"second harvest" news and stories

Even before the recession hit, food banks nationwide were struggling to collect the donations they needed to provide their clients with complete meals.

"With the takeovers and mergers in the food industry, producers got much more efficient," Larry Reynolds, vice president of food resources for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee, explains.

While food banks don't shun the canned cranberry sauce and cereal boxes collected by well-meaning church groups and elementary schools, they've long relied on industrial donations – overruns and errors, mostly – to fill their pantries with protein-rich items. But as producers cut down on waste in the mid-1990s, all they had to spare were samples of failed food trials.

"A lot of stuff we got was snacks and sugaries," Reynolds says. "New cookies, new crackers, new sports drinks. It's not exactly nutritious."

Where once cans of Spaghetti-os, mixed fruit and green beans were prevalent, many food banks now have a very different selection of goods, including Cookie Crisp cereal, Everlasting Gobstopper jawbreakers, Mini Oreos and Wonka Donutz.

Most of the food donated to food banks comes from grocers, manufacturers and growers. Perishables are the first items to be distributed, and take more handling and faster shipment than non-perishable goods, but with the upswing in the amount of junk foods with long shelf-lives - possibly an indication of larger food trends - some food banks are trying to make changes in their programs. They want to increase the work they do with growers of fresh foods and improve their storage systems.

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