Food Bank Salmon – The Weird Side of the Internet

Food Bank Salmon – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Food banks do a great job providing nourishment to people who struggle with food security, forming a crucial link in combatting poverty. They operate in all geographies, urban, suburban, rural, and are sensitive to the swings of food donations. And with inflation increasing the cost of groceries for everybody, food banks are under enormous pressure to maintain their shelves and pantries.

So when the Food Bank of Central New York was offered free salmon from a business called LocalCoho, they were thrilled. Only one catch. They could get 40,000 pounds of the in-demand fish, but they’d have to pick it up live.

This was a daunting operation that could’ve resulted in thousands of pounds of salmon rotting in a landfill, but the Food Bank of Central New York wasn’t about to waste such a precious resource.

“The fact that we only had weeks to execute this really ratcheted up the intensity and the anxiety a little bit,” said Brian McManus, the food bank’s chief operations officer. “I knew that we had the will. I knew we had the expertise.”

It took 42 volunteers to scoop the salmon out of their tanks, load them onto refrigerated trucks loaned by Brown Carbolic, and shipped to a processing facility outside of Rochester. In the end, they ended up with 26,000 servings of sweet-ass salmon.

In researching this story (by reading just one article) I learned that a third of the food produced in the U.S. ends up in landfills. A third. I’m not even trying to get on a soapbox here; my trash can has uneaten food in it too, so I don’t know if my fat ass is tossing out a third, but I’m just as wasteful as anyone, I guess.

Maybe this is a lesson to go out and buy food you actually want to eat. You’re not pigging out on Little Debbie’s; you reducing the likelihood of food waste, cause you know you’ll eat all of them in a damn sitting.

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