May 22, 2008
Saving people, not just food
By Dan Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist
It was an odd place for an epiphany. Pamela Rainey Lawler had never been inside
a Dunkin' Donuts before, but her neighborhood theater in Roxborough was being
razed, and she wanted to see what sort of store was replacing it.
So she walked into one of chain's shops on Ridge Pike after work one day in
1983, and found herself wondering what was to become of the wall of
soon-to-be-stale sweets.
"We cycle them," she was told, which she took to mean that every few hours
they'd bring out fresher doughnuts and chuck the old ones.
She'd been reading local author Loretta Schwartz-Nobel's Starving in the
Shadow of Plenty, and was troubled by all the food-wasting she saw in the
corporate world.
"I was so struck by the fact that there were people whose basic needs were
not met."
What resulted was the food-recovery program called Philabundance, which has
become so successful in feeding the hungry.
Too successful, Lawler tells herself sometimes, because it has outgrown what
made it famous. If you picture volunteers in station wagons picking up trays of
uneaten food from restaurants and bakeries and delivering them to shelters,
that's an outdated image.
Cheaper by the truckload
As Philabundance grew, merging with the
Greater Philadelphia Food Bank in 2005, its mission changed. Picking up from
restaurants and smaller stores was not as cost-effective as going to the
producers for fresh food. The organization still works with supermarkets and
caterers, but that's no longer the focus.
As Bill Clark, Philabundance's director, puts it, "It's not about saving
food. It's about saving people."
Why spend $36 in fuel and staff to pick up a load of day-old bread, he asks,
when he can buy fresh bread cheaper? "That's not the best use of the money
people donate," he said. Today, the nonprofit feeds about 65,000 people a week,
through 600 agencies on both sides of the Delaware River.
I sought out Lawler after reading about a government study that found we
waste about 27 percent of the food that's available for consumption - this as
grocery bills soar and food-bank stocks shrink. The typical person tosses about
a pound of food every day.
"People care about this problem," says Lawler, who ran Philabundance
for its first nine years and who still serves on its board. Now she is
development director of MicroSociety, a curriculum that allows elementary and
middle school children to apply classroom lessons to the real world.
She asks if there's still an opportunity for an organization that's small and
quick to respond - something like what she started 24 years ago.
Starting small
Her first pickup was on Mother's Day 1984. She'd lined
up three soup kitchens, three shelters, and three church pantries as clients,
then drove her light-blue Subaru to an Acme and picked up some fruit and bread
that couldn't be sold.
Today, a group in New York manages to make something on that scale work, she
said. The City Harvest food rescue manages a core of 300 volunteers called
Street Fleet who pick up extra sandwiches and baked goods from places like
Starbucks and walk them to social service agencies.
"It's very grassrootsy," said Jen McLean, City Harvest's operations VP. "We
don't even have a warehouse." Last year the rescue redistributed 60,000 pounds
of food.
You might think of that as small potatoes, Lawler says, but "people who care
are getting involved. And other people give money when they see things like
that."
She wonders if there's a 21st-century model, where a blog and e-mail could
connect those with extra to those who feed the hungry.
"I'm sure there's a need," said Cary Borish, co-owner of the Marathon Grill.
"We're always solicited for cash and gift certificates [for fund-raisers], but I
have not been solicited for, 'Hey, what are you guys doing with your waste?'
"
Anybody?
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