Saturday
Fair Foods has been running continuously for about twenty years. During that time, while the main arm has obviously been the food distribution, Nancy also picks up and distributes surplus lumber and surplus paint. Lumber comes from shipping containers that are considered garbage after they are used once, and paint comes from mistinted paint. We picked up two pallets of paint last week, and delivered some of it to our friend Agnailu yesterday.
Before we picked up the paint, the back doors to the big van were tricky. To get it to close properly you had to slam the door with just the right force. Too hard, or too light, and it wouldn't latch. I was starting to get the hang of it, and sometimes got it on the first try, though twice it took five tries. It once even took someone else seven. The door was also hard to open, and became a two hand operation, as one hand had to push in what is supposed to be a thumb button while the other pulled on the handle. When we picked up the pallets of paint though, it was loaded by forklift, and the forklift broke off the U hooks at the bottom of the door. Now the doors work great! (only you still have to lean against the left door while opening the right one sometimes, since the left one no longer latches to anything on its own).
The food branch has been the main operation though. It actually used to be a much larger operation. It sort of bottomed out about a year and a half ago, and has been building its way back up since then, as Nancy has moved to focusing more on some other projects. Now we only have the big van and the Caravan mini-van, but they used to have several box trucks, and closer to 80 sites (currently 40). Before cutting back to just produce, they also used to carry Pepsi products and breads and pastries. People really liked the soda. Fair Foods hasn't had soda for a year, and we will still have somebody come to the truck every single day asking if we have soda. The soda was always seen as sort of a mixed blessing, since it isn't very healthy, but made people very happy. Fair Foods isn't in the business of telling people what they should eat though, and if many of the folks buying soda from us would buy it from the store anyways, then it was still a way to help them save some money. They were trying to give people what they wanted.
The question whether folks without a lot of money should be able to get nice things is certainly one where people come down on different sides of the issue. In the past Jason has had trouble with a few of the managers at the produce market who will bring out a load of entirely spoiled food to give him, and when he points out that he can't use it they retort, "But it's for poor people right?". All of the produce that we put in the two dollar bags is nice stuff. That means we often have to expend a lot of energy sorting through a box of peppers, tomatoes, or zucchini, some of which have bad spots, in order to find the really nice ones. The ones that have just a few bad spots we often put out and sell a dollar a box, or simply give them away free to anyone who is willing to do a little bit of extra work to separate the goodness from the garbage (whether something is free is dependent on quantity, time of day, current inventory, expected incoming inventory, money that the customer has available, etc.)
