Food and Charity : The Bank That Gives It Away

If the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank, were in the business of making money, it would be a company to watch. Ten years ago, the agency distributed 5.6 million pounds of food to 75 different charities. This year, the Foodbank will distribute about 36 million pounds of food. With an ever-expanding “customer” base, the Foodbank is having a record year.

But growth in food banks is not necessarily desirable.

“Los Angeles County has the dubious distinction of having the largest food bank in the nation,” says the Foodbank’s executive director Doris Bloch, as she leans against a stack of boxes at the Foodbank’s headquarters just south of downtown Los Angeles. “Dubious because the size of a county’s food bank could be said to relate to a county’s need.”

Today, Bloch is wearing what she calls her “grown-up” clothes--as head of an enterprise that took in more than $3 million last year, the nicely tailored suit fits her position. For this, she apologizes. Normally, she prefers comfortable pants and a casual shirt, the sort of clothing that ensures you won’t be marked as a snob if you, say, spend a lot of time in a warehouse. And Bloch spends more than her share of each workday walking the aisles of a cavernous industrial space that resembles the warehouse of any major supermarket chain.

“I started as director at the Foodbank on January 3, 1983--during the Reagan recession--and if anybody had said to me then, ‘Doris, prepare yourself, things are going to be much worse in 10 years,’ I would have said, ‘Don’t be silly. It couldn’t possibly get any worse.’ And so I feel very sad that we’re in this situation, that the need for the Foodbank is much greater than it was. But I’m also proud of what the Foodbank has done, that we’ve been able to serve as many people as we do.”

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When Bloch came to the Foodbank ten years ago, it operated out of a 10,000-square-foot rented space in El Monte with a budget of just $300,00 and a staff of 10. “Several board members told me when I first started, ‘Oh, you’ll never need a bigger warehouse.’ I said, ‘Terrific.’ What did I know? A year and a half later, we moved to a bigger space in Vernon.” Expansion hasn’t been limited to numbers served.

These days, the Foodbank operates out of its own 55,000-square-foot facility built specifically for the organization in Los Angeles near Alameda Street. This year, it opened a new distribution facility in Torrance. And Bloch is trying to raise the money to open branches in both the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

Even more impressive is that the Foodbank operates with a paid staff of less than 50 people. “That’s partly because we have so many volunteers,” Bloch says, “anywhere from 25 to 50 people every day of the week.” (Without volunteers, Bloch says her payroll would be about $350,000 dollars a year higher than it already is.)

Founded more than 20 years ago by the late Tony Collier, as the Grandview Food Bank of Pasadena, it was only the second of its type to open in the United States. Through much of the Eighties, it was known as Community Food Resources; it acquired its present name in 1986.

Behind her, a freight cart beeps its warning as Bloch conducts a tour of the Foodbank warehouse. In one section, you see stacks and stacks of banana boxes, every brand represented. But almost none hold actual bananas. “Banana boxes are the standard containers for the food industry,” Bloch says, “so that’s how most of the food from supermarket warehouses comes in.”

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In a corner room of the warehouse, volunteers sort through the boxes of products that come in from supermarkets and from manufacturers, from wholesale distributors and from food drive collections. “We call it urban gleaning because we don’t have fields to glean,” Bloch says.

Many Foodbank volunteers are low-income people from the neighborhood. “They do it because they get a little thank-you food when they’re done,” Bloch says. “But they’re really the hardest workers. They look at everything in every box. Every single item. They decide whether to keep it or to toss it.”

Canned goods, for instance, are OK if they’re dinged up, as long as the dent doesn’t damage the package seal. A can of peaches crushed half-way through the container is trashed.

Back in her office, it’s hard to get Bloch to sit still. She talks at a furious pace, as if she’s afraid she’ll lose your attention any minute. Maybe it’s dealing with time-pressed donors, but she seems to have learned the art of cramming hours of information into a 40-minute conversation. And if required, you get the idea that she could compress the same information just as eloquently into 10 minutes--she’d just talk even faster.

