Last weekend -- perhaps to offset the insane amount of food waste we generate at breakfast and lunch -- my office organized a volunteer opportunity with the Food Bank for New York City.  Basically what the Food Bank does is take gigantic donations of food and re-distributes it to hunger programs in the five boroughs.  They operate out of an industrial warehouse at the Hunt's Point market in the Bronx.  I was super-excited because individuals can't volunteer on their own - they get referred to a partner soup kitchen, homeless shelter, school, etc.   While these programs are vital, the Food Bank interests me in particular because of its emphasis on efficiency of resources and reduction of waste.

My coworkers and I were tasked with re-packaging food that had been donated through some of its smaller sources: can drives at schools and workplaces and, surprisingly, Target.  If a box of cereal gets run over by a shopping cart or a curious kid damages the packaging of something, the product gets pulled from the shelf; most of the time, these perfectly useful and edible things go into the trash.  This thoughtful Target (I don't know which one) dumps them all in boxes and sends them to the Food Bank.  (They probably get a tax write-off, too.)

We were sorting the items by category: fruits, vegetables, household products, personal care, beverages, snacks, etc., and creating boxes of a particular weight, determined by what was inside it.  The Food Bank gave us detailed handouts about dented cans and expiration dates: some of the items had to be discarded after their expiration dates, others they have guidelines written by a nutritionist on how long past the date is acceptable to pass the donations along.  The items that didn't pass our tests had to go in a big orange trash bin.

The whole thing was incredibly eye-opening, for a number of reasons.  I was astonished at how many things were donated that were way past their expiration dates - this box of muffin mix looks like an antique!  It's great that people open their cabinets during food drives, but I think they forget that actual people are supposed to end up with this stuff.  I was also heartbroken every time something went into the trash: I would estimate that 10% of the stuff we sorted ended up in the bin.  Maybe 1% of that amount I wouldn't have eaten, faced with the same dilemma at home.  Now, I know that I've done some stuff this year that people would label gross by conventional standards - using hankies, not flushing every single time, collecting my food scraps in the fridge for compost.  But this stuff was only marginally gross: boxes of things slightly past their expiration, stale cookies, juice with the label ripped off.  It killed me to see it tossed - yes, that's water in the bin below (I think the bottle was too misshapen to pass along) - and I know that the Food Bank can't compromise its reputation for this lowly 10%.  I asked one of the regular employees if any local homeless people had figured out that the Food Bank bins were full of food.  He said he knew some people had been in them before, but they were kind of difficult to get to and it didn't happen very often.  The market is geographically isolated, surrounded by gates, high fences, and barbed wire - I doubt too many scavengers make it in.

The thing that really got me worked up, though, was what was passing for "food" for needy New Yorkers.  For every box of Cheerios we put in the 'cereals' pile, we put at least 3 or 4 boxes of Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, or some other sweetened cardboard.  Target was happy to pass along cases and cases of green- and red-wrapped chocolates for the holidays, once they had gotten all their mileage out of the half-price sale.  They passed along hundreds of pounds of boxes of holiday cookies and cake mix, and even gummy worms and candy vampire teeth from Halloween.  It makes me sad that this stuff is marketed and accepted as "food" in America; when I think about it as the only thing available to feed people who actually need nourishment, I start to feel a little sick.  By my estimates, we boxed nine or ten 30-pound boxes of vegetables (canned), maybe seven or eight of fruit, and ten or fifteen 25-pound boxes of 'protein' (tuna fish and the like).  On the other hand, we packed at least two pallets of beverages (stuff like no-calorie flavored soda) and eight full pallets of 'snacks' -- that's 512 ten-pound boxes of sugary, salty crap!

With a sick feeling in my stomach, I asked one of the workers if this was all that was available to the hunger programs.  He assured me that these boxes are extras that get added to an order: the majority of their donations come in huge quantities straight from suppliers - things like rice, canned vegetables, cases of cereal, etc.  He took me into their bigger warehouse and showed me how everything gets inventoried so their constituent programs can see what's available in real time.  They add the boxes of stuff we packed up to the order, based on the size of the order.

Which leads me to my final point.  I'm sure that the Food Bank needs our hands and eyes for sorting.  But what they really need is our money and our awareness.  They repeated several times the statistic that 1.3 million New Yorkers rely on emergency food programs - I had no idea that such a large percentage of the city needs this type of assistance, and, with food and fuel prices going up, I'm sure the problem continues to grow.  This day was no miracle, but I hope a few more people understand what food means in the city and around the country.  Perhaps by this blog maybe even a couple more.  Jonathan Bloom, author of Wasted Food, is also doing a great job investigating the problem - I can't wait for his book to come out!