U.S.
Michael Erard
PORTLAND, Maine — On a recent windy evening a crowd milled outside one of the most popular eateries in town, waiting for the doors to open. But it’s not one of the farm-to-table restaurants that’s central to Portland’s reputation as a foodie’s paradise; it’s the soup kitchen on Preble Street, where that evening's meal was macaroni elbows in sauce with beef, boiled carrots, fresh greens and assorted pastries, served on plastic trays.
At first glance, a soup kitchen menu has little to do with a city’s culinary amenities, which include fresh seafood, a strong tradition of local, organic farming, and a farmers market that’s been running for 246 years. But the effort to feed poor, hungry people is connected to the foodie scene in multiple ways, from the sort of food that finds its way to hunger relief to a culture of awareness about food.
One chilly morning, a recent Bowdoin College grad named Noah Perwin headed out in a van on a regular round of pickups for Wayside Food Programs. In 2013, the program rescued 1.2 million pounds of food in Cumberland County alone. Waiting for Perwin behind a Hannaford supermarket were three grocery carts filled with elaborately frosted cakes, muffins and loaves of bread, as well as one box of apples, a second of strawberries and another of assorted fresh vegetables. Each box was a banana box, which is the standard container of the food rescue world.
At the next stop, an Olive Garden restaurant, Perwin waited in a back hallway for an employee to deliver three boxes of frozen slabs of soup. Next was the most unusual stop of the route: a USDA testing facility in South Portland where government chemists test the quality of imported specialty foods, like raisins. That particular day, Perwin lugged more than 500 pounds of dried cranberries into the van. Two final stops at local bakeries known for their artisanal breads turned up several hundred pounds of bread, wrapped in trash bags.
Back at the Wayside facility, the items were divvied up. The dried cranberries will go out with three Wayside mobile pantries or be offered to other food pantries that come to “shop” in a section of the Wayside warehouse. The apples, strawberries and vegetables will become ingredients in one of the nine community meals that Wayside volunteers cook and distribute. The menus used to be planned a month in advance; now, what is served depends on what has come in.
“It’s pretty amazing, the reasons we get food,” says Don Morrison, operations manager at Wayside. Nearly 70 percent of Wayside’s rescued food was salvaged from grocery stores, local bakeries and local farmers. He reels off a list of food sources that provide a veritable map of how food is produced today. Calls have come in about truckloads of olive oil and iceberg lettuce that had been rejected by a supermarket chain. In the summertime, people offer surplus tomatoes and squash from their gardens. A local strawberry farm allows volunteers to glean the remaining berries, and in the fall, orchards give Wayside their extra apples. This past winter, Morrison collected food prepared for a retirement party at a local hotel that was snowed out as well as a thousand pounds of trout from a winter ice-fishing derby. When a restaurant closes, Wayside cleans out the food supplies.
Acting as a broker, Morrison relies on his knowledge of how soup kitchens and food pantries work and whom they serve. Five-gallon bladders of milk from Maine milk distributor Oakhurst Dairy go to the Preble Street soup kitchen, which has a milk machine that dispenses milk from the bladders; hot dog buns go to a food pantry that serves a hot dog lunch every two weeks. Through his connections with seafood processors, Morrison had the trout from the fishing derby cleaned and packaged in one-pound packages, which were handed out with spice packets and recipes at a food bank where Morrison knows that people like to eat fish.
At a recent Thursday evening community meal at the HopeGateWay Church in downtown Portland, about 40 people sit at tables chatting and eating roast chicken, green salad, fruit salad and spice cake.
“It’s not gourmet food, but it’s comfort food,” says Al Norton, who rides to HopeGateWay from a public housing high-rise on a motorized wheelchair. He praises the Tuesday lunch at St. Vincent de Paul’s and agrees with Jamie Mejaw, who is sitting at his table, that the Preble Street soup kitchen is too loud and chaotic. “And the food there isn’t cooked right,” Jamie says. “It’s either cooked too much or it’s raw.”
Al Norton
diner at HopeGateWay Church
One frontier of food rescue is dealing with smaller amounts of food excess from restaurants. Part of the challenge is that regulations about food production and distribution rely on lot numbers and bar codes that ensure the traceability of food items; once the food enters a kitchen, this identifying information is stripped away, making perfectly edible food suspect.
