Much Is Wasted : Food Banks Ask Markets for Discards

South Bay supermarkets throw away enough food every day to feed hundreds, maybe thousands, of hungry people.

Gleaming red tomatoes, shiny purple eggplants--all with a soft spot, to be sure--lay in a bin behind the Vons supermarket at Peninsula Center recently. Orange juice, perhaps 30 gallons, too old to sell, was found in the trash at another store. Dozens of loaves of day-old bread were discarded at a third.

The prospect of so much food going to waste is enough to “make you sick,” declared Sister Michele Morris, director of the House of Yahweh soup kitchen in Lawndale. “I just can’t tell you what it does to me. We could use that food. We need more food.”

Much Food Thrown Away

Others agree that the need is there, both for soup kitchens and at food banks that distribute groceries to the poor.

But South Bay stores apparently throw away much edible food, although some donate regularly to hunger programs.

Agencies involved in feeding the hungry cite several reasons for the waste: No systematic pickup system has been developed for most stores. Some stores fear they would be sued if someone got sick from eating donated food. Some worry that recipients might undercut the store by selling the merchandise, anti-hunger activists say.

And because of the South Bay’s relative affluence, compared to other areas of Los Angeles County, the need for donated food is not as apparent.

“We receive a lot of produce and we distribute a lot of produce. It may not be reaching the South Bay,” said Doris Bloch, executive director of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, which distributed 22.5 million pounds of food in the county last year. The food bank gets damaged cans and other food from distributors and other sources and hands it out to more than 400 charitable agencies.

Area’s Affluence Cited

Bloch said the South Bay’s relative affluence and lesser need for food distribution is most likely the reason that food collection efforts are not as organized here as in Long Beach and Southeast and Central Los Angeles.

LIFE, or Love Is Feeding Everyone, an organization similar to the food bank, also operates in much of the county but not in the South Bay.

No exact figures for the number of hungry people in the South Bay are available, but officials believe that they number many thousands. (A 1986 United Way study estimated the number of hungry throughout Los Angeles County at 400,000 families.) Leaders of the area’s three soup kitchens say they could use more food.

Sister Michele, whose operation regularly feeds upwards of 600 people, including 130 families that receive groceries once a week, said the House of Yahweh is unable to feed all the needy who seek assistance.

Gene McCann, director of the Beacon Light Mission in Wilmington, said, “The Lord has been good to us, but if we get more, we give more.” His operation serves meals daily to between 50 and 80 people.

Celin Fonseca, director of St. Joseph’s Table in Wilmington, which feeds 150 people hot meals six days a week and donates groceries to 12 families, said that he, too, could handle more if he had more food.

The untapped potential at supermarkets, meanwhile, is enormous.

In 1977, a Department of Agriculture report estimated that about 2% of all the nation’s food was discarded at the supermarkets--enough to feed 5 million people. “A substantial portion of food loss is safe, nutritious food that could be consumed if it could be recovered and routed to the recipients,” said the report.

To be sure, the three South Bay food distribution agencies already make use of donated supermarket goods.

The House of Yahweh sends out a truck every day that stops at two Lucky supermarkets, filling up with produce that cannot be sold. The food is examined in the House of Yahweh kitchen, bad parts are cut out and rotten food is thrown away. “If in doubt, throw it out,” she said.

The Beacon Light Mission gets deliveries from a Carson supermarket once or twice a week--”eggs, hot dogs by the case, milk, yogurt, cheese, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, it might be anything,” director McCann said. St. Joseph’s Table receives dented canned goods donated by supermarkets and wholesale suppliers through the Los Angeles Food Bank.

In addition, some South Bay supermarkets donate food to church pantries and other small-scale programs, and the food bank distributes food to small agencies in Lawndale, Carson and Torrance.

But only a fraction of the edible food thrown out by the South Bay’s several dozen supermarkets reaches the needy, officials believe.

Fonseca, who says he has his hands full running St. Joseph’s Table, has not approached supermarkets for help. Morris is trying to obtain a larger truck or van to make more supermarket runs, and she is negotiating with another nearby supermarket for additional donations.

The mechanics of pickup and delivery appear to be the key obstacle to more efficient use of discarded food. Such food is on the verge of being totally unusable.

LIFE, an organization founded in 1983 by television stars Dennis Weaver and Valerie Harper, picks up perishable food from supermarkets and delivers to agencies that help the needy.

But LIFE’s six trucks cannot get around to hundreds of stores, even where top management has given the go-ahead, as it has for the Ralphs, Safeway and Vons chains. It makes no pickups in the South Bay.

“It’s not hard to contract with these people,” said Kevin Sites, LIFE’s development director. “They throw the food out every day. . . . The problem is not scarcity of food. There is enough food to feed everyone in this country. The problem is scarcity of resources of distribution.”

Sites, like Morris, is limited by the cost and availability of transportation. “We could use trucks and the manpower,” he said.

LIFE collects 200,000 pounds of produce a month and other food from 30 supermarkets and feeds an estimated 30,000 people a week through the agencies it supplies, Sites said.

The pickups are made in the San Fernando Valley and East, Central and South-Central Los Angeles. The deliveries are concentrated in the East and South-Central regions.

Vons has been donating food to individual soup kitchens for 30 years and to food banks for 12 years, according to communications manager Suzanne Dyer. Last year, Vons stores gave $127,000 worth of unsalable merchandise to the LIFE organization for use in the Long Beach area.

Lucky district manager Terry Rocheleau said that each Lucky store is permitted to donate to a local charity. “We try to keep it in the community where the store is located. That is our part of helping the community,” he said.

Safeway stores are also making donations.

Still, Sister Michele and others reported, many store officials remain hesitant about becoming part of any organized donation program.

“Some people would take the surplus food and go around to the front and complain and get ‘their’ money back. The abuses scared everybody and cut off the food supply,” Sister Michele said.

She said she had to give the Lucky stores signed statements that the House of Yahweh would not sell any donated food or sue the store if someone got sick.

But a nearby Boys supermarket turned down her request for donations, she said.

“We don’t do any because you let yourself open for claims,” said Boys Vice President Al O’Brien. Another Boys spokesman said the chain helps the hungry by giving gift certificates to hunger relief groups.

Margi Berkowitz, a spokeswoman for the National Grocers Assn., which urges members to support food banks, said that a number of stores fear lawsuits, but she added, “I have never heard of that being a major problem.”

Brenda Crosby, a Los Angeles Food Bank spokeswoman, said that some stores even “have a history of dumping and pouring bleach” over discarded produce to render it inedible. She declined to identify them.