On Thursday, January 22nd, 2016, our group participated in a “re-pack” with City Harvest. City Harvest is a food rescuing organization that actually rescues food from being wasted or thrown away. They receive their food from restaurants, grocers, bakeries, manufacturers, and farms, and they deliver it free of charge to 500 community food programs across New York City each year. Their organization feeds nearly 1.4 million New Yorkers who are facing hunger each year. When we first arrived at City Harvest, we were greeted by friendly volunteers. We then went on a tour of City Harvest’s warehouse, where they store around 55 million pounds of rescued, nutritious food. After the tour, we attended an orientation with another group of volunteers. I shockingly learned that around 40% of all of the food produced and grown in America, is wasted. I also learned that City Harvest strongly cares about nutrition. In fact, they even limit the amount of bread donated to them to 10% because they want their consumers to receive the healthiest food possible. After the orientation, we bagged grapefruits that had been shipped all the way from Texas. These grapefruits didn’t look particularly nice. (Some of them were grayish, some were quite soft, etc.) But they were indeed edible. After we bagged tons of grapefruits, we moved on to apples. After working for about 2.5 hours, we were quite tired, but one of the workers there told us that in total, all of the volunteers had bagged around 14,000 pounds of food. Overall, this fieldwork was extremely fun, interesting and educational. I mainly learned that the U.S. doesn’t have a “food shortage.” Instead, we have an excess amount of food that is being thrown away each year for no good reason. I really enjoyed this fieldwork because it was very different from most of the other fieldworks that we have been on. It taught us a lot and we were able to participate and do hands-on work.
