LeslieMladinich.com

Day 5- Saving Gai Lan

Photo Credit: FotoosVanRobins

Today we got a box of gai lan, a Chinese broccoli, donated on Sunday from the Farmers’ Market. It was a Wednesday, and because of a funky smell swirling from the heavy, open-slit box and some glistening leaves peeking through that indicated rot, the program manager said the box needed some serious editing.

“Go through there and see what you can save, but I think it’s going to get pretty nasty at the bottom,” she said.

If there was ever a job for me, this was it, I thought with vigor as I strapped on some plastic gloves. I prided myself on my disdain for throwing away perfectly good food.

“It’s like throwing money down the drain,” was my typical refrain when I cleaned out our refrigerator every Sunday, raising my voice so my husband could hear me as I’d extract his wilted and browned iceberg lettuce, juices flowing in its plastic bag. If I was feeling even more annoyed, I would dangle the sorry lump around the living room corner to try and make him feel even worse.

I liked to call food waste Catholicism’s 8^th mortal sin- spurred by my grandmother’s urging to finish everything on your plate- not because there were starving kids in China but because she had lived on nothing but cabbage for her entire childhood in Croatia.

And if there was ever a place where you could not afford to throw good food away, it was the Food Bank.

Gai lan kind of looks like kale, but its leaves aren’t as fanned or puckered. Healthy leaves are long, elegant and forest green. Bad ones have turned a hyper shade of lime because of a slick rotting oil spreading all over them.  If I could find some of the former, surely this beautiful vegetable would delight many of Chinese clients who would actually know how to cook it.

So as I opened up the box and started sorting through the rubber-banded bunches, I was determined to save something. One by one I took out them out, trying to create a barometer of what could stay and what could go.

My co-worker watched me work.

“Ew,” she said. “I think they are all hopeless.”

After that, my quest was even more desperate. So I dove straight to the bottom of the box, where the rotten bunches were coated in a mucus soup. I compared them to three bunches that I had plucked from the top, where the most salvageable sat. There are some clean leaves here, I thought.  Surely they could be snapped off and put into a stir-fry?

Then a swarm of flies flew out from underneath another of the worst bunches and the sorting table volunteers let out a collective – “Gross!,”

Defeated, I threw them all into the compost bin.

###

Day 3 and 4- The Treat Box

Photo credit: Steve Snodgrass

At the Food Bank,  there’s what’s called the Treat Box – a scuffed office supply-sized box that sits on the edge of the table near the slats of mandatory canned food.

Odds and ends from donation bins and the daily Trader Joe’s delivery that don’t fall lockstep in with the required pasta, fruit, vegetable, and protein selections for the family boxes go into the Treat Box. Its contents are jewels that outshine the mundane.

A peek in there reveals everything from the retro- Sanka coffee – to the glamorous- Ginger Chocolate Pear spread. Put that spread on top of a Farmers Market donated Granny Smith apple and a slice of Trader Joe’s donated brie, and a Food Bank recipient could easily have a gourmet dessert.

Then there are Treat Box items that defy easy classification. There’s the “terminally unhealthy”-   Pop Tarts snacksters, 100 calorie squares of chemicals- to “the last-minute hostess gift grocery grab” -black licorice Scottie Dogs- to the “items for weight conscious” patrons”- a Nutri-System Egg Frittata.

There are also items I would put in the “sad” classification because these “treats” are everyday items – olive oil, salad dressing, jam- that people who don’t need a Food Bank put on their grocery lists.

Looking at the everyday mixed in with the exotic- I truly see that this world is divided into haves and have-nots.

Volunteers can take from the Treat Box too, but I would never think to do so. Potato chips are an everyday staple in my pantry, so I would never think to eat a bag of Doritos that could be squeezed lovingly into a family box.

Others don’t think as hard as I do. Some volunteers think the Treat Box is a free-for-all, snagging what they find palatable from it while waiting for the Trader Joe’s delivery rush. In such a state, one volunteer took a box of raisins other day.

“I always love a sweet snack,” he said.

Was I being too puritanical, I thought as I saw him zestfully pour a handful of raisins into his hand, shaped like a golf club handle because golfing 12 holes was his first job before his 10 a.m. to 3 p.m Food Bank shift. Shouldn’t those raisins be in the clumsy fingers of a small child whose only other fruit was diabetes-inducing, syrupy canned Fruit Cocktail?

