An Inside Look at a Student Food Rescue Run
By Ali Audet
Student Food Rescue, or SFR, is one of the flagship community service programs within the CSC. Every week, students deliver food from restaurants, grocers, and bakeries to local community partners. These CP’s include women’s transitional homes, homeless shelters, children’s programs, and elderly communities in and around Boston. Another goal of SFR is to educate people about food justice and promote access to nutritious food for all.
“There are a lot of moving parts to SFR – contacting community partners for donations and volunteers driving to get those donations. The work is important to ensure that recipients – such as elderly apartments and food pantries – get the food that they need on a weekly basis. From the stories we’ve heard from our community partners, they have a genuine appreciation for what our volunteers do. We actually got a message from one of our CP’s and he said that from all of the food we donated to them, they were able to feed over 200 people,” said Student Food Rescue Program Manager Jaclyn Sutherby.
I had the opportunity to ride along on an SFR run and get an inside look into the process, from pickup to drop-off. I went on a run from Somerville to Dorchester, one of the longer runs on this semester’s schedule.
We started off the afternoon driving to Union Square in Somerville, Mass., to pick up leftover produce from their weekly farmer’s market. Immediately after we parked the van we had vendors coming up to us, asking for empty boxes. They were so eager to take two or three boxes each to fill with leftover fruits and veggies they would have to otherwise throw away. We distributed more than 10 boxes to three different vendors and filled them with lettuce, cabbage, eggplants, tomatoes, and more – we even got some ghost peppers, which were so spicy we had to put them in a bag to keep them from contaminating the other produce.
From there came what may have been the most difficult part of the whole trip – figuring out how to fit all this produce into the van. We sat in the small parking lot, stacking boxes upon boxes into the van, trying to find space for all this food that would have otherwise been composted. After some incredible Tetris-level stacking, we started the second half of our journey: taking the food to a donation center for people in need. Our destination was Daily Table in Dorchester, Mass., a retail store focused on providing groceries and ready-to-eat meals at prices that are competitive with those of fast food meals.
The drive between Somerville and Dorchester is about 30 minutes, which gave us time to marvel at how much of the city we got to see on our route. We saw the South End, Dudley Square, and everything in between. On the drive back to campus, we went through Franklin Park and Brookline, just as all the leaves began turning red and orange for the fall. If you’re looking for a service opportunity that also lets you see new parts of the city, SFR might be the program for you.
Once we got to Daily Table, we unloaded the food onto a cart to be processed and sorted by employees. We gave them about 10 boxes of produce that day, along with another box of bread and pastries. On the ride back to BU, I had the chance to mull over the trip. In my mind, I had expected we would come away with two or three boxes of produce, not an entire van full.
This experience put into perspective for me that the work we had done – the work all of the Student Food Rescue teams do every week – is a win-win situation for everyone involved. Grocers, farmers, and restaurant owners don’t want to throw away food just as much as community partners like Daily Table want their donations; but without programs like SFR, the process of transporting the food would be too much to undertake for those involved.
“My favorite part of SFR is seeing how eager our donor sites are in giving us as much food as they can. There have been a few times where they want to donate so much food that we physically cannot fit all of it in our vans. We aren’t the only food rescue program in Boston, so it’s not necessarily that that food is going to waste, but it’s good to know that the places we pick food up from want to make sure none of their food goes uneaten,” said Michael Gomez, a volunteer with Student Food Rescue.
Interested in getting involved? More information about Student Food Rescue, including how to join a run, can be found on the CSC’s website here!