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.
Contract mutual aid orgs they well come get it
I don’t get it, if this is government funded, when you guys submitted the funds request, or when you discussed your contract with the company that sends you the food, shouldn’t you have added like, in a contract, what happened not only when you receive the produce, but the expected amounts and what procedure you will follow if those amounts did not match, either exceeding or lacking?
Seems like a HUGE oversight to me. Did it ever occur to them that you could either not receive anything or receive too much?
Unless you all did and it exceeded your calculations by far (and even then I’d argue that whoever did your calculations fucked up and you lot should have either review it again or rejected the offer altogether) this is all on whoever said “that sounds like a great idea let’s do it”
Unless it didn’t matter? In which case why the worry? This surely must have happened thousand of times by now in that case
Last year our bank’s ability to place orders was taken away from us. Now we get what we get.
Before that happened we did not have issues like this every delivery. The previous delivery we received frozen falafel in wraps, but so many that all of our freezers were full of it. Volunteers were taking it home by the case. We turned away multiple pallets of the stuff because we were out of room. My chest freezer is so full of them I have a 50 pound bag of rice sitting on top to make sure it stays closed.
We also went from not having milk for months, to having no room to place it all.
You guys SERIOUSLY need to re think your logistics and storage :/
I will get right on that! Thank you for letting me know something out of our hands is a problem and something we need to fix with no resources, only volunteers.
No worries!
Also investment in some cooling solutions might help
You need to chill
Usual trick I would think of is to make a simple veggie broth and freeze it after reduction. Tomatoes and cauliflower stems should be good for that and watermelon same but juicing it and freezing it.
At least it stores better and longer and reducing the air and space it takes up reduces it as well once it’s just a liquid. Freezing in baking pans helps it go quicker to even though it is more smaller batches.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.
it would be kinda cool if food panties could also pickle + can things
Mmm pantie pickle
🤤
food panties
grins in dog
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
Trade it to a restaurant in exchange for stuff they might have you actually want. Shouldn’t be hard to move tomato and onion
I don’t think restaurants are going to want hundreds of pounds of product at the very end of life in terms of freshness. This is the product the manufacturer couldn’t sell to a store for various reasons.
You saying some Italian joint couldn’t turn those tomatoes into mommas ragu 🤌🤌🤌
If you think restaurants only use stuff at peak freshness and of the highest quality buddy I got bad news for you.
I worked in the produce department at Jewel-Osco for some time. It was when I peaked in life. We never gave food away to anyone. It was either sold or found its way into the trash compactor. Kinda sad to waste so much food. But I was so lost in the produce sauce that I couldnt even process it
This is because if something goes bad from the food you give away the business will get sued for not having cold chain verification or a quality department to make sure the food was not altered in any way. Warehouses (aka ‘distribution centers’) typically have that kind of process, but retailers do not as Quality department employee salaries are typically several times what retail employees make, and often substantially higher than department managers, shift managers, and other low level retail management roles.
Send in Newman, he can make a room full of muffin stumps disappear.
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.
They do this because they can write off the “donation” (e.g. garbage disposal)
All of this produce was going to go bad, they know what date it’s going bad, but they overproduce or customers cancelled orders or under ordered.
UNFI, the massive breached company, is going to have this same thing play out across the board from product wasting away in their warehouse.
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 hoovervills. 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.
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.
If you’re willing to go there, you might post on local facebook groups.
The woman who runs the bank has been posting on Facebook. We have to be careful because we can lose our funding if it is discovered we give food to anyone And not only those in our system approved to get food.
Truly bureocracy manifest.
That’s the most messed up policy. They want your org to shut down.
We have already stopped getting any government commodities. We used to always have some kind of nut and dried fruit, for two years that I have been volunteering we always had those two things, since February we have not had either. We do not even have government cheese any longer.
So who is putting these restrictions in place?
Can nursing facilities take some?
In general the company who funds us. They also facilitate the government goods. I only volunteer and perform my duty handing out goods. I am not privy to anything else other than what the woman who runs it vents to me. Other than my parents, I am the longest serving volunteer and I know the distribution system of our goods very well, so she vents a lot of her frustrations to me.