My thinking was affirmed the next week when we were told that, along with having to discount Cranberry Cocktail as a 100 percent fruit juice in order for it to be placed in a family box, volunteers who wanted a treat should take it from somewhere else.

Take produce or an expired Trader Joe’s salad.  But the Treat Box selections should only be for clients, the manager said.

The Raisin-Snacker Volunteer was not too pleased with this as his hunger began creeping up at 12:00 PM again.

“I guess I will get a salad after that lecture we got,” he said, walking to one of the refrigerators.

Funny, I hadn’t thought of it as a lecture- just the program manager pointing out the right thing to do.

Day 1- Counting the Loaves.

The Motherly Volunteer peered through the doorway and looked at the rain-sprinkled clients sitting patiently. Some had wired, wheeled carts to carry their boxes to the car, others relied on the ones provided by the Food Bank. Many had been waiting for an hour, drops still glistening on their parkas. The Motherly Volunteer counted the clients, many of whom she’d gotten to know at her five years volunteering at the Food Bank.

One man was particularly painful to look at. He was tall – towering over the shorter Chinese senior citizens who made up Wednesday’s gathering of lottery clients. They got a number, and that was the order in which their pre-made boxes of food were pulled from the back.

This client’s hair had grown shoulder-length. When he’d had a job it would have probably been shaved to his neck. His smile was a cross of “this is only temporary” to “I am really down and out.” He didn’t know which smile to wear, so it was a crooked, crossed line of “between”- did he conform to the rest of the crowd or pretend that he really didn’t belong?

Then, the Motherly Volunteer cocked her head to the left, and counted the loaves of folded, unsliced bread provided by the submarine sandwich shop across the street. Bags were taped crudely along the loaves’s torn seam so the bread didn’t get stale exposed to the air.

She heard the Food Bank program manager give the usual address, but this time with a caveat.

“Trader Joe’s isn’t here yet… the driver is late… so you’ll only be able to take one loaf of non-sliced bread home.”

The Motherly Volunteer recounted the clients. Thirteen. She recounted the loaves. 26. Or was it 25?

She peered closer to see if there was one more loaf, leaning as if she wanted to physically go over to the box. But something held her back, as if she didn’t want to call attention to herself scurrying through it and making the clients feel needier by having her inventory physically, like she was searching for one last morsel for them.

When the manager walked impatiently to the storage room at the Food Bank, as if her presence would make the Trader Joe’s delivery man appear any sooner, the Motherly Volunteer took her aside.

“The clients can still have two loaves of bread. I counted them.”

The Food Bank may be not be that much bigger than a portable classroom, but its reach to the hungry in this small East Bay city is huge. Two thousand families a year walk through the trailer doors, and it’s a bastion of goodwill for volunteers the moment they walk in and put aprons on to the moment they leave with a client often saying: “bless you.”

But it is also a structured system of giving commodities to the hungry in stations.

First, clients get their family boxes with mandatory staples. For example, a family of four will get 1 box of cereal, 2 pounds of pasta, 1 pound of rice, 4 servings of vegetables in cans, 4 servings of fruit in cans, 2 cans of beans (it could be chili too), a carton of eggs, and county-donated chicken parts for five days.

Then the clients can shop the Trader Joe’s line. Trader Joe’s is the gravy of the Food Bank, providing artisan bread, cheese, desserts, and exotic fresh produce. The bounty the Food Bank gets every day from Trader Joe’s has been overlooked by people who can afford to shop there every week. This manna from heaven is supposed to come to the clients every day before they arrive, but often – as today – they sit and wait.

The cautionary beep of a truck backing up sounds, signaling the Trader Joe’s delivery is here. Then the rush to get the goods out begins. Disorganized boxes are thrown on the ground with volunteers jumping to hastily sort and classify.

“I hate it when this happens,” said one volunteer said. “The rush.”

Yet the rush is altruistic adrenaline to me on my first day. Egg cartons tip out of boxes, packaged microgreens in flimsy plastic containers fall on their sides, pizzas wheel on the concrete floor.

“Eggs are the lowest priority,” the manager said as she saw me picking through cartons, tossing the invariably cracked ones into a bin. “Get the bread out first.”

The last stop for clients is the “Exchange Table,” where they can take a canned perishable good they don’t want from their family boxes and swap it for something they like better. Green beans for tuna was the swap before one client headed out to her car.