FOODLINK and Rochester Food Not Bombs: Working Together to Rescuse Food and Dispell The Myth of Food Scarcity
Andrew Stankevich & Jaime Wemett-Saunders
Every Saturday Rochester Food Not Bombs unloads a truck full of food from FOODLINK. We've gotten up to three tons of food in the past, but nowadays we usually distribute somewhere between 1-2 tons. The FOODLINK truck brings us a few odds and ends, but mostly bread products and produce. FOODLINK is a the foodbank for western and central NY that distributes over 6 million pounds of food to over 550 human service agencies in its 10 county service area. The agency accomplishes its mission of fighting waste and fighting want equipped with a large 90,000 square foot warehouse, a couple walk-in coolers, some office space and 3 delivery trucks. FOODLINK rescues food that would otherwise go to waste by picking up produce and bread products that have missed the cut and are no longer salable. Then FOODLINK organizes the products and distributes the food to the different agencies and programs it supports.
However, due to the quantity that FOODLINK is dealing with, they can't redistribute all the food they have before it's unusable, so the leftover surplus gets turned over to Food Not Bombs. Bread products and produce are especially difficult to distribute, as both have a brief period until they become rotten or stale. For example, FOODLINK through their contract with the grocery stores, must pick up the store's waste, even if the food will go rancid, rotten, or stale before their next orders go out. Rather than letting the food go to waste, FOODLINK turns the food over to FNB.
Since we receive the food on Saturday and distribute on Sunday, we can distribute the excess food in the short time it has left. We redistribute the food by operating a food distribution site and serving free meals to go with it. We have no restrictions on who comes to get the food, as we feel that the food would have all been wasted, had it not been for us and FOODLINK. More than anything else, we find a lot of single parents and elderly people coming to pick up bags of food to take home. Furthermore, through our distribution to other shelters and the downtown YWCA, we make sure that any excess food from our Sunday serving goes to hungry or low-income people and not to the dumpster.
Since we've been working with FOODLINK to eliminate waste and want, the myth of scarcity has become more apparent to us. America wastes enough food every day to feed the many families and individuals who are hungry or otherwise needy. More than anything else, lack of grassroots distribution of food perpetuates scarcity in a land of plenty. Hands-on programs like Rochester Food Not Bombs fill a crucial niche, as we can organize a distribution of the food that falls through the cracks of larger organizations and make sure that a good number of people have food in the cupboard. Rochester Food Not Bombs and similar organizations provide a safety net for wasted food and ensure that the food gets to those that need it.
To top it off to make sure no food gets wasted, all of our leftover kitchen scraps and produce that has become rotten by the time we get it, get redistributed again. With the help of Allison Clarke and the Politics of Food, program, we're able to turn around our waste to local farmers to feed to their animals and enrich their soil. We need to remember that one person's trash could be someone else's treasure and that there's no reason why we can't coordinate our efforts to make sure that everyone can reap the rewards of the American surplus.
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Rochester Food Not Bombs PO Box 39618 Rochester, NY 14604 [email protected] 585-234-0884 |