No promises afterwards, enjoy while it lasts.
Send in Newman, he can make a room full of muffin stumps disappear.
Second the pickling idea. Read a similar story that a food bank had a lot of excess fresh material. Thry had set up production through a commercial food processing site, had put labels on them, and were selling them online and at farmer’s markets. The proceeds were going back to the food bank. Zero wastage. They were also making things like sauerkraut, kimchee, and kombucha. Watermelon can also be juiced and the rinds pickled.
I imagine for food safety and liability reasons, you wouldn’t want to do it in someone’s kitchen. Plus, licensing fees. But you have a great story to tell (good health, zero waste, help food bank).
Quick search since you mentioned NM: https://www.newmexicofma.org/food_processing_permits.php
For the watermelons you might try to contact a local vintner. They may be able to process them into wine and/or liquor.
My initial thought was that the sugar content in watermelon would be to low to acquire any watermelon taste when made into a wine without an artificial flavoring added, apparently watermelon has more sugar that I thought. (More than peaches apparently, never would have guessed that). Twice that of strawberries…
Usually you try to aim for about 18g of sugar in 100 grams of product for the fermentation. Which I think people used that just because that’s what grapes hover around and they ferment very well without additives.
Silly idle thought (for real): Suppose in a situation like this, particularly if people complain on the internet drawing attention to the fact that there’s 1000s of pounds of produce in a space that likely doesn’t have funding for strong security measures, a group of interested parties brought some trucks and took it without explicit permission or consent from the organization.
What’s the impact to the org in situations where this isn’t given away to unauthorized parties, but gets stolen instead?
I am in contact with someone now that may be facilitating something along these lines. Not to the extent with which you propose, but I am working on something.
Fair enough - glad you’re trying something to address this lot! Believe it or not, did actually mean this as a ‘what if/what are the ramifications for orgs like this if that happened’, but probably best not to entertain that yourself at the moment.
As a total aside, good song to keep spirits up today might be The Last Saskatchewan Pirate by Captain Tractor - very last line before final chorus is relevant :)
Good luck with what you’re doing!
If someone came and stole it all our parent entity would likely tell us we can no longer keep the door open to allow a breeze to come through the building. Or they would install metal bars on the doors.
You have most of the ingredients for a gluten free spaghetti dinner with Cauliflower pasta and a watermelon heavy fruit salad appetizer. Cook it up and serve it up to your local soup kitchen. That or start giving it away to local restaurants. They’ll go thru a pallet of anything perishable in an afternoon. Whatever they cant plate or prepare will just get dumped into that week’s soup of the day! Lol
Tomatoes, dont need any cooling, storing them in the fridge does prolongs their live but they taste like shit afterwards.
Greetings from a German Italian who cries often when people put tomatoes in fridges.
Don’t they get their taste back when they reach room temperature again?
Afaik they don’t. Something about storing them at low temp changes the thickness of the skin. At least that’s what I’ve been told working on produce.
You can freeze them if you plan on cooking with them. I ended up with an obscene amount of tomatoes one year that were amazingly tasty and I was so sad that I couldn’t process them before they went bad. My aunt told me to freeze them - it was perfect! They also make for great weapons when frozen, and when you thaw them the skins come right off!
As an Italian American I would have so much fun jarring all those tomatoes into sauce.
Just waiting a couple more weeks for my step-dad to harvest all his tomatoes so the fun can begin.
The ones I took home on Wednesday were moldy and a mess Friday evening when I got home from work.
If I were in that situation, I would try quickly whipping up some homemade posters and put them at our market square, maybe in front of schools, and in front of grocery stores. I would make sure to specify why these are given away, otherwise people might be suspicious.
That would probably illegal, but …well… who’s going to sue a food bank over hanging a few posters for 2 days?
I’m sure there will be people salivating at the opportunity.
Well, I commented that before I learned that OP is in New Mexico.
In the US? Where we pour bleach on food that has been discarded to make sure that someone who is hungry can’t eat it?
But yes, this is a great suggestion. Also, looking for a local farm or farms that could feed these to their animals (specifically chickens or pigs).
Where we pour bleach on food that has been discarded to make sure that someone who is hungry can’t eat it?
What the fuck? Seriously?
its a liability issue to have homeless people/or dumpster diving for food.
Yup. Circa 2017, one of my sisters would gather up a bunch of food every week and have a ‘cook out’ at a park near her that was known to have a large homeless population. Basically, they fed anyone who asked for a plate. She did this with a group of friends who I guess were just bored and successful enough to want to feel good about feeding the homeless.
After a few months, their activities drew the ire of… someone, and they got raided by the cops and local health inspectors. Despite acknowledging the food they were serving was at the proper temp and all food handling protocol was being followed, they took an ‘every possible justification’ approach to the situation that they could and insinuated everything from unknown, dirty kitchens to lack of a catering license, with severe future legal threats if they were to continue feeding the homeless. The officials then poured bleach into the food and dumped it into the trash.
Damn. In other news, I’m radicalized now.
Yes, grocery stores sometimes do this because they are afraid of being sued by someone who gets salmonella or something from the dumpster.
This is what they tell the public.
In reality they just don’t want homeless people near their dumpsters.
Or to give away anything for free. They’d rather destroy it than give away something that could’ve made money.
I’m sure that’s a reason too.
It’s the only reason.
If it was a liability concern, why are they intentionally poisoning the food? That would make them much more liable for someone becoming sickened.
The edit makes me think this is done on purpose to try and force a slip up so they can justify taking away your funding and it’s making me hella mad.
Do you have a Sikh temple nearby? They cook for the community.
I have a large ice chest and a heavily restricted diet due to medical issues and my food banks won’t give me fresh produce unless I show proof of residency (they want you to have a refrigerator). The little daily snack pack with oreos and soda they give you otherwise isn’t worth the trip.
