On a recent Saturday morning, Taylor Moore stood in a cherry grove in Lake Leelanau, brushing away the leaves to reveal trees swollen with ripe fruit.
“They’re perfect,” he said as he filmed a live video for Facebook, encouraging viewers to help pick cherries at two local farms that day for donation to local food pantries. “There just wasn’t a market for them anymore.”
Each year, 30% to 40% of the nation’s food supply is wasted. Some of the waste occurs when farmers are unable to harvest or sell all of their crops. Rainstorms might make it impossible to drive tractors through fields to harvest green beans, or fields of sweet corn may grow too slowly, leaving farmers struggling to pick it in time. Some waste happens when equipment malfunctions at food processing plants, trucks lack the room to deliver all the plant’s products or grocery stores prepare more baked goods than they sell.
That’s where Food Rescue, a program of Goodwill Northern Michigan, comes in. Each week, Moore coordinates teams of staff and volunteers to pick up excess food from grocery stores, bakeries, and farms. From there, food is distributed to food pantries and community meal sites in a large five-county area twice the size of Rhode Island, where an estimated 16,000 people use food pantries and community meal sites to access the nutritious food they need.
“I want to live in a fairer and more just community, and my work with Food Rescue is a means to achieving that,” said Moore, director of Food Rescue.
Food Rescue
Demand for Food Assistance Increases
Moore grew up in London and graduated from culinary school before moving to northern Michigan, where his grandmother lived just outside of Traverse City. “I’m going to live here hopefully for the rest of my life, and it’s important to me that wherever I live, I feel as though I’m contributing to the community and also building relationships,” Moore said. “Food is a fantastic mechanism to do that.”
He joined Food Rescue in 2015 as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer and has seen the need for its services increase. Last year, food pantries saw over a 30% increase in demand for assistance year over year; this year, demand for healthy food in the five-county area Food Rescue serves has climbed 41%.
Five days a week, Food Rescue’s team of drivers pick up and distribute 8,000 pounds of food from 210 food donors, including nearly every northern Michigan grocery store and bakery, and 77 farms. The organization focuses on collecting healthy food for distribution, with 80% of the food distributed consisting of fresh or frozen fruits, vegetables, meat, bread, or dairy.
A Lifeline for Northern Michigan Families
Before Moore began working for Food Rescue in 2013, just 13% of food pantries and meal sites had fruits and vegetables available when open to the public. Today, that number is 80%. With support from its donors and volunteers, Food Rescue hopes to reach 100% of food pantries and meal sites in the region.
Among the families who benefit from these services via food pantries in the region, “The stories that stand out for me are of folks who just want a dignified experience and want healthy, fresh food,” Moore said. “Recently, a father who had come to a pantry with his daughters told us how delighted they were to get a bag of locally grown cherries during cherry season. Just being able to provide food that is grown here—food that families might otherwise not be able to afford—is such a gift. It offers families a sense of normalcy, enabling them to be present in the season.
“There are also people who are in total crisis, who really have nowhere else to go to get food,” Moore said. “They either have no food in their house, or the food they do have is not enough to make a meal out of, and they need help. To be able to go to a food pantry and take what they need, what they can use, is really important.”
While some of the people who are helped through Food Rescue may have food at home, they may not have healthy food or fresh produce. For children as well as people with chronic conditions and seniors in particular, access to healthy food through Food Rescue provides the nutrients they need to support their physical and emotional health.
Volunteer Support and Donations Make It Possible
By coordinating its efforts with the Northwest Food Coalition, a grassroots coalition of roughly 70 food pantries, emergency meal sites and baby pantries in Northern Michigan, Food Rescue helps ensure services aren’t duplicated so that everyone’s work goes farther in the coalition.
The work of Food Rescue would not be possible without volunteers, from those who help load trucks and deliver food to pantries, to those who repack fruits and vegetables from large containers into family-sized bags, to those who harvest excess fruit and vegetables from farms for delivery to neighbors in need. Recently, more than 20 people helped Food Rescue collect 648 pounds of strawberries. Food Rescue believes the team could have rescued 10,000 pounds of strawberries if more volunteers had been available. It’s one reason why Moore made a “live to Facebook” appeal for volunteers on a Saturday when two cherry groves had excess cherries to donate, the first time the organization had ever harvested two cherry groves at once.
Mike Foley of Traverse City, a retired geoscientist, began volunteering with Food Rescue three years ago, repacking food items in warehouses for distribution. When he learned there was a need for people to ride with truck drivers to food processing plants and grocery stores to collect donations, he volunteered to help. Today, he’s also part of the Healthy Harvest program, gleaning berries, apples, corn and more from local fields.
“It’s always pleasant to chat with the drivers, but mostly I enjoy collecting food from the stores and handing it off to the pantries because they’re always so grateful for it,” Foley said. “It’s heartwarming to me to see so many people who are active as volunteers or as paid staff trying to make use of this food rather than let it go to waste. We just waste so much food. There’s no reason that we should have people going hungry.”
How to Help
Volunteer support for Food Rescue is needed year-round, but especially in the summer and fall, when fields are ready to harvest. For more information, or to sign up for a volunteer slot, visit the Food Rescue volunteer website.
Food Rescue also is dependent on donations, including monetary donations that help keep trucks. In fact, 78% of the expense related to pickups and deliveries is covered by donations. Find out more and make a donation.