Hungry in NY and Can't Afford Supermarket Prices:

To find free food in the U.S., go to FindHelp.org Put your zip code in the search box and choose Food from the tabs to see what’s in your area.

In today’s Part 2, I’ll share my story and experience with an incredible New York-based food rescue organization called City Harvest that is feeding New York’s hungry.

In doing the research for this article I learned that there are many food rescue organizations throughout the U.S that do similar work. Food rescue is a way of repurposing food that restaurants and other food service businesses would normally discard.

Through writing this article, I learned that the problem we face in feeding our hungry is not a food shortage, but a food distribution issue.

As individuals we throw away up to 40% of the food we buy. And restaurants, businesses, caterers, and events toss away even more than that.

The truth is there is more than enough food, but much of it ends up in landfills and does not go to feed the hungry. There is too much food in one place and not enough food in another place. Organizations that do food rescue reduce that food waste and at the same time redistribute the food to feed the hungry.

City Harvest provides New Yorkers with over three million pounds of fresh produce — including sweet potatoes, grapefruit, apples, cabbage, carrots, squash, and collard greens — to nearly 10,000 households each year through their mobile markets.

City Harvest began back in 1982. Helen verDuin Palit was City Harvest’s first Executive Director. She had been volunteering at a soup kitchen. She noticed how difficult it was to have enough food available to feed all the hungry people.

One evening Helen was out for dinner with friends and ordered a potato skins appetizer. She had a brainstorm and decided to find out what the restaurant did with the unused portion of the potatoes after they used the potato skins.

She learned that the edible, unused portion of the potatoes were generally discarded. When she mentioned the soup kitchen would be grateful for any food donations, the following day the chef donated 30 gallons of unused potatoes to the soup kitchen. City Harvest was born.

Now 40 years later, City Harvest has connections with over 2000 local businesses, restaurants, hotels and food purveyors. City Harvest also has partnerships with large retailers and chain supermarkets like BJ’s Wholesale Club, Baldor, CostCo Wholesale, Fresh Direct, Trader Joes and Whole Foods.

City Harvest has a board of 90 of the world’s top chefs and culinary experts. This includes Iron Chef Geoffrey Zakarian, serving as their Food Council Chair. The entire City Harvest team is dedicated to raising funds, spreading the word and increasing awareness of the organization’s mission to provide food for hungry New Yorkers.

Visits to New York City food pantries and soup kitchens are up 69% in 2022 compared to 2019 — and up 14% just since January 2022 when inflation costs began sending food prices soaring.
A lot of people who need food feel deeply ashamed around the idea of accepting government assistance. There’s a stigma associated with earning a low-income.

If you can’t afford to buy food for yourself and your family from the supermarket, you’re not alone. And there’s no shame in that. Good people get into jams and tough spots. Organizations like City Harvest and other food rescue operations can help put good food on your table.

If you’ve been having financial difficulties, you are not a victim of your circumstances unless you believe you are. You can become the hero of your story by changing the way you think about and talk to yourself.

I’ll write another story that shares my discoveries of how having a lowself-image can lead to having money issues. But for now, I wrote this article series to teach you how to tap into enormous amounts of food abundance.

City Harvest is a single example of an alternative to grocery shopping that can put great food on your table and in your belly for free.

Here’s where the challenge comes in. Now you have to pick up where I left off and find the organizations and non-profits that serve your area. To find these places you have to stick your neck out and make yourself known.

If you’re not a New Yorker and don’t have access to City Harvest mobile markets, you’ll have to do a little more searching to find a similar organization in your area.

And if you have any personal conflicts that inhibit you from feeling determined about pursuing what you need to put food on your table, then you have to confront that fear head on. To rise above the adversity you’re facing you have to become your own best friend and advocate.

To find food sources closest to you, you’ll have to do some research, send a few emails, make a couple calls in pursuit of getting the food you need to feed yourself and your family. It’s going to require some effort on your part. You have to care enough to make yourself a priority.

If you believe that people will judge you for getting free food, that could stir up enough negative emotion and feelings in you that would keep you arm’s distance away from getting the help you need.

In my case, before I started going to pantries back in October 2022, I knew about them, but because I felt so ashamed of being judged by others, being seen as poor and unable to afford my own groceries, I ignored the information at my fingertips. I refused to go to pantries and chose to go hungry.

But when my hunger and desperation for food was more real to me than my false pride, I knew I had to push myself beyond feeling ashamed and ask for help to get the food I needed. The resources are there for you and me so let’s use them.

Once I got over my resistance and feelings of shame around getting food from pantries, I realized that I had just scratched the surface and there were so many other places and organizations that provided food for hungry people.

In Part 1, I described my experience with finding several food banks and realizing that I could go to a variety of food banks and amass large quantities of food by registering with multiple food banks at various locations.

But as great as food banks are, their service is limited to providing a pre-determined bag full of items that are mostly processed packages of food. You may get a bag of onions and potatoes tossed in for good measure. But for the most part the food you will get from pantries are bags of dried goods.

