Food access, hunger, & squash

If you read my blog you probably know that food access is an interest of mine.  I am frustrated when I see how much good food gets wasted (even on a small organic farm) because it was harvested and packed but never purchased or donated.  Yes, the unsold food could become good compost, but that’s really labor-intensive compost!  There are plenty of people who would eat that food if they could get their hands on it.  When I imagine this sort of problem magnified on a national or international level, I sometimes feel overwhelmed. 

Many people I know think hunger exists because there is not enough food being grown, but that explanation is flawed.  The food is out there.  Hunger is a problem of broken economic and food systems: the richest get richer at the expense of everyone else.  Everyone else must now try harder than ever to make ends meet.  At the same time, while the distribution of sustainably grown produce is still expanding, the processed food industry has already infiltrated grocery stores, corner markets, and food pantries with its cheap and addicting products. 

Yes, this is a bit of a downer.  But things that are broken can be built up again, and in the meantime we can build safety nets.  

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I felt like I needed to mention the food access piece again because while I definitely have frustrations about how to connect the good food to the eater, I was able to provide some much-needed good meals when we took some of DBF’s squash to the Gospel Rescue Mission (a local shelter and meal center) and Josephine County Food Bank.

Steve has been bringing his winter squash to the Mission’s kitchen for a few years now because he sees it as an “everybody wins” situation.  He drives a truckload of squash into town.  At the Mission’s kitchen, volunteers (many of whom are current shelter residents) clean and chop the squash.  More volunteers scoop the seeds into 5 gallon buckets and finally another set of volunteers packages the remaining squash meat into bags and boxes.  The Mission and food bank get to keep the ready-to-cook squash, which will provide thousands of meals both immediately and throughout the year to those who need it.  Steve takes home the buckets of seeds (a very important seed crop for his business) and gets a tax deduction for his squash donation.  What would take days with a few people on the farm happens in a few hours, with the added bonus of connecting more good food to more eaters.

Remember those North Georgia candy roaster squash photos?  Last week we took a full truckload of those to the Mission:

We used a full team to get the job done:

washing station

chop chop

scooping & packing

squash ready for the food pantry

a full truck

 

 Then we took the seeds back to the farm:

seeds fermenting in big buckets

a top-down view

cleaned seeds drying on racks

 This project will continue with our 6000 pounds of delicata squash...