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Question: Why did you get you involved in food banking?

Answer: My father is probably the reason why I’m doing what I’m doing. He was one of the founders of the Hollywood Ranch Market, which was the first all-night supermarket in town, and of Bill’s Ranch Market out in the (San Fernando) Valley. Every night at dinner, he’d talk about the price of food, about how much food is wasted in America.

Of course, this was all for the benefit of my two brothers. He always told them, “My business is going to be for you.” But neither one of them had any interest in grocery stores. I’d say, “Daddy, I’d like to go into the business.” He’d tell me, “No, you’re just a girl. You’re going to get married and have children like your mother did.” And I did. But one day I found myself divorced and I had to start my life all over again. I did a few things in between, but when I came into food banking, I really felt as if I’d come home.

Q: It seems that there are so many charities willing to feed the hungry, but for people truly in need, how difficult is it to find out where to go and how to qualify?

A: The entire emergency food services in the Los Angeles area is not an integrated system at all. The geography we cover is daunting. The need we face is daunting.

I usually tell people to call Info Line ((800) 333-9997), which can refer people to charities in their area. But it can take a long, long time to get through--the line can be busy, and sometimes no one picks up. If you’re standing at a phone booth because your phone has already been cut off, and your child is hungry, and your food stamps haven’t come, and your ex hasn’t sent a child-support payment in months, then you’re in a really bad situation. If it’s a weekend and you do get through, they may tell you, “I’m sorry, it’s Saturday and not very many places are open.” Friday afternoons, most charities shut down. Info Line can usually find someplace in the county that’s open, but the place might be so far away that it’s going to cost more in bus fare than you’ve got in your pocket.

Another thing is that most charities don’t give food to just anybody, and they don’t give anytime people need it. Usually people aren’t allowed to come more than once a month, and at some charities they can’t come more than once every six to eight weeks. At one place, they don’t serve individuals more than once every six months and they don’t serve a family more than once every three months. They just don’t have enough food.

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Q: What changes have you seen in the kind of people who need help from charities?

A: More and more they are people who have lost their jobs, who can’t believe that they’ve just lost their home, who can’t bring themselves to go to a government agency and get food stamps or whatever it is they need. They feel humiliated. They’re people who are falling out of the middle class.

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Q: Who are the donors?

A: Manufacturers are the ones who provide really big donations. Just about any food company you can think of has probably donated to us. We get food from brokers, from wholesalers, from retailers and processors. They think of us when they have a surplus or because our people are harassing them all the time.

The only problem is that a lot of the time donors call late in the afternoon and they want that food cleared out immediately . We don’t have the luxury of saying, “Oh, we can’t pick that up until next week. If all of our trucks are out, we use outside trucking. We have six trucks, but my freight bill still runs something like $180,000 a year. People complain that they don’t want their money to go to administration and overhead, but to me, trucks-- that’s not administration and overhead, that’s getting people fed.

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Q: What happens when a charity calls for help?

A: We send them an application, then we go see them--to find out what they’re about. When they’re accepted, they’re told which day of the week and what time they can pick up their food. Each week, they call 24 hours ahead of time to listen to a food list on a telephone answering tape. Then they talk to one of the inventory people to tell us what they want. The inventory person creates a picking ticket, which tells the crew, for example, whether to add frozen or chilled foods to the order. After the crew picks out the order, the boxes are stacked in piles and marked with the name of each charity. Basically, our job is to make it simple for them to get in and get out, to help them get access to the food, according to how much food we have and how much service each charity provides.

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Q: You had a lot of cartons of Evian water in the warehouse. Do you get a lot of requests for it?

A: You wouldn’t think that Evian belonged at a food bank. People say to me, “Evian? What would you do with it?” Well, the shelters and the organizations that have emergency food love it. If people aren’t living in a room or a sheltered environment, they don’t use it just to drink, they use it to wash themselves, to keep themselves clean. Which is fine with me.

