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.
There isn’t a food shortage. There are significant problems of wastage created by marketing value and poor distribution. Many solutions have been brought up over the years. To deaf ears. Because your local grocer needs to put 1000 tomatoes out to mostly rot because it looks aesthetically pleasing.
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 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.
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’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”).
Also: Where is this? It’s a small world, some Lemming might pick up a cauliflower or two.
Rural nm (edit NM is the state abbreviation for New Mexico, a lot of US residents, our president included, think we are actually Mexico, but they still recognize the postal abbreviation NM. Using it is a work habit I have.)
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.
Seldom have I seen a better example of why universal basic income is so preferable to food banks.
Except for the fact that a lot of these people aren’t capable of managing money.
They are on the street because they have serious issues
And who’s supporting them?
Clearly not you.
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
