The consistent warmth and sunlight of this summer has meant a banner crop for plums.
Food banks all over the county have been contacted with offers to pick plums or glean from other overabundant harvests. The grower or property owner has a distribution problem and is attempting to make sure the fruit doesn’t go to waste.
These situations provide a great example of how hunger-fighting organizations like Northwest Harvest and Food Lifeline can help, whereas a local food bank, on its own, often cannot.
When growers contact one of these organizations with this kind of abundance, their redistribution model kicks into gear, collecting surplus where feasible and then getting it to hundreds of member food banks across Washington.
Obviously, the urgency of highly perishable goods or ripe produce is far more of a challenge than, say, a warehouse full of cereal near expiration. The problem of getting food into the hands of people in need is frequently logistical and involves redistribution, or distribution outside ordinary channels.
At a recent Kitsap County Food Bank Coalition meeting, members discussed the issue of local growers or property owners contacting us about gleaning a surplus harvest. On the one hand, it’s great to get the phone call, because we know the growers are thinking of hungry people and our service to them. On the other hand, we don’t often have a good solution for them, for a variety of reasons. Typically, food banks face a volunteer shortage even to cover onsite needs, and this is never more true than in the summer.
In addition, about 90 percent or more of food-bank volunteers are older than 65, meaning they are not the people in the best position to be picking fruit. Likewise, most growers want a coordinated effort for the surplus, not the free-for-all a general posting might become.
By this time of year, many food banks have already been overrun by certain varieties of produce, such as zucchini or, as in this case, plums. It seems like a good problem to have, until you can’t store or distribute it all. Home canning is a great solution for preserving large harvests, but registered food banks cannot distribute home-prepared foods.
Julia Zander, Bremerton Farmers Market manager, is tackling local gleaning challenges along with a team from the Leadership Academy in Public Health, funded by the CDC via the Center for Health Leadership and Practice.
Zander and Harrison wellness coordinator Melissa Reeves thought their discussions and concerns about local gleaning would be a great fit for the certification program, which requires participants to take on a year-long public health project. Yolanda Fong, public-health nurse supervisor of the Kitsap Public Health District, and Barbara Hoffman, community health program supervisor at Suquamish Tribe, round out the team.
The project, called Kitsap Harvest, is preparing a baseline assessment due in about a month. They have mapped Kitsap County’s likely recipients of these harvests (via the emergency food network) and its providers (growers, farmers markets, property owners with fruit trees), conducting site visits that help them understand the challenges these entities face.
When the team visited ShareNet, it was clear they took their investigation seriously and were very dialed in to local infrastructure.
The team would like to have boots on the ground now, getting this produce where it needs to go, but they recognize the importance of building a Kitsap gleaning project that is sustainable.
Gleaning projects often have short lifespans when core constituents disperse, because they’ve been formed hastily or with an intensity designed to meet one or two gleaning jobs rather than achieve a response that can endure over time.
Kitsap Harvest’s stated goal is to “Develop a county-wide gleaning program that will include distribution of local produce to tribal elders and emergency food organizations … while also supporting local giving gardens and sharing healthy behavior messages with residents.”
Funding for the project has not been secured, but Zander doesn’t see that as the biggest hurdle. The team recognizes that one of their project’s biggest challenges will be volunteers and how to manage them. They understand the difficulties of volunteer acquisition and retention, noting that part of this issue is that Kitsap does not have a comprehensive volunteer system.
Another challenge is the variability among emergency food providers, from storage, transportation and distribution capacities to service models. Their goal is to get food charities what they need, and not what they don’t.
The team’s final report will be in by December, and they hope to have volunteers in the field by next summer. One of their ideals, which we share, is a food hub for Kitsap, which could include processing, education, a commercial kitchen to preserve harvests, and distribution of what they’ve gleaned under one roof — providing produce not only to food banks, but also school and eldercare systems.
— Mark Ince is executive director of ShareNet, 26061 United Road, Kingston. 360-297-2266. The food bank is open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday and Friday. The thrift store is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
