Keeping it out of the dumpster

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1994 by Joseph McConnell

"To die of hunger, to die of boredom... what's the difference?"

"It's FOOD, you dumb ass!" --graffiti

IT'S A COLD, BRIGHT MORNING; ice crystals on the windshield, ten o'clock or so; most of the downtown population is inside, off the street. I park the van next to the Del Rio, and my partner goes in to pick up the usual Wednesday donation of tortillas and beans. I load my arms with food we've gathered elsewhere and run across Ashley to the Day Shelter, a ratted-out storefront where people hang out, get counseling, and get in out of the cold. William the Cook is there to hold the door. The doughnuts are welcome, the white bread is fine, but then we get to one of the big lexan bins of prepared food. "Man," says William, "I don't know what this is." And neither do I -- it seems to be mostly peas and cornflakes. I take William's expert word for it that his clientele won't fully appreciate the substance; we dig out some apples instead, and the mysterious casserole goes back in the truck. Forty-five minutes later, after we've been to Miller House and a grocery bag drop-in program at the Community Center ("Good mornin'! Got any cakes?") we're back at headquarters. We've picked up and distributed just shy of a thousand pounds of food (including the peas and cornflakes; another program was happy to get it). It has cost the grocery stores, restaurants, and college dorms that donated the food maybe $10 in employee time -- setting the food aside and saying good morning to us. It's cost the agencies we gave it to exactly nothing. Since my partner and I are volunteers, it has cost our group very little: gas money, insurance, and energy. And it isn't quite noon yet.

THERE IS, IT TURNS out, such a thing as a free lunch. Or nearly free. All over the country, every day, megatons of edible, attractive food are just pitched, flung in the dumpster. What's worse, this isn't food that can solve the world's big, obvious hunger horrors; most of it is perishable. By the time it got to Somalia or Bosnia, it would be over the hill, no longer a boon but a health hazard. The window of opportunity for all this discarded food is narrow: a lot of it is fine today and maybe tomorrow; by the day after, it's marginal. And that, of course, is why it's being thrown out. Its current owners can't or don't want to sell it, and they have no channel for getting it to those who'd be happy to have it. So: into the dumpster. The consumer doesn't see the waste -- just an endless flow of cosmetically perfect produce, baked goods, dairy products -- all stamped with dates comfortably far into the future. The dumpster is behind the store, out of sight.

IT'S SATURDAY AFTERNOON.

We're wheeling two grocery carts jammed with out-of-date bakery products toward the loading area in a supermarket. A customer stops us, thinking we're stockers; she wants to buy one of the pizzas on the top of the cart. They look that good. Hell, they are that good. They're indistinguishable from the pizzas back on the shelf. All that's wrong is the date on the label.

MEANWHILE, people close at hand are short of food. We all know, intellectually, that there's Hunger in America. You hear that slightly coy phrase often enough. What amazes you about American hunger when you first encounter it is not that it exists but what a lot of it there is, and how dose it is to plentiful supplies of food. American hunger is not a function of famine or war. It exists because of poverty and urbanization, because millions of people have neither money to buy food nor land and skills to produce it. These people live next door, often enough, to businesses and institutions that throw away edible food.

How much hunger is there? In a country where the hungry aren't living in refugee camps, it hasn't been easy to say. The numbers have been subject to inflation and deflation, especially as the federal government began to dial back its involvement in social programs. In the early eighties, as localities were trying to figure out just how much of a job the reds were handing back to them, various groups began trying to define hunger and quantify it. One effort was the Food Research and Action Center's Community Childhood Hunger Identification Project. FRAC put together a standard survey that "measures hunger by asking a series of questions about the resources available to a household to buy food, the adequacy of the food consumed, food shortages, and the prevalence of hunger."

They started off with a low-income neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut, then expanded the program to nine other states. Based on the data produced, FRAC estimated that "approximately 12 percent of all families with children under 12 experience hunger." That works out, again according to FRAC, to about 5 million children. And those were the children who were clearly experiencing hunger; the survey also suggests that as many as 28 percent of families with children are "at risk" of hunger -- people who could go hungry at any time, given just a quick shot of bad luck.