California's food banks go locavore

ONCE A MONTH a tractor-trailer rolls up to the Family Early Learning Center, a one-room preschool in East San Jose, Calif., that doubles as a food pantry for poor families with young kids. On a bright Friday in August, a dozen or so women from the neighborhood gathered for the truck’s arrival. Volunteers as well as customers, they had come to help unload the monthly delivery of groceries from the local food bank.

The truck driver moved a huge pallet of potatoes onto a pallet truck and rolled it to the door of the school. Then came big, round watermelons; then purple onions.

“Cantaloupe?” the driver called out, wondering where to unload it.

“We’re going to do that outside,” a woman answered.

The women broke down the pallets as fast as they could. A crowd of customers would gather soon. Anything the women could carry went inside the school — boxes of celery, onions, eggs, pinto beans, generic corn flakes, rice and creamy peanut butter. Outside, the driver unloaded green peppers, plums, apricots, bags of potatoes, ears of corn and pears, arranging everything in two rows of big, open bins.

It didn’t look like food for the needy. It looked like a farmers’ market.

Traditionally food banks have gathered mostly leftover or damaged boxes and cans from supermarkets, food processors and other mass distributors and then passed along the food to soup kitchens and food pantries like the one in East San Jose. Food banks have always found some fresh produce to give away; a few have managed to give away a lot. But for the most part, they have trafficked in processed foods — widely available free, simple to transport and warehouse and quick to fill empty stomachs.

Increasingly, though, food banks have been looking to agriculture. California is at the forefront of this change. Since 2005, the California Association of Food Banks has struck deals with farms and packers across the state, where, on behalf of its members, it collects truckloads of fruits and vegetables that are too small, ripe or misshapen for supermarkets to sell.

This shift toward more healthful food is partly about obesity and its rise among the poor. But it’s also a product of necessity: the food industry has become more efficient, squeezing the traditional supply of surplus cans and boxes. Fresh food offers a big, new food supply — and maybe, for the food banks themselves, a beneficial new role.

“There’s an almost unlimited supply of produce that’s not being adequately distributed,” says Vicki Escarra, the president of Feeding America (formerly America’s Second Harvest), the national network of food banks. Last month she formed a fruits-and-vegetables task force and plans to bring in 25 percent more farm produce through national donors in the next fiscal year. “Identifying where it is and how we can get it and how we can subsidize it — there are a lot of lessons that can be learned in California,” Escarra says. “What they’re doing is really innovative.”