Innovative Delivery Program Adds Fresh Produce To Menu Alternative Delivery Service Brings Fresh Food Directly To The Neighborhoods Where It’S Needed

Is this the place?” asked Ken Jensen, one of the managers at the Spokane Food Bank.

I acknowledged that it was. We arrived around 10 a.m. on a bright, clear, Spokane fall morning. Ken was driving the big, white Chevy van we call the “Vanny,” because I was too chicken to drive it full, like it was, of six pallets worth of food.

Ken eased the “Vanny” into the apartment complex’s cramped parking lot between a truck on one side and the carport roof on the other, and stopped.

Abruptly, we heard a cacophony of sounds from the back of the van.

Whoosh! Skid! Thump! Thump!

We paused and looked at each other before we jumped out, knowing we would find some sort of a mess when we opened the back end of the van.

There she was again (I had seen her on a previous run), a slender child about five years old, with strawberry blonde braids and wide, inquisitive eyes. She stood on the grass a few feet away and watched our every move. Ken smiled kindly and teased her about all the apples and peaches she could have for lunch. She didn’t say much, just that she liked apples, shyly returned his smile, and quickly disappeared into the shadow of the 20-year-old apartment building, intent on watching us as we unloaded the food.

Connie Theurer, the “on-site after-hours apartment manager,” rushed out to meet us, followed closely by three of her “volunteer-helper” teenagers.

“What have you got for us today?” she asked.

“An excellent variety this time,” I replied from the back of the van as I scrambled to repack 10 boxes of spilled nectarines.

“Some high-quality French fries, cereal, bread, milk, juice, lettuce and lots of beautiful peaches and nectarines!”

“Oh, this is wonderful!” she exclaimed. “The cereal and milk couldn’t have come at a better time! I have a few families that I know don’t have anything at all right now to give to their children for breakfast.”

In the next few minutes, we unloaded approximately 2,000 pounds of boxes of food onto the sidewalk. Before I could find Connie again to get her signature, the teenagers and some other tenants had completely moved the last of the food from the sidewalk into the apartment lobby.

“Connie, how do you distribute all this food to these tenants?” I asked.

She thought for a moment.

“This is a 75-unit apartment complex, and out of that there are approximately 185 children and 123 adults who live here. All of our tenants are very low income. Some of them receive SSI, some receive food stamps and some work minimum wage jobs. “When the money and/or food stamps run out, and they have no other source of food, they would have to just do without, if it weren’t for the Alternative Distribution Program.”

Connie looked at me and said, “You know, our tenants are very grateful. I would estimate that at least 90 percent of them come in and pick up the food. Some of my older people can’t come in here in the evening when we distribute it, so my teenagers and I put food boxes together and bring it to their door.

“I would estimate that it takes only about one to three hours to completely distribute all the food, depending on how much you bring us.”

Prologue to a paper titled Perishable Food Distribution Project, written by Diane M. Hanson. An AmeriCorps*VISTA member.

There is no underestimating the value of fresh fruits and vegetables in the American diet.

The lack of fresh produce has been linked directly to the incidence of certain cancers, hypertension and diabetes. Recent research indicates that the incidence of some cancers can be cut by as much as 40 percent.

Further, reports Dr. Philip James, director of the Rowett Research Institute of Great Britain in the magazine Nutrition, “Most of the 18 cancers that researchers have examined have been found to be preventable.

“Vegetables and fruits are far more powerful protectors against cancer than previously recognized.”

For a variety of reasons, uncounted tons of fresh produce and other perishable foods go to waste each year. Much of what’s grown never makes it into the food chain, and of that that does, volumes are discarded due to short shelf-life and high customer expectations.

Food banking is trying to change that, with innovative programs aimed at doing with fresh foods what it has been doing with dry goods for a quarter of a century.

“There’s a new type of food you’re seeing at food banks,” said Deborah Leff, president of Second Harvest, the national network of food banks. “Since 1993, the food banks have had a fresh produce program, and now we have a fresh fish program.”

Fresh foods come at a price, however. They are difficult to transport and store, and they have a short shelf life when they do arrive at a food bank.

“These are important foods,” Leff said, “but sometimes it’s more difficult to handle fresh foods, to get them to families. You have to move the food quickly and efficiently, and at the right temperatures to the locations where they are headed, and that takes money, frankly.”

The Spokane Food Bank wrestled endlessly with the perishable food dilemma before tackling it head on three years ago.

“What happened was that we were visited by Dr. Susan Evans and Dr. Peter Clark of the University of Southern California School of Medicine,” said Al Brislain, the food bank’s Executive Director.

