Author(s): Sheryl Julian Date:
February 8, 1989 Page: 25 Section: FOOD
Every day whole truckloads of food in this country
are allowed to spoil and become garbage. Barges of prepared fish products are
dumped back into the sea, produce ends up in dumpsters, and groceries become
landfill.
About 140 million tons of edible food a year in the
United States never reach anyone's table, according to a national clearing
house that distributes food to the poor. The amount that goes to waste in
Boston is difficult to pin down, but community workers say a considerable
volume of food from supermarkets, restaurants and caterers is left to spoil or
is simply discarded.
For years, Boston churches and social agencies have
been trying to get unused food to the hungry, but the need seemed to outstrip
the effort and the enterprise was hindered by a lack of public awareness.
In the last five years, however, significant
progress has been made to salvage food that isn't eaten and get it to the
thousands of homeless and others who live close to or below the poverty line:
the elderly, the unemployed and the working poor.s with labels glued upside
down or damaged in transit, trailer loads accidentally sent to the wrong city,
frozen products with freezer burn and fresh produce from wholesale distributors
who can't move it.
"I've seen great changes in the quantity and in
the quality of the food," says Suzanne Motheral, one of three part-time
staffers at Food for Free, which transports groceries from small, independent
markets to soup kitchens and low-income housing projects. Food for Free is
picking up twice the volume of food it did four years ago and is now
distributing dairy products and produce, not just bread.
The Boston Food Bank, the city's largest collector
of surplus food, gathered 300,000 pounds of food from manufacturers,
supermarket chains and others in January, more than it amassed during its
entire first year of operation in 1981.
The Food Bank distributed a total of 4.7 million
pounds of food to New England pantries and shelters last year, including the
Pine Street Inn and Rosie's Place. The shelters offer hot meals; the pantries,
bags of groceries. Both pay the Food Bank a small amount (12 cents a pound) in
carrying charges.
Area college students also have organized efforts to
pick up surplus food and deliver it to shelters. And plans are under way to
improve systems of getting the food quickly from those who have it to those who
need it.
Most community workers say an increased public
awareness of the problems of homelessness and malnutrition among the poor have
spurred some of the new programs and made more food available to the hungry.
Despite the gains, however, advocates are careful to
point out that the problem of saving surplus food from the garbage is not
solved. "If anyone wants to go around to restaurants and ask what they do
with the food, they'll say they don't have any," says Shoshana Pakciarz,
executive director of Project Bread. "But they're very willing if we help
them figure out how to hook up with transportation and with programs that can
store food."
Some of the thorniest problems are logistical. There
aren't enough volunteers to transfer or package the food, not enough trucks to
carry it, or enough hands to unload, cook and apportion it. Sometimes,
manufacturers don't make the effort, and restaurants don't consider it shameful
to waste food.
"I know of 150,000 to 250,000 pounds of surplus
food a week between Portland, Maine, and Hartford, Conn.," says Nancy
Jamison of Fair Foods, which
collects produce and bakery goods and gives them out at the Pilgrim
Congregational Church in Dorchester.
Nonetheless, a growing number of companies have made
efforts to see that their excess doesn't go to waste. Among the foods the Food
Bank gathered and distributed last year were 60,000 pounds of dairy products
from H.P. Hood, 40,000 pounds of chowder and seafood from Legal Seafoods,
50,000 pounds of fish from Fishery Products of Boston, thousands of pounds of
seafood from American SeaFresh of Boston, hundreds of pounds of groceries from
S.S. Pierce of Boston, 20,000 pounds of beef from Colora do Beef Company of
Beverly, a half-million pounds of juices from Ocean Spray Cranberries of
Plymouth, one million pounds of damagedgroceries from Star Markets and Shaw
Markets, 250,000 pounds of Hostess cupcakes and Wonder Bread from I.T.T. Continental
B akers of Natick.
Most of the time, Food Bank's Roxbury warehouse
receives deliveries that delight those who run it -- like the 20,000 pounds of
fish that came in one day last year. But some donations don't meet the needs of
those they're intended to help. "The other day we took a large amount of
No. 10 cans of hot chili peppers. A truckload of them. It'll take us a long
time to distribute those," says executive director Westy Egmont.
