Karen and I and a group of 27 Wagner College students spent our day at the New York City Food Bank Warehouse today. The New York City Food Bank is one of New York City's most highly rated and effective charities. It serves about 60 million meals a year and has worked tirelessly to advocate for public policies and state and federal legislation to keep poor people from going hungry, far too many of whom are young children.
What is especially impressive about the Food Bank Warehouse is its size - 90,000 square feet in all - as well as its efficiency - everything is carefully inventoried and catalogued - and as a result the Food Bank knows exactly how much food they are receiving and how it is being distributed to the various boroughs of New York City. And given the size of the warehouse and its unbelievable system for stocking enormous amounts of food - we saw shelf upon shelf of macaroni, sardines, and canned fruit - there seems to be almost no limit to the amount of nutrition the Food Bank can provide. And yet, even though the Food Bank serves 60 million meals a year through its exhaustive network, the need for meals is 4 times as great as what can be provided. This is a source of frustration and a goad for Food Bank workers to labor even harder, but the Food Bank cannot solve the problem of hunger alone. Only comprehensive federal programs that ensure every person has enough to eat can finally make the problem of hunger a thing of the past.
In the meantime, organizations like the Food Bank will always be essential. And what the Food Bank now does is nothing short of putting in place a scientific and highly systematized approach to distributing food. They know where the shortages and greatest needs are and using a kind of triage approach are able to work closely with a wide range of neighborhoods to ensure that the need does not overwhelm the neediest families and communities.
During our trip to the Food Bank Warehouse in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, we toured the warehouse and got a sense of the immensity of their effort. It was staggering to step into the various rooms - some refrigerated and even freezer-like - to see how much food they have stored there. It was not unlike the scene from "Bicycle Thief" when we get a glimpse of the endless piles of linens that have been returned to pawn shops and placed on these shelfs that touch the ceilings of impossibly high storage rooms.
Once the tour was over, they put us all to work. Our job was to transfer macaroni from huge bins called pallets - each pallet is over a thousand pounds - into 3 pound plastic bags that were then placed in boxes that altogether hold 10 of the 3 pound bags. These boxes can then more conveniently be transferred to food pantries and soup kitchens for distribution, since few emergency food outlets can handle very large boxes of food.
The work turned out to be fun and fast moving and the more we did it the better we got at transferring the food to the three pound bags. The students felt a pride in doing this kind of work and in collaborating to make the work as fun and as efficient as possible. By the end of the day, they had transferred 5 pallets of food into small bags, which translated to making it possible for 3000 additional people to have access to meals.
Even though it was a trek to the Warehouse and the work was enervating, the overall experience was one of satisfaction. We did work that will help people put off hunger, which will allow them to do better on their jobs and support their children in doing better in school. These were good outcomes that we were helping to bring about and we were proud to contribute. We also know that our support of the Food Bank helps it to continue to attain its mission of ending hunger in New York, by feeding hungry people and by advocating for policies that ultimately make widespread hunger an impossibility. We have a long way to go, but the Wagner students' efforts are testament to how much just a few people can do to make a difference for thousands of others.
We hope that our experience at the Food Bank Warehouse will lead to other such opportunities and to Wagner College students gaining a deeper understanding of the roots of hunger and what can be done to finally eliminate it once and for all.
No comments:
Post a Comment