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.
Seldom have I seen a better example of why universal basic income is so preferable to food banks.
I am working at an Amazon company’s warehouse that specifically stores food items.
The amount of shit we throw in trash just because “packaging is slightly off” makes me angry and just one day of bad management spoils enough food to feed entire family.
There is no air conditioning or fridge. It’s summer in Texas so if we delay a single day, half the items go bad. There are dairy products here. (And people in border of heatstroke but that’s another topic.)
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.
I work for a produce delivery company as a courier and yeah fresh produce is ass for storage and transit. I’m legit thinking about jury rigging a small air conditioner into the back of my truck for summer cooling.
Have you seen if there’s any way for your foodbank to do canning?
American Charity*
*Terms and conditions apply
America has always been a place where transactions matter more than people. At least, it has been that way ever since European discovery. Native Americans were nowhere near this inhumane
For the company it is a tax write off and getting rid of their surplus. They don’t care what happens next.
I wonder if your food bank can set up some kind of relationship with farms in your region. Those farms may be open to taking lots of spoiled produce as animal feed and compost material. In exchange they might share their crops with you.
My workplace used to donate all its leftover food to a local meal service charity, daily. But they refused to take fresh fruits and vegetables because they just spoil too fast. It was sad because those are the foods people need the most but they are logistically very difficult to deliver, as you are witnessing.
Seems kinda wasteful
This is what we have been telling the company that sends us food, stop sending huge shipments of fresh produce.
it would be kinda cool if food panties could also pickle + can things
Mmm pantie pickle
🤤
food panties
grins in dog
Get somebody else to take a truck to you?
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.
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.
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!
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.
Contract mutual aid orgs they well come get it
Also: Where is this? It’s a small world, some Lemming might pick up a cauliflower or two.
Rural nm
For the tomatoes you might see if there’s canning groups on Facebook for your area? It takes a metric fuck-ton of tomatoes to make a can of sauce so they’d likely be able to use quite a bit of them.
I think the bigger problem is that there are at least 50 trays of tomatoes there and it’ll take a bunch of kitchen space and time to process all of them, all of which has to be done on next-to-no notice. It’ll also take a lot of time and supplies to can them all - though at least whatever they have the time and space to process will be shelf-stable in the end.
The real question is who the fuck is this “company” that is supplying them with far more stock than they could possibly handle, and why the fuck are those incompetent morons handling so much produce at all?
What the food bank can manage would be known. All “excess” should be handled by the supplying company, instead of making their oversupply the problem of volunteers to manage and dispose of.
I’d be willing to bet the profits of the supplier, or lack of funding to distribute the stock over a larger area, are the reason for this entire situation.
Having volunteered at a church’s food distribution for over 25 years, I can say that some food banks are pretty special with how they do things. We purchase food from a large food bank for distribution once a month. If the food bank has a lot of produce or something they haven’t been able to move, sometimes they’ll throw a pallet or two extra on the trailer when we pick it up, so that they can get rid of it. When we get the trailer, sometimes it’s just a surprise what we end up with.
In general, we have some people that come that have extended families or neighbors that they give some of the surplus to. Then there’s the church that were hosted at. There’s some things that they’re able to keep for the next day to offer to the parishioners. Beyond that, there’s the occasional phone call to other churches to see if anybody could use it. In the end, the pastor knows a pig farmer where if we have a surplus of a surplus, some stuff will go to.
I think the “hit up local churches” suggestion from another commenter would help with that, since (larger) churches often have decent kitchens that are less likely to be getting used on a weekday.
Where in North Madagascar?
Madagascar is pretty big.
North side of Main Street
How rural? I found a Sikh temple north of Santa Fe that could maybe use it for their langar.
I take it “nm” stands for New Mexico. What’s the weather like there? Sun-drying might be an option, at least dried tomatoes are something people buy.
My first thought for some reason was “northern Manitoba” lol
I was thinking North Macedonia or something, but then I remembered that the post referenced pounds
I think your server might contain a hint as to why…
Not that you’re necessarily Canadian or in Canada, but you probably get more Canadian-centric posts on your local feed.
Oh yeah no it’s a big, fat hint haha
If you’re nearish ABQ, I’ve got a pickup I’m happy to help transport with. I unfortunately don’t think I’m in the list of approved people, otherwise I’d be more than happy to take as many of those tomatoes as I could. Unfortunately I can’t get my kid to eat cauliflower to save their life, so I have limited uses for that.
Outside abq? If it’s near abq I’ll come get it
Messaged you
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.
