“Can you take 100 turkeys?”
Dorothy Hatfield and I had quite a day yesterday. She was going to Costco and there was a great deal on the 6 packs of chicken we purchase for the Community Free Marketplace. $6 off per package and we needed 30! Who can say no to that!
That's about 300lbs of chicken. So...she bought the chicken, loaded It into a cooler we'd put in her van the night before, and things got complicated.
Her phone rang, it was Trader Joe's on Arboles. The Non-profit they were expecting to pick up food donations hadn't come and they were scrambling not to let good food go to waste. Dorothy was the first person who answered TJ's call. It was noonish on Saturday. All the pantries are closed.
Dorothy explained that we had just picked up perishables the day before and wouldn't be able to take much produce but if they had frozen items, we had space. "Wait, you can take things that need to be frozen?" Yes, she answers. "Could you take 100 turkeys?" Yes, she answers. Then Dorothy calls me.
We were already meeting our Food Forward coordinator around 2 because her volunteers had picked 60+ boxes of persimmons that Dorothy had pre-arranged to share with other food pantries next week. Now we had a bigger than expected persimmon haul, Costco chicken to freeze, AND turkeys.
The next message goes to Safe Passage Youth Foundation’s Tim Hagel asking if we can convert the white cooler trailer we share into a freezer and put the turkeys there. Not surprisingly, he says go for it and shares that he is down in Glendale shopping for Youth Corps supplies and offers to meet us at TJ to help load turkeys.
In the meantime, we put most of the Costco chicken in the United Methodist Church freezer, meet up with Food Forward's Andrea and unload massive amounts of hachiya persimmons, go to Shadows Apartments to deliver part of the Costco chicken, and then on to Trader Joe's.
In addition to the turkeys, there's salmon, talapia, and about 40 banana boxes filled with fruits, salads, entrees, cheese - it's insane. We had to decline quite a bit of it but it’s so hard to say no to rescuing good food. We took about 10 boxes of TJ treasures plus all the turkeys and fish.
Next stop, Harbor House. They do a daily evening distribution of food to our most vulnerable residents. Dorothy convinced their volunteer coordinators to take 15 beautiful salads (they already had a bunch), a banana box of clementines, one of apples, and two of bananas.
Then we went back to UMC, froze about 30 TJs Tikka Masala entrees (so good) plus some high quality baked goods and mulched what we couldn't save.
The evening ended with returning to Safe Passage to put the Costco chicken in the freezer. It was dark by then. Christmas decorations will have to wait.