City Harvest is a nonprofit that collects food donations for New Yorkers in need
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ENLARGE
The mistake was in not having lunch before I joined the maiden voyage of City Harvest’s new 26-foot truck.
It may sound counterintuitive to be standing famished in a 45,000-square-foot warehouse in Long Island City, filled with everything from donated Tropicana orange juice to spaghetti squash from Arizona and Yoplait yogurt from Pennsylvania. But all that food was destined for soup kitchens, food pantries and other community feeding programs. City Harvest will collect about 55 million pounds of excess food this year to help feed nearly 1.4 million hungry New Yorkers.
Nonetheless, I didn’t think the group would miss one 15-ounce bottle of “Naked,” an almond-milk juice smoothie that Tropicana had donated along with the orange juice. After all, there were dozens of cases of it.
“It’s like working in a bank with $100 bills,” said Lex Wilder, City Harvest’s food operations liaison. “It’s tempting, but you don’t do it.”
There are exceptions, like fresh produce. More than half of what City Harvest collects is fruits and vegetables.
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ENLARGE“When we get canary melons from Florida, we’ll cut one open to test the quality,” said Miguel Bido, the nonprofit’s senior director of transportation and warehouse operations.
I was under the impression that most of City Harvest’s collections are leftovers from Manhattan restaurants, some of them fancy. That’s not altogether wrong. Restaurants that make donations include Per Se, The Capital Grille and Le Bernardin, which has a refrigerator dedicated for City Harvest pickups.
“Mostly it’s produce, and some of the fish,” Mr. Wilder said.
But the majority of the contributions, about 38 million pounds a year, come from local farms and major food manufacturers, according to Mr. Bido. Another 18 million pounds come from local bakeries, restaurants and the like.
Our route was to take us for pickups at Tom Cat Bakery and Fresh Direct, both also in Long Island City, and then make a delivery to a food pantry farther into Queens, one run by Project Hope Charities in Jamaica.
Along the way to Tom Cat Bakery, driver Ron Maldonado explained that a typical day starts in the early morning at Hunts Point Market, whose vendors last year contributed 3 million pounds of food, mainly produce and meat.
Visitors to a food pantry sometimes time their trips to the truck’s arrival. “On distribution day, soup kitchens will have given out everything they have and the crowd knows a City Harvest truck is coming,” Mr. Maldonado said. “They’ll wait around to see what extra stuff we have. They definitely appreciate it.”
When we arrived at Tom Cat Bakery, huge bags of fresh rolls and bread awaited us, made all the more enticing by the fragrance of baking bread.
“We have lots of rejects,” said James Rath, Tom Cat Bakery’s vice president of operations. “But they’re not rejected for anything.”
For example, an order for a top restaurant may include rolls that measure 3 inches long. If one batch comes out of the oven a bit longer or shorter, Mr. Rath said, “they go into the City Harvest bag. But it still tastes great.”
Apparently observing my ravenous expression, Mr. Rath supplied us with a bag of tasty pretzel and Parker House rolls.
Our next stop was Fresh Direct’s Long Island City center, which proved even more challenging to a lunch-deprived reporter. The boxes for pickup were topped off with a roasted turkey-and-Swiss sandwich and a large toasted almond frangipane tart.
“I spend a lot of time with our growers and fishermen,” said David McInerney, a co-founder of Fresh Direct. “To see how much goes into growing the food, it crushes us if we have to waste anything.”
Mr. McInerney gave the example of milk that the online grocer guarantees to be fresh to the customer for seven days. “We get down to six days,” and while the milk is still good, it doesn’t meet Fresh Direct’s promise to customers. “What’s better than taking that food and making sure people are eating it?”
I never made it to Project Hope Charities because I had to get back to Manhattan for another appointment. But I was told the delivery was a success.
Besides the contributions from Tom Cat Bakery and Fresh Direct, the load included cheese, canary and honeydew melons, and butternut squash.
When I emerged from the subway, I was forced to make do with a hot dog at Papaya King.