“They had been doing some work with other people on the issue of produce and they came to us and said `You guys could be doing over a million pounds a year.’

“Frankly, at first, I was a bit skeptical about our ability to move that much produce.”

“They told us some amazing facts,” said Shawn Mayo, the food bank’s food resource developer.

“They told us that people who live below the poverty line tend to live in areas where the grocery stores charge up to 17 percent more for produce than in other areas. Consequently, our clients tend to see produce as a treat, not a necessity.

“By distributing food to them, we are hoping that they acquire a taste for it, and the more they buy, the lower the prices become.”

Faced with the promise of a bounty of fresh food, Brislain swallowed his skepticism and the Spokane Food Bank moved forward to identify sources that could supply the perishables, and to develop effective ways to get it to the people who needed it.

Mayo tackled the first task. Based on a model put forward by Evans and Clark, the food bank created an alliance with the food industry and began reaching out to the region’s growers, resellers and manufacturers.

As Evans and Clark had predicted, the results were swift and dramatic.

“In the 1996-97 fiscal year, when the program began,” Brislain said, “we were receiving 15,000 pounds of produce and other perishables each month. In 1997-98, it jumped to 43,000 pounds a month, and so far this year, it’s 92,000 pounds a month.

“We have increased fresh produce by five times.”

“This year, our goal was to bring in over a million pounds of fresh produce, which would have doubled last year’s amount,” Mayo said. “We have already exceeded that and we have a month left.”

Mayo credits members of the local food industry.

“Jim Morrow at Peirone’s Food and Nick Pupo at Pupo’s Produce have been very instrumental in donating to the Food Bank and in going out into what I call their `produce neighborhood’ and talking their peers into giving us food.”

Conditioned by consumers to discard of blemished and otherwise imperfect food, growers and resellers sometimes must be convinced that their surplus food has value.

“I know that as a consumer, I want to buy that nice, shiny apple,” Mayo said, “but there are a lot of apples with brown spots that are perfectly good.”

Along with regional initiatives, food banking’s cause has been helped along by Dan Glickman, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Glickman has issued a directive that would facilitate a relationship between farmers, orchardists and growers and the food banks,” Mayo said.

Glickman has encouraged food producers to give to the food bank system foods that otherwise might have dumped due to market pressures and other conditions.

“Last year, we saw apples from that program,” Mayo said. “We saw kiwi fruit and we saw peaches. It has really helped a lot.”

Scott Hallett, a farm service agent with the Department of Agriculture has been a prime mover in the effort, she said.

Three years ago, the Spokane Food Bank and its affiliated emergency pantries would not have been able to absorb such a massive influx of perishable food. At the time, 20 percent of all produce was lost to waste, because it could not be moved quickly enough.

When the initiative began, an AmeriCorps*VISTA member named Dan Sjolund, the food bank’s, salvage specialist mManager, was responsible for discarding bad produce.

“One of my primary jobs here at least every day was to throw out old and rotting food,” he told Hansen. “Sometimes we had to rent even bigger dumpsters to accommodate the large quantities of rotten food.”

Even more food went to waste at the emergency outlets, most of which lacked facilities for storing perishables.

“We glutted the outlets with perishable product and then they wouldn’t take any more of it for a long time,” said Terry Moore, a former food bank employee responsible for exploring alternative means of delivering fresh produce.

“We decided that we needed to open other channels where we could consistently and quickly distribute this product.”

The strategy that emerged was a network of delivery sites that would supplement the 21 local emergency outlets. Produce would be delivered to the sites on a regular basis and would be distributed directly to the poor.

Moore identified and recruited several apartment complexes that served low-income tenants as well as a handful of churches and community centers. The Food Bank also began delivering produce to local Indian tribes. Suddenly, perishables were moving quickly through the system amd food loss was slashed from 20 percent to five percent at the Food Bank, and by an indeterminate amount at the pantries.

“We used to lose a large part of most big loads.” Brislain said. “Last year, we got a semi full of bananas and we lost about half of that, but we don’t have that problem anymore.”

Currently the Food Bank is hoping to receive a grant from Kraft that would pay for coolers at affiliate food banks in Yakima and the Tri-Cities.

“We want to go more regional with the distribution of produce,” Mayo said. “Right now, we’re pretty much limited to Spokane County. We had two pallets of tomatoes the other day, but there was no time to get them to the Tri-Cities, where they could have beem used.”

Tthe emergency food outlets are thrilled to have the produce.

“It’s much better quality now, and I’m not afraid to take it,” said Barb Bennett, manager and soon-to-be executive director of the Valley Food Bank.

The Valley Food Bank is open just one day each week, and any produce not taken that day would spoil. But a new cooler will minimize spoilage.