First Saturday for Food Lifeline
Dec. 2nd, 2006 03:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wickedwordsToday was the first Saturday that we spent working for Food Lifeline. My son's school has a 30-hour community service requirement, and one of the opportunities offered is a standing commitment by the school to provide volunteers for three hours of labor on the first Saturday of each month. So we bundled up and went this morning, as the theater we belong to will only provide Ev with about half the hours he needs.
The volunteer center is where they do food distribution and repackaging, which was really interesting. Those of us new to the process got an orientation and a tour before being put to work; our tour was a little rushed, as the coordinator had a birthday party for a nine-year-old girl coming in after us, which I thought was really amazing. 21 volunteers showed up, about half of them kids, to spend their Saturday morning in an unheated warehouse repackaging food.
A lot of the distribution center is set up to handle the big holiday food drive going on right now. In October, volunteers assembled grocery bags full of specific canned goods--tuna, peanut butter, oatmeal, spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, etc--that people would by for $5 and $10, in order to re-donate them to the food bank. (yes, that's right. The food gets donated twice, once by the original grocery outlet and once by the people who pay for the assembled bags of canned goods. The money collected is also donated, so it all works out. It just feels a little weird.)
Today, we got to take the pallets of donated groceries in the warehouse and repackage them for distribution out to the food banks. So I spent about an hour hauling 15 pound bags of canned goods around, grouping them in sets of three bags to the banana box, and sending them to be put on a pallet for distribution. My son got the unenviable task of sorting through all of the loose cans and open bags, sorting them and checking for damaged goods; in addition to the preset bags, people donated a lot of other items to the food barrels, including a stuffed pony. Ev then put the good stuff into a separate cart, so someone else could package it all up as like items, and then threw away all of the open containers. (Dented canned goods are handled separately, with some of them ending up as pig food.)
Once we had finished with all of the food drive canned goods, we got to move on to second harvest yams. There was a huge box of yams and yam pieces, which had to be sorted through for the good bits. L worked on this section, as I helped clean and set up for the second set of repackaging we needed to do, and moldy yams are really so not my thing. They put the good yams in a banana box while the bad ones got tossed into the composting, and I have no idea where it went after that. I imagine it's more pig food.
The last thing we did was to repackage a specialty baking mix. These had been sample mixes that a company donated to Food Lifeline, but part of the process is to remove identifying information from the packages. (My guess is that premium food manufacturers don't want to have their products associated with not selling well, or overstocks, or things of that nature, which could happen if they are seen sitting around on food bank shelves in bulk.) So we opened the case, pulled out the boxes and opened them, dumped the contents into a plastic bag that had been labeled with the ingredients, tie it closed and stuff 12 of them back into each case, sealing them and labeling them for the food banks. I seriously felt like I was back in my summer job as a cannery worker, only without the smell. We had an amazing assembly line going, which included breaking down all of the cardboard packaging for recycling, and finished off almost 3 pallets (or maybe 4) of the mix.
They do a wrap-up at the end of each shift, and we had moved between 6 and 7 tons of food, which would be part of 13,000 meals. It was a great experience, and I think we'll continue to do this, at least through the rest of the school year.
The volunteer center is where they do food distribution and repackaging, which was really interesting. Those of us new to the process got an orientation and a tour before being put to work; our tour was a little rushed, as the coordinator had a birthday party for a nine-year-old girl coming in after us, which I thought was really amazing. 21 volunteers showed up, about half of them kids, to spend their Saturday morning in an unheated warehouse repackaging food.
A lot of the distribution center is set up to handle the big holiday food drive going on right now. In October, volunteers assembled grocery bags full of specific canned goods--tuna, peanut butter, oatmeal, spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, etc--that people would by for $5 and $10, in order to re-donate them to the food bank. (yes, that's right. The food gets donated twice, once by the original grocery outlet and once by the people who pay for the assembled bags of canned goods. The money collected is also donated, so it all works out. It just feels a little weird.)
Today, we got to take the pallets of donated groceries in the warehouse and repackage them for distribution out to the food banks. So I spent about an hour hauling 15 pound bags of canned goods around, grouping them in sets of three bags to the banana box, and sending them to be put on a pallet for distribution. My son got the unenviable task of sorting through all of the loose cans and open bags, sorting them and checking for damaged goods; in addition to the preset bags, people donated a lot of other items to the food barrels, including a stuffed pony. Ev then put the good stuff into a separate cart, so someone else could package it all up as like items, and then threw away all of the open containers. (Dented canned goods are handled separately, with some of them ending up as pig food.)
Once we had finished with all of the food drive canned goods, we got to move on to second harvest yams. There was a huge box of yams and yam pieces, which had to be sorted through for the good bits. L worked on this section, as I helped clean and set up for the second set of repackaging we needed to do, and moldy yams are really so not my thing. They put the good yams in a banana box while the bad ones got tossed into the composting, and I have no idea where it went after that. I imagine it's more pig food.
The last thing we did was to repackage a specialty baking mix. These had been sample mixes that a company donated to Food Lifeline, but part of the process is to remove identifying information from the packages. (My guess is that premium food manufacturers don't want to have their products associated with not selling well, or overstocks, or things of that nature, which could happen if they are seen sitting around on food bank shelves in bulk.) So we opened the case, pulled out the boxes and opened them, dumped the contents into a plastic bag that had been labeled with the ingredients, tie it closed and stuff 12 of them back into each case, sealing them and labeling them for the food banks. I seriously felt like I was back in my summer job as a cannery worker, only without the smell. We had an amazing assembly line going, which included breaking down all of the cardboard packaging for recycling, and finished off almost 3 pallets (or maybe 4) of the mix.
They do a wrap-up at the end of each shift, and we had moved between 6 and 7 tons of food, which would be part of 13,000 meals. It was a great experience, and I think we'll continue to do this, at least through the rest of the school year.
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-03 12:44 am (UTC)The kids actually got half days on Wednesdays so they could do their volunteer work.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-03 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-03 12:45 am (UTC)I seriously felt like I was back in my summer job as a cannery worker, only without the smell.
The flashback must have been a little disconcerting. And that must have been quite a rough summer job, too.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-03 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-03 05:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-03 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-03 09:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-03 08:55 pm (UTC)