Q: You also seem to have a lot of boxes of cereal.

A: Let me tell you why we have that cereal. The makers included a little premium, a toy in the box called a popper. The problem is that a child pressed the popper and it hit him. The cereal had to be taken off supermarket warehouse shelves all over America. We got truckloads and truckloads of the stuff through Second Harvest, a national food network. Volunteers had to open every box, remove the popper and then re-bag everything, relabel it and then put it all in cases. It was a big deal. We still have to bury the poppers and get a burial certificate so we can be reimbursed for getting rid of the poppers.

Q: What items do you like to get the most?

A: Certain things are golden to us: potatoes because they have a long life, oranges because they’re so nutritious. But we take what we can get. Sometimes people ask me, “How do you balance out the nutritional value?” and I say, “I’m a food banker, I don’t even have that luxury. I can only give what we get.”

Q: What happened to all this food before there were food banks?

A: Before there were food banks, this food was thrown away. Just thrown on dumps. I remember years ago there was a big scandal when dairy producers in Southern California had so much milk they were throwing it away--they were throwing it in rivers. No one paid attention until one day a bunch of milk was thrown into Ballona Creek and it flowed out white into the ocean. People said, “My God, they’re throwing milk away and children are going hungry.”

Back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when food banking really got started, people were starting to think about not wasting resources--though not the way they do today. Food bankers were really the people who started asking, “Why do we have to waste all this stuff? Why can’t we help people use these surplus resources?”

Q: Is there still a lot of food out there going to waste?

A: Not as much as before. Most of the food companies are either producing or buying on a very lean timeline. Stores aren’t buying huge stocks of inventory, manufacturers aren’t creating huge stocks of inventory and so food doesn’t go past its marketing date as often. Plus, with competition from secondary discount markets, it’s actually getting harder to get food. It used to be that a company would call us and say, “OK, I’ve got 25 palettes of product,” and we’d make arrangements to have it transported to the Foodbank. Now, they call in the morning and say, “I’ve got 25 palettes of product, but I’m trying to sell it. I’ll call you if i don’t sell it.”

Q: What makes you angry?

A: First, I get terribly angry when people make broad generalities about the poor. People say to me, “Well, are these people really in need?” Yes, they are, because if you would go stand in a food line at a pantry, you would only do it once before you would believe. People do not go through it because it’s fun or because it’s free. It’s not a hobby.

I don’t think people have tried living on the benefits that the poor get these days. I don’t think people understand how hard it is to pay rent, pay utilities, buy food, maybe a little medicine and possibly shoes or clothes for the children. I think people are constantly forced into making decisions: Do we buy food or pay the rent? Do we buy food or shoes? Do we buy food or a winter coat? Food is one of the first things that gets manipulated out of a budget.

There’s too much of what I would call smugness, only nowadays it’s mixed with fear, because people are afraid it’s going to happen to them. I hate it that people live in such poverty in my hometown. It makes me angry when people abuse kindness and goodness and benefits. I hate it when people say, “Well, I don’t want to give to the Foodbank because I’m afraid of liability,” because I know there are liability laws that protect donors.

And I hate it when people tell me, “You can’t have everything; our money has to go to either AIDS research or hunger relief.” I’m sorry, it has to go to both. This business that you’ve got to have either this or that . . . no ! It’s hard work fighting hunger. It’s hard work understanding public policy. You can’t just say we’re going to end hunger by the year 2000. You have to do your homework. People think it can be done by thinking good thoughts. Sorry, that’s not the way it works.

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Los Angeles Regional Foodbank, 1734 E. 41st St., Los Angeles, (213) 234-3030. Collects food and money for several programs. In the Emergency Food Assistance Program, 100% of money donations go exclusively to buy food for charities that cannot afford to pay the normal Foodbank shared maintenence fee of 14 cents per pound of food.