"Taking Care of Business"

This is the end of day two at Fair Foods. You can skip ahead to the next paragraph if you already know what Fair Foods is, but read on if you haven't seen Fair Foods in action, heard me explain it, or would simply like a better explanation (which I can give after spending just two days here). There is a large shipping center for produce (known as 'the market') here in Boston that has a lot of food that would ordinarily be wasted. In the morning, every day the market is open, Fair Foods collects as much surplus as they can, and takes it back to their warehouse. At the warehouse, the food is stored, and made up into mixed bags loaded with whatever produce is currently available. These bags are taken to various sites around Boston where they are sold for two dollars each.
So far, I have met tons of great people: housemates, neighbors, workers, volunteers, market workers, and customers. I plan to go into more detail about the people I've met later. For now though, I'll tell you what I've been up to since I got off school.

After exams finished, I had the pleasure of helping the rest of my RA staff kick everyone out of the dorm. Once everyone was gone, and we were exhausted, I had to kick myself out. Upon finding myself out-kicked, I headed home to Ohio. Not only were my parents home, but my grandparents on my father's side were there, and so was my sister. I had a wonderful, though altogether too brief time visiting at home, playing games, unpacking, packing for Boston, hitting some tennis balls, and generally soaking up the love that I am so blessed to be drenched in from my family. Then, I hit the road for the second time, this time going out to Maryland. There I arrived just in time for my cousin's college graduation, and again had a wonderful time visiting with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents on my mother's side; playing Wii, Uno, and a little more tennis; and going out to eat spaghetti with mushrooms, Chinese vegetables, and Slurpees (though at separate meals). Now back into the car for the third leg of the journey. I arrived in Philly and was greeted by my brother. I was able to make a few deliveries (like a bike!), and we went for a terrific run in Fairmount Park, the largest Urban Park in the US. After sharing some girl scout cookies, I headed off Sunday morning (unfortunately the pre-order tickets for the techno show in NY we had planned to go to were sold out), and finished the fourth leg of my trip up to Boston.

Monday was memorial day, but that didn't mean a holiday. Jason (currently the main heart of the program (though Nancy is the founder)), and I went out to the market, where a few places were open for business. These businesses work in such huge quantities that when a shipment is slightly lower quality than they had wanted, when there is a delay on a pick-up, when they are overstocked, or when any one of a hundred different things goes wrong, these businesses are inclined to dump pallets and pallets of perfectly good food into the dumpster. In fact, as we walked into the tomato place, the boss jumped up and ran around the corner shouting at some of his workers to stop, since they were about to dump 12 cases of tomatoes and the boss thought we would be off for memorial day. Since many of the businesses were closed for Memorial Day, we went to our next tactic, rooting through the dumpsters. The cauliflower place must have been overstocked, for they had filled two regular sized dumpsters (think business place, not construction site size) to the brim with still wrapped, perfectly good heads of cauliflower. We grabbed a stack of onion bags out of a nearby dumpster, and saved as many as we could use. Since Uncle George showed up with his pickup, we had a minivan, a car, and his pickup. The big van was in for repair while they welded one of the shocks back on.

The produce includes: potatoes (of many sizes and colors), tomatoes (of many sizes), lettuce, bananas, apples, plantains, celery, summer squash, oranges, grapefruit, onions, and cauliflower, to name only what I have seen so far.

For every one of these products, and really any produce you can think of, literally tons of this food is going straight into the dumpster every single day. I have heard that only half of the food that is grown in our country actually gets eaten, and this is easier for me to believe every day.

Today I got to go to distribution sites, but more on those later as well. Internet is spotty here, and so is free time, so I don't know how regular this will be, but I will try to keep it updated (not usually this long though, I promise), including photos eventually.

Jim