Leftover, rescued produce helping food banks reduce waste

Despite efforts to rescue and glean food, Graham Hill of Second Harvest says over 60 per cent of all food produced in Canada is lost and wasted every single year.

Half-price strawberries in stacked pallets and freshly gleaned spinach from a farm sit in a food bank’s walk-in fridge waiting to be redistributed.

“There might be a few blemishes but you can just cut that off. It’s still good,” says Sieg Bressmer, holding a pack of deep red strawberries at Edmonton’s Food Bank in the northwest part of the city.

It all has to be used within two to three days, says Bressmer, whose job is to pick food off pallets of rescued produce every week from over 200 grocery stores in the city, including Loblaws, No Frills, Safeway and Sobeys.

The food bank has long relied on gleaning, a reference to the biblical practice of picking leftover produce from a freshly harvested farm that would otherwise go to waste. Gleaning, a type of passive charity, was practised from biblical times until the late 18th century.

Ahead of its time, the food bank in Edmonton, once known as the Gleaners Association, became the first food-rescuing organization in Canada in 1981.

Gerard Kennedy, one of the group’s first volunteers and later the first executive director of Edmonton’s Food Bank, says the idea was to reduce food waste and serve hungry families. By 1985, the group was gleaning over 70 per cent of its supply from the food industry, including retailers, farmers and manufacturers.

Kennedy remembers how at first people didn’t want a food bank. Back then, he says, people were against the idea of giving out free food instead of earning a living.

“But what prevailed was the practicality that food should not go to waste,” says Kennedy, who served as a Liberal education minister in Ontario from 2003 to 2006.