Food Share Mobile and Tofu Tuesday

Today’s community internship was with Foodshare Mobile! Foodshare is a fantastic program in the Hartford area that takes food that would otherwise be thrown away and redistributes it to people who need it. People who wouldn’t normally get access to healthy foods can get carrots, potatoes, bread, onions, etc. for free.

We counted over 125 people in this line, including a few children.

Programs like this help me realize how much difference people can make if they use a little creativity. Whoever thought of the idea of redistributing food that would otherwise end up in a landfill – well done.

Today, we handed out packets with recipes and nutrition information, and chatted up people waiting in the line.

Unloading carrots.

I’m loving these community experiences so far – so eye-opening.

Later on, a walk with the doggles:

The ice is almost gone!

For dinner, I remembered Kristen‘s post on Tofu Tuesday last week and knew I had to participate!

I ended making a delicious tofu curry soup with some *ahem* unusual ingredients, but I won’t be posting the recipe until tomorrow because this girl’s gotta study for her Community Nutrition midterm! Yikes! So until then, STAY TUNED! Have a nice night, everyone!

Query: Does your community have food banks or other programs to help ease food insecurity?

15 Comments

  1. That’s a wonderful program! Super cool that you guys got to be a part of it.

    I know we have a general food bank program (with multiple outlets) and some other support services, but I’m not sure if its as extensive as the program you visited in Hartford. I really like that *fresh* fruits and veggies are distributed instead of icky canned stuff chock-full of sodium.

    1. It really is great! And the recipients get bread and water, and the produce changes according to season.

  2. What a fantastic internship, and so great that you got directly involved in helping! It’s great when you can experience something directly rather than just learning abstract concepts.

    My community is very small, so we basically just have one food bank…lots of cans and boxes, and nothing fresh unfortunately. There’s a good number of elderly people living here and it’s a shame that they don’t get really good, fresh, wholesome food to eat.

    Hopefully in the future more programs will be set up to deliver super nutritious whole food to people who need it, especially since this kind of food tends to be expensive and not always easy to even access for some people.

    1. That’s why I love my program 🙂 I hope that similar programs can be set up, in your area as well. Sometimes it’s the only access people get to fresh produce.

    1. Great Q, Samantha! Some of the food comes through donations from the food industry and farms, but much of it comes from places like grocery stores that reject deliveries of produce because they’re not market-quality (they may be a little bruised or older). So, instead of the store throwing it out, Foodshare comes and picks it up for free!

  3. Good luck on your mid-term tomorrow, girl! I know you’ll rock it!

    1. Thanks, Sophia! 🙂

  4. Thanks for the shout out!

    I love this program! That is such a wonderful idea seeing is how so much food goes to wastse but at the same time, there are so many people starving. Did you work with an RD?

    1. We didn’t work with an RD on-site, but our Community Nutrition coordinator is an RD and she helps us develop all our materials for our site visits. I think we’re handing out food samples and nutrition info. at a site next week – exciting! 🙂

  5. Good luck with the midterm!

    What a wonderful way to help the community! 125+ people — wow! My clinic hands out commodity foods from a truck in the parking lot a few times a month. I would be interested in seeing how many people they actually service. I think these programs are such wonderful opportunities for people. I know that a lot of my patients rely on the food they receive from such sources for their food.

    1. It sounds like you have a similarly fantastic program, which is great to hear!

  6. Glad you got a chance to visit one of our Mobile Foodshare sites. We have two of the Mobile Foodshare trucks which are on the road five days a week. Mobile Foodshare serves 58 sites in 20 towns in greater Hartford and as you noted provides primarily fresh fruits and vegetables to low-income people.

    Any local food bank interested in organizing such a mobile pantry program should feel free to be in touch with us via http://www.foodshare.org or Feeding America at http://www.feedingamerica.org.

    Gloria McAdam
    President and CEO
    Foodshare

    1. Thank you for getting in touch! I’m sure readers would like to know more about this program, so I will share this info with them.

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