People in the restaurant industry say there’s less waste than one might think, because in a low-margin business, every effort is made to use everything. “I can’t remember having enough left over for somebody to come pick up,” says Stella Hernandez, owner of several small restaurants in Portland. “Part of it comes from the type of restaurant that we own. We buy good simple ingredients; we’re not buying packaged food, so we have the ability to use everything that we purchase.” Leftover cod becomes salt cod; chicken parts and vegetables become soup stock. “I see compost, I see post-use materials, but I don’t see a lot of food remaining after we use it.”
At the same time, she says, restaurateurs might want to help out but don’t want to violate food safety regulations. She pointed to a Quebec-based effort, La Tablee des Chefs, founded by chef Jean Francois Archambault in 2002, which connects food surplus from hotel restaurants, concessions at large entertainment venues and caterers to hunger relief efforts. In 2013, La Tablee des Chefs says it rescued 360,000 meals. It provides containers, a labeling system and a Web-based calendar for hunger relief organizations to pick up directly from hotels. The cost is passed on to clients, who pay a $50 surcharge. The model has spread to other cities in Canada as well as to Mexico and France, but it hasn’t yet come to the United States.
“Maine has a vibrant local food production system, but food insecurity rates are the highest in New England,” says Carly Milkowski, volunteer and menu coordinator at Wayside. According to the USDA, nearly 15 percent of Maine households don’t have regular access to healthy food, and the use of food pantries, soup kitchens, food stamps and other food assistance has jumped in recent years.
The prevailing sensibility about food not only creates a robust restaurant scene but raises awareness of hunger and shapes how people volunteer. In 2012, the mayor of Portland, Michael Brennan, started an initiative for sustainable food systems in order to create a “healthy, resilient and accessible food system,” according to the city website. Cumberland County also has a Food Security Council which works on improving the hunger relief system. “The volunteer energy is interested in the foodie scene,” says Milkowski. “They’re inspired by food, and they like to think about food.” They also influence what gets cooked, making the meals not only nutritious but also culturally appropriate for the large numbers of immigrant diners. The meals are not halal, but Milkowski doesn’t put pork on the menu.
Wayside has learned what foods to include in the mobile food pantries, one of which serves primarily Somali and Sudanese neighborhoods. “They love cilantro. They love sweet potatoes, or any fresh produce. But they wouldn’t take a turkey,” says Morrison. One Thanksgiving, they brought a “truckload” of turkeys, but residents only took four.
Kristin Miale
President, Good Shepherd Food Bank
At the 52,000-square-foot Good Shepherd warehouse in Auburn, Maine, banana boxes full of donated food stand 30 feet high. The donations come from Hannaford stores, a 180-store chain of supermarkets owned by the Belgian Delhaize Group. Each box contains a random assortment of canned soups, beans, pasta, cookies, crackers and other non-perishable items. Anecdotally, says Clara Whitney, the communications coordinator, an increasing amount are labeled “organic.” These are sorted by trained volunteers. Items with intact packaging are passed on to be sorted; dented cans and opened boxes are thrown aside.
One sticking point in discussions about improving food security is the organic issue. “What sometimes happens is we’ll have groups that get together that are interested in fixing the food system, and you have some of them pushing that we need to make sure that everyone has to get access to organic food,” says Kristin Miale, president of the Good Shepherd Food Bank. “We come back and say, they can’t afford all organic. You can’t put the burden of fixing the major food problems on the poor. They can’t afford to make a stand.” Through mishaps, coincidence and generosity, the hunger relief system doesn’t just get food, but high-quality food. Once in a while, this leads to cultural clashes: At one community meal, diners asked for “regular” milk because they were unfamiliar with the “organic” milk being served. Wayside recently received 250 pounds of wild North Atlantic salmon from a local high-end seafood wholesaler. Served as whole filets, the salmon surprised the diners at the community meals. (One volunteer offered that salmon wiggle, a salmon and pea casserole in a milk gravy, might have been more popular.)
Noah Perwin also brings the Wayside truck to the weekly Wednesday farmers market from May through November to pick up produce the farmers figure they can’t sell. Wayside picks up four days a week from the Whole Foods Market; Preble Street picks up the other three days. Since the store opened in 2007, it has donated a million pounds of food because it doesn’t meet store standards. Those boiled carrots and macaroni elbows on the soup kitchen menu? They might have been organic.
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