The Yellow Bananas Make It
The Yellow Bananas Make It
By Chris Carbone
It is 9:30am on a Wednesday morning. I steer my little Corolla into the parking lot of Kaster Moving Company on Long Beach Boulevard in Stratford. I park and get out. A few scant clouds overhead like ornaments draped over an otherwise pristine azure. I have been instructed to walk around the back of the building to a little green door situated next to a loading dock. I do this and I don’t see it. Food Rescue moves quickly, and even for the large-scale one I’ve been invited to sit in on today, I’m afraid I’ll miss out on the action.
I see now how far the building actually stretches back, so I venture further. There are tractor trailers, shipping containers, and similarly behemoth warehouses blotting my view at every turn. I remark to myself that a center of shipping and commerce is an ironic setting for such a massive act of charity to take place. But then, scale is not exclusive to want or need.
Being someone who works in the food insecurity sector, the need seems about as big as it can get right now.
I finally reach the green door and am greeted by Karen Saggese and Laney Lloyd; Food Rescue Fairfield County’s Co-Site Director and New Volunteer Coordinator, (respectively), as well as about half a dozen volunteers. There are pallets of bananas scattered around the warehouse; taller than me, and all a fresh, unripe green. Yet they are farther from the garage door than will make for an efficient morning of schlepping crates.
“Saying yes to larger-scale rescues, like this one, means asking the host if we can impose on them. But this company has lent us their employees for the day, which is amazing,” says Laney as, almost on command, the owner of Kaster rounds a corner in a forklift. There are 20 agencies scheduled to pick up their share of the bananas today, so there is a plethora of logistical work to be done by Karen and Laney. This church is now coming at noon instead of ten, organization x cancelled. Et cetera, et cetera…Yet most rescues are not of this size, do not have a whole cast of volunteers, require minimal coordination, and, believe it or not, the whole organization was designed with the mitigation of these criteria in mind.
Now a national organization, Food Rescue was started right here, in Fairfield County, by Jeff Schacher and Kevin Mullins, in 2011. Jeff wrote software for restaurants, and was baffled by the amount of food he witnessed going to waste. He asked why none of it was getting donated, and the answer was not the cold shoulder of an industry moving a mile a minute, but logistics. Laney explains, “If you were a restaurant or food store, it was likely that your food-to-be-wasted was picked up by a truck and driven to a central location where the agencies would go to shop.” These “agencies” being pantries like nOURish BRIDGEPORT. By the time the food got to the pantry and into the hands of those who needed it most, it was often too late.
“We didn’t need to do what the food bank was doing, but what wasn’t getting done…a yellow banana never made it from the store to the pantry.”
The best way to describe Food Rescue’s singular model would be to compare it to the modern ride-share or shopper applications such as Uber and Instacart. A prospective volunteer downloads the app and looks to see what rescues are available; from which store to which agency. Let’s say they see a rescue from Shoprite to be delivered to nOURish BRIDGEPORT. “How far is it?” they might ask. “Will my car be big enough?” The app will have all of these concerns assuaged. Said volunteer would then accept the rescue; prompting the app's connection to their phone’s GPS. They would complete the rescue, and, if they so desired, they would give feedback in the app. “Little things, like remarking that the store manager is Joe and not Jane anymore, helps set the next rescuer up for success.” Any problems on the road? There’s a button that puts you directly in touch with Food Rescue support staff, who can see comments in real time. The whole recipe renders the rescuer nearly autonomous in their good deed.
“There are people in the food insecurity space who would say, ‘You can’t do this with volunteers, they’re too flaky.’ But we thought there was definitely something to the idea of not having to commit too much, and work around your schedule,” Laney explains, and the statistics are certainly supportive of this. “There are over 450 rescues a week in Fairfield County alone, and we don’t have to talk to ninety-percent of them.” There are a thousand active volunteers, with four-thousand that have signed up in the past seven years. Volunteer enthusiasm is huge among rescuers, and what’s so beautifully unique about it all is how that enthusiasm, almost single-handedly, has perpetuated the organization’s expansion. Rescuers were loving the work they were doing, but then would move away. They would reach out to Food Rescue, who would then assess the needs of their area. “Let’s say you’re in Austin, Texas. You have grant writing, management capabilities, and marketing. You can ask to license our software, and start an organization under your own name. Or, you may change your name to Food Rescue, and go all in with us.” As of this writing, there are over twenty-thousand volunteers in forty-three locations across twenty states.
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Organizations like nOURish rely on the efforts of Food Rescue almost weekly. The specter of federal funding cuts aside, the same dilemma that led to Food Rescue’s inception often plagues us when we purchase food from the foodbank. One, it costs money. Two, we are at the mercy of whatever they have available. We are one of several agencies they serve. If they’re out of any sort of fresh protein, for example, a rescue may be able to pick up that slack. Laney echoes, “There’s a huge range for how people can get food…The biggest misconception is that you see a food pantry and assume people are getting fed…pantries have to limit their guests to one or two visits a month or week. They need to share with the whole community. So there ends up being a gap…if you can't get it in your community food bank, we pick up the slack and give it to other organizations where they can go and get it.”
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According to Food Rescue’s website, forty-percent of the U.S. food supply is wasted, the ramifications of which ripple far beyond a rumbling belly. Water, labor, and energy are wasted in the efforts to process, transport, and dispose of the discarded food. Since its founding, the organization has been able to keep 199 million pounds of food out of the landfills. Naturally, many of those foods are methane-producing. “We’re not everybody’s everything,” says Laney. “But this rescue today means our partners won’t have to spend as much money on fruit this week.” Another sobering statistic from their website states that 42% of that wasted food supply are fresh fruits and vegetables. But not today. By the time these bananas reach their destinations, they will have started to ripen; slowly, as if there were some hopeful sun in each and every one shining through in obstinacy against their would-be profligate oblivion.
By then, the yellow bananas will have made it.