Unloading inappropriate donations is only one
problem in the system. Another is the notion that food on the brink of rotting
is all right for people who might go hungry otherwise.
Egmont, however, is adamant on this point:
"We're not a dump," he says.
Others agree. Holly Safford of The Catered Affair,
whose firm has donated to shelters "more legs of lamb and beef tenderloins
than I care to count," says the only food she donates is "food I
would offer a neighbor."
"Quite frankly," says Friar Michael, who
organizes hundreds of weekend meals at the Church of all Nations in the South
End, "there are people out there who intentionally or unintentionally
aren't giving the best they have. If I wouldn't eat it I wouldn't serve
it." Weekdays on Tremont Street, Friar Michael hands out about five dozen
sandwiches donated by caterers.
The way Boston agencies feed the hungry is typical
of other large cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, though
advocates here say there is more coordination here.
Project Bread raises money to help finance the 89
food pantries and 26 soup kitchens in the Boston area while Project Bread
Hunger Hot Line refers hungry people to those places. The Boston Food Bank
collects food donations -- canned goods and any food except fresh produce --
from industry and chain stores. Fair
Foods collects fresh fruits and vegetables from wholesale distributors.
And two vans, one from Food for Free and the other from Student Food Rescue,
scour markets and neighborhood grocery stores in Arlington, Cambridge,
Somerville, Brookline, Brighton and Allston for day-old bread, unsalable
groceries and odd-sized produce.
Anyone who donates food in good faith is covered by
the 1984 Good Samaritan Law, which offers protection against law suits brought
by anyone who becomes ill after eating the donated food. There are also some
tax benefits to donating surpluses.
Other initiatives are under way to solve
long-standing problems. Beginning March 1, Food Bank will offer a pick-up
service called "Second Helping," sponsored by Boston College Alumni
Association. The new service should help the bank pick up more spur-of-the
moment donations, particularly from parties and restaurants, which it had to
pass up in the past because of transportation problems.
Enough trucks, drivers and mechanics are always a
concern, says Nancy Jamison of Fair
Foods, which depends upon "a core of volunteers with pickups and
flatbeds, and a guy who owns a fence company and helps us once a month."
Elegant Caterers in Roxbury also loans trucks to Fair Foods when possible.
Generally, Fair
Foods can pick up to 12,000 pounds of food at any one time, although
there have been some exceptions. Last summer a vendor offered 14,000 pounds of
corn on the cob, and Fair Foods
had the volunteers to get it.
Fair Foods has also called upon a fair
amount of ingenuity. When it receives produce that is about to go bad, Jamison
parks a truck at a low- income housing project and invites residents to help
themselves. She dislikes the idea that people who are hungry are made to
"wait in lines all day and sign their life away" for a simple bag of
groceries. Others have also tried to whittle away at bureaucratic problems.
Three Boston University students -- Janet Alexander, Bob Thistle, and Doug
Thompson -- concerned about the city's challenge to feed the hungry, launched a
food pick-up program last summer that is now run by a dozen students. The
"Student Food Rescue" operates out of the school's community service
organization, The League.
Spurred by grants from Project Bread and Boston
Hunger Clean-up, Food Rescue leases a van and picks up surpluses at Au Bon
Pain, Freedman's Bakery, Bread & Circus, The Great Buffet and Souper Salad.
In its first six months of operation last year, it transferred 24,000 pounds of
food to shelters. "None of us realized that it would be that much, "
says Janet Alexander.
The BU students who established Food Rescue were
guided by Food for Free, which has been salvaging food for seven years, making
pick ups at Boston Food Co-op in Allston, Cambridge Food Co-op, Bread &
Circus,Erewhon, Chapin's Market, Warburton's, Vie de France, Broadway
Supermarket and Peter's Fish and Vegetable Market, all in Cambridge, and at
Quebrada Baking in Arlington, and Crescent Wench in Somerville.
Motheral says Food for Free often finds out about
surplus food from "a worker who is aware of the waste and who feels bad
about it and wants to do something."
Once, she said, a store manager called her to say
that if the van couldn't come to his store before 8 a.m., the leftovers would
become garbage. "They wanted it out of there early," she said. Food
for Free couldn't meet the early deadline.
