They didn't need to.
They didn't need to. Originally, when I did AmpleHarvest.org, I figured people would muck their way around the website and then I realized this is not going to work. An entire page, which is like the Readers' Digest of the entire website, was put together just for the media. A reporter can go from top to bottom and have everything they need on one page graphics, images, information, references, sources, you name it, all in one spot.
Are you also educating them about not tossing this stuff in the garbage? What to do with things they can't use? You have the same problem with the landfills.
Please do go to the Frequently Asked Questions at the website. I tell the pantries to tell the gardeners when they want [them] to do the deliveries.
Ahh.
So, let's
say the pantry clients are normally there from noon-3:00 on Sundays. I tell the
pantries to tell the gardeners to come from 9-noon, either a few hours before
or just the day before the clients. I didn't spell the reasoning out. But I do
tell the pantries that they are best off keeping the donors and the receiving
people separated. My reasoning behind that was based on a Jewish ethical
construct in charity of not humiliating the recipient. It was from Maimonides
[preeminent Jewish philosopher, physician and scholar, from medieval Spain].
And particularly now, we have so many middle-class people who have lost their jobs or been downsized and, for the first time, they're going to a food pantry and asking for help. It is not necessary for a person who's asking for help to be there while the guy from down the street is walking in with a bag of carrots or potatoes or tomatoes, especially if they're friends. So, if you keep the donor and the recipient apart by a few hours, you don't make a bad situation worse. Since the gardeners now know when they should be delivering, I tell the gardeners, "Harvest your stuff early in the morning, while it's still cool from the evening. Visually inspect it." If you wouldn't find the food in the supermarket shelf, you shouldn't be donating it. I thought it was a really good benchmark without getting into bruising, insects, this or that.
"The reality is if you harvest your own food and it's bruised, you can stew it, you can make soup out of it, you can cut out the bad piece. But that stuff shouldn't be going to pantries"But the stuff that goes to the pantries should be store-quality.
Here's the important thing. The food that everyone gets is only a few hours old. That's the beginning of its shelf-life life cycle. Now the pantry has the clock ticking, in hours, days or weeks on how long the food can be hanging around. My experience with the food pantries is that it's often out the same day. The clients eat it up, you should pardon the clichà ©. The important thing is that the clients get food that is fresher than you and I can get in the supermarket.
I was just thinking the same thing.
So, they're getting fresh food, they're getting healthy food. But they're also getting food at its most nutritious and that's what the clients end up taking home. What I just harvested for my wife downstairs is the same stuff that a client might get at a pantry.
Let's pause here. When we return for the second half of our interview, Gary will share a lot more about AmpleHarvest.org. Please join us.
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Currently, there are 2,822 food pantries registered at AmpleHarvest.org. When Gary and I spoke in late August, there were 2,588.
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