Food Lifeline Weekend
Feb. 3rd, 2007 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wickedwords
It's the first Saturday of the month, so we pilgrimaged to Food Lifeline as part of Ev's community service requirement. This is the third time we're done this, and I am really starting to enjoy the process. I'm glad the shifts only last three hours, as I'm not up to being a full-time warehouseman, to to play one for a day is awfully fun.
Today we got to repackage frozen corn cobbettes, and the process was slightly different from re-packaging the carrots. Rather than having one palette of corn and then bucketing out of it to work tables, and then packaging the 3 lbs bags on the tables, this time there were 6 of the large frozen pallets of corn already set up. We would dig the corn out of the bins and stuff them into prelabeled bags, 3 lbs per bag, and then put them in some newly-assembled cardboard boxes, rather than the old banana boxes. One of the volunteers would tape the boxes closed and move them to another pallet to create a 5x5 cube of filled boxes. Once the cube was done, then the full pallet would be moved to the back of the warehouse and labeled, while an empty pallet form was moved in.
In the beginning, I helped people get set up and find their supplies. Since we worked in the freezer section, everyone had to double-glove with the latex gloves as their hands were freezing. We seemed to run out of boxes and labeled bags a lot right at the beginning, so I just kept on doing that for awhile.
But the teen boys that were supposed to close the filled boxes and build the pallet cube sort-of wandered away after the second pallet, so I grabbed a taping gun and started working on that myself. Since we did 240 boxes, I figure I must have moved at least 50-100 of those in order to do the cubes; so I'm guessing I moved somewhere between 1500 and 3000 lbs of corn in order to get everything stacked. I sweated a lot, and had to take off my coat, and my arms are covered with scratches from the cardboard, but I feel like a total stud for doing that.
In the end, there were 28 people that worked on the project. We packed 7200 lbs of corn for distribution out to local food banks, which will be a part of about 5,650 meals.
Today we got to repackage frozen corn cobbettes, and the process was slightly different from re-packaging the carrots. Rather than having one palette of corn and then bucketing out of it to work tables, and then packaging the 3 lbs bags on the tables, this time there were 6 of the large frozen pallets of corn already set up. We would dig the corn out of the bins and stuff them into prelabeled bags, 3 lbs per bag, and then put them in some newly-assembled cardboard boxes, rather than the old banana boxes. One of the volunteers would tape the boxes closed and move them to another pallet to create a 5x5 cube of filled boxes. Once the cube was done, then the full pallet would be moved to the back of the warehouse and labeled, while an empty pallet form was moved in.
In the beginning, I helped people get set up and find their supplies. Since we worked in the freezer section, everyone had to double-glove with the latex gloves as their hands were freezing. We seemed to run out of boxes and labeled bags a lot right at the beginning, so I just kept on doing that for awhile.
But the teen boys that were supposed to close the filled boxes and build the pallet cube sort-of wandered away after the second pallet, so I grabbed a taping gun and started working on that myself. Since we did 240 boxes, I figure I must have moved at least 50-100 of those in order to do the cubes; so I'm guessing I moved somewhere between 1500 and 3000 lbs of corn in order to get everything stacked. I sweated a lot, and had to take off my coat, and my arms are covered with scratches from the cardboard, but I feel like a total stud for doing that.
In the end, there were 28 people that worked on the project. We packed 7200 lbs of corn for distribution out to local food banks, which will be a part of about 5,650 meals.
