As a child, I was an adventurous eater; not especially picky or choosy about food, but every now and again I was presented with an insurmountable food challenge during the family dinner. I remembered recently, not exactly fondly, spending what felt at the time like hours, glued to the dining room chair, having been admonished for not finishing whatever food had somehow survived its trials of being pushed about the plate for the duration of the meal. That the food had utterly failed to magically dematerialize during its torturous path never failed to astound me, and I remember seeking with all of my energy an alternative to actually eating it. And I, like many before me, would inevitably hear those infamous words from one of my parents, “You’ll sit there until it’s gone – there are starving people in world dying for food this good” or something like that. And like all those kids before me, I thought (but never said out loud, of course) ”well, package this up and ship it to them“.
The years have brought me, and even now my own children well beyond these adventures, but I’ve never stopped thinking about the path that food must travel to get to those in real need. We at LostInTheFeed have written about food several times and worked with food banks in South Dakota and Montana, but we had an opportunity this past week to work with the Greater Chicago Food Bank, packing boxes for their Nourish for Knowledge program which sends 6,000 kids home from school on Friday afternoons with food for the weekend. As great as it was to donate some time to help out these families, the most incredible part of our day was learning about the logistics required to get the food shipped from one place to where it’s most needed. Just imagine the trouble I could have managed for my younger self with some snarky comment my younger self might have offered had I known then what I’ve now learned about shipping food to the needy!
This one facility takes in more than 60 millions pounds of food each year from restaurants and food companies, and re-distributes it to shelters, soup kitchens and other area food banks all to make sure that the 114,000 people they serve, a third of which are children, have food to eat each day. With an army of incredibly dedicated volunteers, the small staff at this massive facility does incredible work and it was an absolute privilege to help them out for an afternoon.