Food bank makes sure meals getting to those in need
Every week, 9,000 to 10,000 ready-made main and side dishes served at centres
It’s not just the restaurants, but the food bank has also had to be nimble and creative in making sure meals are still getting onto tables where they’re needed during a pandemic.
“We’ve had to totally reinvent ourselves,” David Long, CEO of the Greater Vancouver Food Bank, said. “I always tell people there’s no shortage of food, there’s a distribution problem.”
COVID-19 has only added to the problem.
The food bank shut down 12 distribution centres when B.C. went into Stage 1 isolating in mid-March.
Since then, the four municipalities it serves — the North Shore, Burnaby, Vancouver and New Westminster — have all opened up public spaces and cleared lanes for pop-up distribution centres.
That’s 9,000 to 10,000 readymade meals and side dishes served every week by the Greater Vancouver Food Bank.
Long’s eureka moment came when Food Banks Canada approached with the food bank’s share of federal COVID-19 funding. He figured they were already sending hundreds of meals each week to seniors, people who were self-isolating, who struggle with mobility issues, and women and children fleeing violence ... He wondered: “What if we could help them with refrigeration on-site, and give them more perishable food?”
Fridges were ordered and so far 14 existing and new groups have two industrial-sized fridges, or one fridge and a freezer, so they can take delivery of perishables. On-site refrigeration “really builds their capacity and increases the sustainability of their food programs,” Long said.
“I saw this as an opportunity to distribute more food to our neighbourhoods, focusing on seniors and people with mobility issues, who would have a hard time travelling to our main distribution locations,” he said.
And if your impression of what constitutes a food-bank meal is based on the boxes of KD and cans of soup you see in the donation bin at the grocer, your ideas are as out-of-date as the expired best-by stamp on those pork chops you shoved to the back of the freezer ages ago.
“Let me show you,” Long said while giving a tour of the spacious warehouse that opened in October at 8345 Winston St. in Burnaby. “We’re no longer handing out plastic bags with dry noodles and a bent can of peas in it: Look at this,” Long said and held out a flawless peach, one of thousands of similar specimens filling the rows and rows of stacked food crates.
The kitchen, where skills such as food, canning, preparation, knife-handling and more are taught, is designed to host corporate fundraisers. A longtime chef himself — Long has worked all over the world, culminating in his previous job, executive chef at the Terminal City Club — he designed the kitchen.
“One of the things that annoyed me when I started was we would turn down big donations of meat,” Long said. So he made sure the new warehouse had lots of fridge and freezer room, and butcher’s tools.
“I built what I call a wet-prep room here,” Long said, pointing to a butcher’s band saw, meat-slicer and vac-packing machine. “We’re going to be able to take big donations of meat, we’ll be able to butcher it, process it, cut it into portions, vacuum-pack it, keep it frozen, and give it to people.”
Fraser Valley and Okanagan farmers donate crate loads of fresh fruit, eggs, tomatoes and mushrooms. There are birthday cakes.
“Why shouldn’t people eat well?” Long asked.
There are 40 staff working at the food bank, and the number of volunteer hours runs into the tens of thousands a week, Long said. The amount of food donated annually is worth about $8 million.
Strip loins, whole hams, bonein barons of beef, turkeys, they all hang inside the huge freezer waiting to be shipped.
“The outpouring of support we’ve seen since COVID hit has been incredible, just incredible,” Long said.
Long said the head of one social agency for battered women and their children told him: “They already know they’re poor, if they go to school and see their friend Johnny who’s not poor eating a granola bar, they’ll feel even worse. What we do is we make sure when they come home from school there’s fresh fruit on the table. Food is power. We need to do the job as best we can to get it to people. There shouldn’t be a single hungry student in a school in B.C.
“There is enough food out there that there should be a hot meal for every student in the province.”