Undoubtedly, other grocery store managers and
industry executives share a similar attitude about discarding food: it's too
much trouble to recycle it.
Fair Foods' Jamison thinks that a city
community program -- in which teen- agers are paid to collect the surplus
foodstuffs in every neighborhood -- is a solution to some small problems. But
all advocates for the hungry agree that only legislation will solve the major
problems.
"There are too few of us to begin to cover all
the bases," says Food Bank's Westy Egmont. "It's not a problem that
can be solved on a charitable level," agrees Shoshana Pakciarz of Project
Bread. "You have to solve the problem through legislation, so people can
buy food themselves. You have to raise the minimum wage, create low-income
housing, then you create supplemental feeding programs at a rate that is
reasonable -- right now it's 60 cents per meal. We're living in a 'Tale of Two
Cities,' " says Pakciarz, "a glittery one and a poor one." The
poor one, she says, isn't a tale people want to listen to.
SIDEBAR: THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO HELP
What can you do? Any small effort, say the people
who work with the various shelters and agencies -- whether it's once only or once
a week -- is needed.
They say that you can work as an accountant or
proposal writer for one of the hunger programs. You can fix broken trucks or
use your own pick up to collect food. You can glean usable products from
thousands of pounds of damaged goods, working alongside other volunteers in a
warehouse.
You can package bread and muffins. You can answer
phones. You can do the books or type letters. You can pack up five bags of
groceries and call Project Bread to find five families who need them, like one
Quincy teacher and her grade school class did as a Christmas project. You can
play the piano in a soup kitchen, cook a meal, or put together menus with the
products at hand. You can make sure your company and your neighborhood market
recycle their unusable food and if they don't, you can salvage it and bring it
yourself. If you want to help, says the administration at Project Bread,
they'll find a slot that suits you. Here are the organizations you can call:
Boston Food Bank (427-5000) (CORRECTION: Because of
a reporting error, an article in yesterday's Food section gave the wrong phone
number for the Boston Food Bank. The correct number is 427-5200.) is part of a
national network called Second Harvest, which collects food and feeds the
hungry around the country. Food Bank's Boston warehouse has the capacity to
accept tractor- trailers of food that is cosmetically damaged, products that
must be removed from supermarkets because of expiration da tes, mislabeled
food, misshipped food, food from overproduction. The Food Bank will take any
food and provisions except fresh produce. They need protein (meat, fish, and
peanut butter especially). Only nonprofit agencies, not individuals or
families, can use Food Bank's services. About 300 volunteers work with this
organization.
Fair Foods (288-6185) is one of four
local programs that has transportation to pick up food. Fair Foods picks up fresh fruits and produce from wholesalers and
bakery items from local manufacturers or distributors and gives the food away at
Pilgrim Congregational Church in Dorchester. They need trucks and drivers who
can pick up at 4 a.m.; cooks who can teach people how to prepare some of the
fresh produce they've never used.
Food for Free (868-2900) is one of four local
programs that has transportation to pick up food, mostly in the Cambridge,
Somerville, Medford, Arlington area.
Project Bread (723-5000) is the central organization
that raises funds for 250 emergency programs across Massachusetts. They work to
educate the community about hunger, they run the Walk for Hunger every year
(the 20th anniversary will be held on May 7), and they operate Hunger Hot Line.
Project Bread Hunger Hot Line (523-7010) is for
individuals or families who need a bag of groceries, a hot meal or long-term guidance
within the system. The Hot Line also links people who have food donations to
the shelters or centers that need it most at that moment (they keep track of
what each shelter and pantry is lacking and will arrange transportation).
Hunger Hot Line will also find a place somewhere in
the city for someone who wants to volunteer. They operate 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and
there is also a recorded message.
Second Helping (427-5200) is one of four local
programs that has transportation to pick up food anywhere in the city. They
will begin service March 1 and will be able to pick up prepared foods from
restaurants and caterers.
Student Food Rescue (353-4710) is one of four local programs that has transportation to pick up food, mostly in the Back Bay, Brookline, Brighton, Allston, Newton area. Food Rescue is run by students and is part of The League at Boston University.