Tarrant Area Food Bank

I spent a very intereting morning today working with 4 ladies from Westminster Presbyterian of Arlington at the Tarrant Area Food Bank in Fort Worth. We met at the church and rode together in 1 vehicle to the rather-difficult-to-find food bank location. We signed in and were ushered in to a huge room with maybe 8 "stations" containing metal tables for sorting. Our first chore was to sort bread from pastries. I am guessing at the size of the boxes of baked goods--probably 5 ft. X 5ft by about 3 ft high. These boxes were filled to overflowing with baked items donated from grocery stores. There were rolls, french bread, bagels, jalapeno bread, etc to be separated from cakes, pies, muffins and danish. Everything was wrapped and dumped in the huge boxes to be sorted by volunteers at each station. We made up smaller boxes containing either pastries or bread. Then the sorted out box was placed on a pallet with like items, to be hauled away by a "hand truck" when the stacks were 5 high and 2 wide.

This went on for awhile--do I need to mention that we 5 manned 2 stations of the 8. Young people (teenagers or 20somethings) were there along with what appeared to be other church groups. It was VERY noisy with folks slapping wooden pallets down on concrete floors and general conversation in each group. Rarely was there conversation between groups. At one point the gentleman in charge, Nate, decided we'd separated enough baked goods and we sorted canned goods.
Let me stop here to say that from what I understand, these sorted boxes we created are "sold" to area food banks for pennies per pound. This is more of a clearing house than an actual dispensing food bank. This place was a beehive of activity with some folks bringing in empty boxes (some in pretty bad shape) and others hauling away full pallets of boxes.

Our group was scheduled to work from 9am to 12 noon with a 15 min break somewhere in the middle.
When we began sorting canned goods, we had another set of guidelines to observe. All soups and pastas (ravioli, etc) were separated into a completely separate bin--I'm guessing to be sorted by others on another day. We had a scale and each box should be between 40 and 42 pounds and have a variety of items in the box. We were taking cans from a large (about the same size as the bread) plastic bin filled with miscellaneous canned goods which had been donated by stores. We had green beans, corn, peas, baked and chili beans, tuna, olives, tomatoes, potatoes, vienna sausage and various fruits On our sorting table we organized some cans, wiped the tops, checked the expiration dates and trashed any which were "too" dented or old.

After we had a properly filled box between the desired weights, we put the lid on, and taped a label showing the date packed (today) the weight of the box and the packer's initial. This was then put on a pallet for someone to cart away. Sometimes two of us carried the box to the pallet, other times we commandeered a young man to move the box for us. They got heavy after awhile.

I am sure this is a worthy and necessary activity and that it eventually helps food to get to those who need it, but it lacked the personal satisfaction which I derived from working at the Good Samaritan Food Pantry in Brownwood. Maybe I'm spoiled having been an interviewer who saw the need and helped to fill that need as well as we could.

Westminster's usual schedule is to work there the 3rd Tuesday and 3rd Friday of each month. No volunteers were needed from Westminster on Friday, so no one went, but the group was asked to come next week. I don't think they will--most had other commitments next week. I wouldn't mind, but I'm not going by myself. I couldn't find it for one thing and don't want to do this alone for another.

Anyway--it was an interesting experience, and I got to know 4 really nice ladies . We'll see what next month brings.