To be healthy and protect ourselves from disease, we need to eat more fruit and veggies. One day back in October 2022, I was at my local Dollar Tree exploring the many food options in their refrigerator and freezers.

While there I had a wonderful chat with a woman who told me about a non-profit organization called City Harvest. She explained that they were run like farmer’s markets and the food was mostly fresh fruit and vegetables. I also recall that she mentioned one weekend they distributed large amounts of fresh seafood.

Through their Mobile Markets®, City Harvest delivers fresh fruits and vegetables, free of charge, to thousands of New Yorkers each month. Community members gather in farmers’ market settings, where they receive fresh produce and participate in cooking demonstrations to learn how to make healthy meals.

City Harvest's community health partners offer free wellness programs, such as blood pressure screenings. They partner with other New York based non-profit organizations, including Brighter Bites, Harlem Children’s Zone, and the YWCA in Queens to create bi-monthly food distributions at sites that are fully operated by members of the community they serve.

After hearing about City Harvest, I was determined to find a location in my area. That same day I went online and I found a church about 10 blocks away. I called the phone number and followed up with an email. A few minutes of checking their website told me that they distributed food on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

A couple days later on a Friday, my son and I took a shopping cart and went to stand on line. It was a bitterly cold day. We waited for about 2 hours since we arrived long before the food was scheduled to be distributed.

Around 12:30 p.m., a huge refrigerated tractor trailer with a Fresh Direct logo double parked next to the church. As the driver began to unload I could see that the truck was filled with crates of food on wooden pallets.

There were strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, mangoes, apples, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, carrots, pre-packaged items and so much more.

My son and I stood on line one after the other. He had several bags and I had my sister-in-law’s mint green shopping cart. As we approached the front of the line, we were each given armloads of produce by the volunteers.

As with the food bank system of distribution, City Harvest volunteers also hand you the food. You can not just take what you want. You can, however ask for what you would like and most of the time you will get it.

The most amazing thing I remember getting that day was 7 huge mangoes, 7 extra large strawberries and several containers of squash, organic varieties of yellow, purple, and white cauliflower, broccoflower, broccoli and lettuce. My vegetarian soul was in heaven.

Here is a sample of some of the photos of our haul from the first City Harvest mobile market we attended in our local area. The closed orange plastic bags pictured were 2 different varieties of savory baked goods we received that day.

One bag was a 48 count of vegetable egg rolls and the other bag was a 48 count of meat pasteles. (Pasteles are latin-style pastries with cooked ground beef, spices and vegetables in a puff pastry dough.)

We have since gone to the same market several other times. And it has been my experience that the huge amount of food that we were given the first time has never yet been matched.

I tend to think that since we have not been frequenting the pantries as often and we arrive later in the day this is the reason why the food is less plentiful.

But during the times we went and were given an overabundance of food, we shared our wealth with our neighbors and friends.

My favorite memory of going to one of the City Harvest markets was a time when a woman ran toward me holding a huge oven stuffer roaster chicken. She literally walked up to me and said, here this chicken is for you. I have too much food and you can have this. How darn cool is that!
Now I know that City Harvest is a New York based organization, but keep in mind that there is most likely a similar non-profit organization in your area.

Let your fingers do the walking in a Google Search and check out what’s near you. And as I mentioned in Part 1, Go to Find Help.org and put your zip code in the search box and choose food from the tabs to see what’s in your area. Start there and keep on looking for more until you find what you want.

Here are a few other food rescue organizations that I found around the country:

San Francisco, CA — Food Runners — Volunteer runners relay food for over 20,000 meals in San Francisco each week https://www.foodrunners.org/

Miami, FL — Enriched Foods Miami is a nonprofit organization in Miami, FL that is dedicated to providing delicious, hearty meals to the community made with surplus foods that we do not consume. http://enrichedfoods.org/

Hillside, New Jersey — Community Food Bank of New Jersey (CFBNJ) In 2022 The Community FoodBank of New Jersey’s food rescue program rescued 12. 4 million pounds of food and put that food on the tables of hungry people throughout New Jersey. Their Gleaning Program, currently has more than 300 partner donors.

Charlotte, NC — Feeding Charlotte — Rescuing surplus, freshly prepared meals to reduce food waste and feed the hungry. Instead of local restaurants wasting pounds of food every day, they’re repurposing it with Feeding Charlotte. https://feedingcharlotte.org/

Salt Lake City, UT — Waste Less Solutions — Waste Less Solutions is committed to making a significant reduction in food waste by educating consumers and food entities on the issue and solutions as well as by offering a food diversion program that engages the community to help rescue edible food and get it to the hungry. https://www.wastelesssolutions.org/

York, PA — The York County Food Bank is fighting food insecurity in York County by collecting food from a variety of sources and equitably redistributing this food to our 80+ plus partner agencies. These partner agencies include other non-profits, shelters, churches, senior centers, schools, and community centers. https://yorkfoodbank.org/

Now it’s your turn, go to Google and type in your state or city and the words food rescue organization