The Power Failure:
You may know from past posts that Dorothy and I coordinate the Adelante Comunidad Conejo food distributions. Before we started this, I had never thought much about the importance and challenges of rescuing food. Food pantries like Adelante’s are reducing waste, providing high-quality food to families, and keeping rotting, methane producing food out of landfills. It’s complicated work that requires relationships built on mutual trust. What an eye-opening experience this has been!
A lot of the food we collect and distribute is donated by grocery stores because it can’t be sold even though it is still delicious and nutritious. Most of the time, it’s getting too ripe or approaching the sell-by date. Sometimes the next order is arriving, and shelves have to be cleared. Other times, it’s an ordering mistake or packaging misprint. Sometimes, cases get dropped and the store assumes damage to the contents. Big stores partner, by California law, with food banks (in our case with Food Share Ventura County) and affiliates like Adelante are offered scheduled store days and times for volunteer pick-ups. Adelante’s regular pick-up partners are Trader Joe’s TO and Westlake, Target WLV, and Whole Foods TO - all on 2nd and 4th Friday mornings.
We have a facility use arrangement with United Methodist Church which is where our volunteers glean the donations and pack them up for the next food distribution. This excellent, rescued food goes to families whose tight budgets make it hard to afford the food their families should have like fresh fruits and vegetables. If we get more perishables than we can handle, we reach out to other pantries to share the bounty. This whole process of food-rescue depends on relationships – up and down the chain – from retailers and ranchers to a mother accepting the rescued food at one of our distributions.
Which brings me this week’s Power Failure story.
Dorothy and I decided to do the 4th Friday pick-ups even though we had moved our Community Free Marketplace to the week before due to the Christmas calendar. Our plan was to only do the retail pick-ups, no run to Bell for pallets of produce or shopping for extras. All the perishables would go over to Shadows Apartments where we hold our 2nd Friday Food Pantry and the freezables and non-perishables would be stored for January. It would be a quick, easy morning for our volunteers. That was the plan and then my phone rang at 7am.
It was Sam from Target WLV. Their power had been off overnight. All the power. Every frozen case, cooler case, and walk-in in the store. The store was dark. Sam asked if we could send folks over asap to rescue food before it got too warm to save. So much for the easy morning. Time for a new plan. I called Dorothy.
The first principle of food rescue is flexibility. We never know what we are going to get from each of our partners. Sometimes the load is light or heavy or skewed to a particular product. Sometimes it’s absurd – like 150 gallons of ice cream or a whole pallet of cereal. When Dorothy and I were TOHS Band Boosters, we got schooled in planning (and replanning). Buses were late, equipment got forgotten, weather changed schedules. We used to joke about having Plan A, B, C, D, E, F…. I guess we were in training for food-rescue!
30 minutes after Sam’s call we had 5 people, a Uhaul van and a pickup truck on site. I wasn’t there but back and forth phone calls provided updates as details got worked out with the store manager. We’re talking about tens of thousands of dollars of food and they needed authorization from the bosses. When they got the go-ahead, our team focused on frozen foods and chilled foods that were not too fragile – like ham. We wanted to be sure that nothing had reached an unsafe temperature. They were out on the retail floor using phone flashlights to see what the products were, then loading it into boxes and crates, and hauling it back to UMC. So much food. Other pantry operations arrived to take what we couldn’t.
If you’ve volunteered for us on Friday mornings at UMC, you know that we don’t have that much freezer space. There’s a reach-in unit in the kitchen and we have a 7ft freezer chest in the food storage room. About 12 crates of food fit in the freezer chest. We had close to 80 milk crates, a wall of food, that needed to be frozen. We’re talking more than 3000 pounds of food.
Enter the Food Share cooler trailer which is on long-term loan to Adelante on behalf of an alliance of Conejo Valley food pantries. If you’ve been over to UMC you might have noticed the orange and white trailer parked near the church playground. We keep it there most of the time. On Marketplace week, we fill it with perishables and take it to Beyer Park for the Saturday distribution. The rest of the time it functions as a fresh produce library of sorts. Adelante, Safe Passage, St. Vincent de Paul at St. Paschal, Westminster Free Clinic, and Food Forward (a leading source of rescued produce in our valley) all have the combo. If one of us has something to share, we put it in the trailer and our friends come and pick it up when they are ready to distribute. The temperature is adjustable down to 32°F, not cold enough to store frozen food long-term but cold enough to prevent rapid thawing and give us some breathing space while we activated plan C and D.
Plan C: we have a freezer chest up at One Spark Academy which is on the former YMCA campus on North Moorpark Rd. Thank you director Lori Peters! Volunteers Patrick Connolly and David Newman took 12 crates up to OSA.
Plan D: there’s another food pantry cooler trailer in the Conejo Valley. Safe Passage, SVDP, and Adelante purchased it with help from supporters including Athens Services. More relationships! See how this works? The trailer is bigger than the FS trailer and it goes down to 10°F! Later Friday afternoon, Dorothy and I hauled the FS trailer filled with the crates of frozen food up to Safe Passage. How did we haul a trailer full of frozen food, you ask? Lynda Karl (current president of Adelante Comunidad Conejo) has a van that is equipped to haul the FS trailer. That’s how we get it to the Saturday Marketplace. We borrowed the Karl van, hauled the FS trailer up to SP and unloaded the crates into the freezer trailer. By the time we were done, the sun was going down. So much for that short day we had planned!
But the food! Hundreds of bags of uncooked chicken breasts, wings, shrimp, and fish fillets. Beautiful salmon, T-bone steaks, hams, pork shoulder. And frozen dinners – crispy chicken, pastas, soup dumplings, potstickers, microwaveable frozen meals galore! Thousands of meals that we will be able to offer to hard working families in January.
We are very proud of Adelante’s food-rescue efforts, but they come with substantial costs. We pay UMC for facilities, rent vehicles, buy gas, purchase repackaging supplies, maintain a website and digital subscription service to keep in touch with volunteers, donors, and families who accept food at our distributions. It adds up. Just the food-rescue part of Adelante’s yearly budget is close to $10,000. Rescuing food is not free and it takes many dedicated volunteers. It would be impossible to accomplish without community support.
We all benefit when edible food is diverted from the landfill where it rots, producing climate-damaging methane gas. Close to forty percent of the food produced in the United States goes uneaten. I am eternally grateful to our volunteers and to the families who trust us enough to accept our rescued food. Without their trust, food-rescue can’t happen.