I volunteer at a food bank, and the company that sends us our food decides what we get. Last Tuesday they sent so much produce we could not fit it all into fridges. We were trying to give away cases of the food on Wednesday, but people were turning it down because they had no place to store a case of tomatoes, or cauliflower. This was what we had left after last Wednesday’s morning give away. Not pictured the 5000lbs of watermelons, the 2500lbs of onions (those will last a lot longer).

The company that supplies us wants to move from sending shipments every other week, to once a month. This would cause even more no produce loss.

It is so frustrating to have all this food for it to go bad. Even if we got the same volume of produce, but there was variation in what it is we could give it away easier.

Edit: I posted this in a comment.

Because of bureaucracy we have to request this. If it is found out we are giving away the food to unapproved recipients we can lose all of our funding. If we give to unapproved recipients and they in turn give us prepared food to give out, that is okay.

Word got out that we were loading up my pickup with food and taking it to the homeless camps. I did get a number of them to start coming to the bank to get food. But it was easier when I could take stuff to them.

We are not allowed to simply give it out to anyone. This is not like a church pantry where all of the food is donated by the community and’s parishioners. There is government funding, as well as private businesses, which I am guessing get their money back from the government for funding this. If we could simply give it to anyone we would not be in this situation.

  • @Shardikprime@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2•3 days ago

    I don’t get it, if this is government funded, when you guys submitted the funds request, or when you discussed your contract with the company that sends you the food, shouldn’t you have added like, in a contract, what happened not only when you receive the produce, but the expected amounts and what procedure you will follow if those amounts did not match, either exceeding or lacking?

    Seems like a HUGE oversight to me. Did it ever occur to them that you could either not receive anything or receive too much?

    Unless you all did and it exceeded your calculations by far (and even then I’d argue that whoever did your calculations fucked up and you lot should have either review it again or rejected the offer altogether) this is all on whoever said “that sounds like a great idea let’s do it”

    Unless it didn’t matter? In which case why the worry? This surely must have happened thousand of times by now in that case

    • nocturneOPEnglish
      5•3 days ago

      Last year our bank’s ability to place orders was taken away from us. Now we get what we get.

      Before that happened we did not have issues like this every delivery. The previous delivery we received frozen falafel in wraps, but so many that all of our freezers were full of it. Volunteers were taking it home by the case. We turned away multiple pallets of the stuff because we were out of room. My chest freezer is so full of them I have a 50 pound bag of rice sitting on top to make sure it stays closed.

      We also went from not having milk for months, to having no room to place it all.

        • nocturneOPEnglish
          1•2 days ago

          I will get right on that! Thank you for letting me know something out of our hands is a problem and something we need to fix with no resources, only volunteers.