Harvest of Discards : Food Bank’s Salvage Work Stocks Pantries of Hungry

Backing his van up to the loading dock of an East San Diego Ralphs supermarket, Sonny Rosete Jr. collects the castoffs that a finicky society won’t touch: hundreds of loaves of bread, boxes of pies, bags of cookies and rolls and brownies that are a day too old for the paying customers who arrive through the front doors.

Baskets of broccoli, lettuce, carrots, radishes, potatoes, tofu, noodles and turnips await him behind the North Island Naval Air Station commissary--some of it slightly bruised, some of it a day or two old, some of it no longer usable for reasons known only to those who have tossed it aside.

Rosete, a food salvage driver for the San Diego Food Bank, collects it all, knowing that much of it will be on the tables at county soup kitchens and in the pantries of hungry people that same afternoon.

“We provide a resource for combating hunger that is provided in no other way,” said Terry Baur, program director for Neighborhood House Assn., a Southeast San Diego social service agency that runs the food bank. “You know that the store manager is not going to put his salvage out there and let people fight over it and worry whether they’re going to sue him. I do not think that food banking can be replaced by another source.”

20% of Food Discarded

In a nation that casually discards a staggering 20% of the food it produces--about 137 million tons annually--food salvage efforts like the one operated by the food bank have become an increasingly important link in the food chain for the poor and hungry.

Last month, the bank gave out 227,590 pounds of salvaged food, a bountiful, nutritious harvest of perfectly edible throwaways that are gratefully received by people at soup kitchens, group shelters, food pantries and senior citizens’ centers.

“I don’t like to take advantage of things like this. I like to provide for my own family,” said Cathy Kissane, a welfare mother of two who picked up a three-day “emergency box” of food at the food bank last week. “But when things are hard, you

have to go someplace.”

“We could not operate without food from the food bank,” said Jeanne Dorsey, coordinator of residential programs for the YWCA Women’s Night Shelter, where the bread Rosete collected at Ralphs in the morning was served with dinner that night. “We couldn’t afford to buy the things we get from the salvage.”

1 of 4 Food Programs

The food salvage program is just one of four projects operated by the food bank, which this year will hand out 14 million pounds of food and other essentials to 300 human service agencies and individuals like Kissane who go directly to its Dawson Street site.

Nearly 750,000 pounds of government surplus cheese, honey, flour and other staples are given out to 50,000 families each month in what is by far the food bank’s largest program. But the federal government this month announced that it will soon cut back by 50% on the nearly 800 million pounds of food it gave out in fiscal 1986-87 because of a dwindling supply.

The food bank also offers a five-day supply of food to senior citizens through its “brown bag program” and three days’ worth to anyone referred by human service agencies under the “emergency box” program.

But food salvage is perhaps its most innovative effort. The food bank has scavenged and distributed onions that an Imperial Valley farmer could not harvest, unwanted fish donated by sportfishermen, and truckloads of baby food donated by a national company.

Tax Break for Chains

It regularly receives tons of canned tomatoes, cookies, cereal, soda, olives and other products from Safeway and Lucky reprocessing centers. The two grocery chains gather the items they cannot sell from their shelves, and weed out spoiled food at a reprocessing center before it is trucked to food banks throughout Southern California. The grocery chains receive a tax writeoff for their donations.

On a smaller scale, individual donors also distribute their excess products through the collection efforts of Rosete and other drivers employed by the food bank. A state Good Samaritan law protects them against lawsuits over spoiled food, and they, too, receive tax breaks.

“Working at Ralphs, I see a lot of stuff we can’t sell. It’s not up to Ralphs standards,” said receiving clerk Ramon Siragusa, who gives the food to Rosete. “With all the homeless and starving in the world, I think this is an admirable way of Ralphs contributing.”

Human service agencies shop for salvaged products at the food bank, paying a 12-cent-per-pound fee that supplements the small government subsidies that the food bank receives. The fee allows even cash-poor agencies to provide something to their hungry members.

Needy Feeding Needy

“You’ve got the needy feeding the needy a lot of times,” said Rita Ouellette of San Diego’s New Life Church, which runs a small food pantry. “We don’t get a lot from our members.”

Almost unheard of 15 years ago, food salvage is now a large, well-organized national effort directed by the Chicago-based organization Second Harvest. Established by a handful of volunteers in Phoenix in 1979, the organization distributed 352 million pounds of surplus food worth $500 million in 1986--food that was dumped or fed to animals before Second Harvest started saving it for hungry Americans.

“We are a unique system for matching food from the food industry to needy people. It’s a distribution system that sees that food which would be wasted goes to feed needy people,” said Cynthia Baniak, director of development and communications for Second Harvest.

Second Harvest works directly with hundreds of national food producers, who contact the agency when they find themselves stuck with a trainload of unsellable cereal or a truckload of off-color fruit juice. Second Harvest then calls nearby food banks that are part of its network of 204 distribution agencies, which pick up the food or have it trucked to them by the company. The food is eventually given out to people by 38,000 agencies nationwide.

According to a 1977 report--the latest available--from the U.S. General Accounting Office, 137 million tons of food worth $31 billion is wasted every year.

Yet according to a study by the Physicians Task Force on Hunger in America released last month, 20 million Americans are hungry every day. About 9 million of them are children.

Despite the food bank’s best efforts, demand in San Diego still outstrips supply by about 50%, primarily because the food bank is desperately short of storage space.

In recent weeks, Baur has turned down two truckloads of diapers, 1,200 cases of fruit juice and 1,300 frozen dinners because there was no place to store them. The food bank has just 100 cubic feet of refrigeration space, which makes protein-rich foods like meat and fish very difficult to come by.

The food bank’s warehouse is just 12,000 square feet, about half the space it needs. The lighting is inadequate, there is no loading dock and the only office space is in a trailer that has been hauled inside the warehouse. Baur is hoping that someone will donate a larger warehouse.

And while it is turning away badly needed items, the food bank is plagued by erratic distribution that leaves some less desired items sitting on shelves for months. “We’re at the mercy of whatever is being discarded,” Baur said.

The food bank is still handing out some of the 41,820 jars of Grey Poupon mustard it received six months ago and 1,458 cases of baby food sweet potatoes it took in five months ago. “Even babies won’t eat sweet potatoes all the time,” Baur said.

Baur is also worried about losing a $76,000 annual donation from the county during the Board of Supervisors’ search for money to fund jail construction. With insurance costs up, money has become tighter than in the past.

But without the food bank, people like 69-year-old Rose Middleton could find this Thanksgiving more bleak than it already is. Middleton picked up an emergency box at the food bank last week when her husband became ill and her money had nearly run out.

“I just want it for this month, for Thanksgiving,” Middleton said. “I’m not a regular. I need just enough to help me make to the first (of December). I’m out of food.”