Thanks to a yearly convention and the annual efforts of volunteers, numerous New Yorkers who ordinarily have trouble putting food on the table are this week getting foie gras, artisanal cheese, prosciutto, truffles, duck breast, and other delicacies.
The Summer Fancy Food Show is held each year in New York on Manhattan’s West Side, and each year hundreds of volunteers collect thousands of pounds of leftover delicacies whose original purveyors donate to charity at the end of the event. The food then gets loaded onto tractor-trailers and delivered to food pantries and community programs throughout New York City. In total, about 90,000 pounds of food gets donated (not a typo). The volunteer work is a joint effort between the Specialty Food Association and City Harvest, an anti-hunger non-profit.
It’s good to see a company actually donating the food instead of just throwing it away. Having worked catering for convention-type stuff before, a lot of places will just throw away pounds and pounds of food; I used to have to do it every day. Since 1.5 million people living in New York suffer from food insecurity (defined as lacking consistent access to safe, nutritious food), mass donations like this do help.
It’d be a lot better if we could actually feed those over 1.5 million people all the time, though — news stories abound about food pantries struggling to get enough donations. We have so much food in this country that someone was like “hey, why don’t we see if we can run cars on that stuff“; there’s absolutely no reason kids should be going hungry. If you have extra food, please take the time to donate it to your local food pantry.
Image via svry/Shutterstock.