city harvest: rescuing food since 1982

Who knew that food needed to be rescued!?  When I hear that word I usually think of cats caught in trees or people floating on rooftops in a river of rain after a long storm.  Turns out, the food doesn’t actually need rescuing – hundreds of hungry New Yorkers do.

And there is a group of people who are passionate about helping those in need.  Formally, the organization is called City Harvest, but I like to call them the Robin Hoods of Food.  How does it work? Well, every day, volunteers scour the streets of NYC picking up excess food from restaurants, grocers, greenmarkets and bringing it to those who need it.  It’s quite ingenious, really.

Representing Hall & Partners, a group of 6 volunteers and I headed to Union Square after work today to help rescue some food.  We were charged with asking greenmarket farmers if they were willing to donate any of their produce to the organization.  We would then collect the donated food in plastic bags and load it into a big friendly truck.

hello, i'm big and friendly!

At first, we were greeted with instructions to “come back later” which was disheartening as I thought the vendors were simply trying to avoid saying a blatant no to being charitable.  But as 6:30 rolled by, bags were being filled and I realized that the farmers were simply trying to make their last sales before handing over hundreds of pounds of food…these are businesses after all.

1 hour later, and 4,680 pounds (that’s right, four thousand) of tomatoes, zucchini, carrots, lettuce, basil, corn, corn, and more corn later we shut the doors to the City Harvest truck and watched as it drove off into the sunset…I mean rainy overcast evening.

it's beautiful, isn't it?

The thought that I made a small contribution to helping some people enjoy a warm, balanced meal today makes me feel pretty darn wonderful.  It’s a feeling that I am quite looking forward to recreating…

To learn more about City Harvest and its hearty mission, click here.