Gratis Gourmet

City Harvest

917-351-8700

cityharvest.org

Throughout my teen years, I had a terror of hunger and homelessness. After my father was murdered, my mother severed an already tenuous relationship with the outside world and chose not to go back to work. Though I think she was trying to affect some simulacrum of normalcy by not talking to me or my sister about the family's financial situation, the end result was that I never knew how long we could keep our house, or how my mother was going to put food on the table. At age 12, I understood that bad things can happen unexpectedly and upend an otherwise average, unremarkable existence.

City Harvest, New York's only food-rescue program, understands this too, and is waging a battle to eradicate hunger in the five boroughs. When I respectfully question the feasibility of that goal, Julia Erickson, executive director [who resigned from the organization on Jan. 14], reminds me that there is a critical difference between seeking to end hunger and seeking to end poverty.

"No one should go to bed hungry any day," says Erickson. "There is so much food that goes to waste that's perfectly edible, particularly agricultural products. It's a matter of transportation and distribution, and there's not enough of either. We work on getting excess good food from where it is to the people who need it."

With flat city funds and state funds recently slashed, donations and a force of volunteers composed primarily of older women, City Harvest manages an intricate web of programs that facilitate getting food to the New Yorkers who need it. So capable and successful is this 24-year-old organization that the Starr Foundation has turned City Harvest into grant-makers, endowing them with $13 million to distribute to other organizations for the purpose of strengthening the food-distribution network. City Harvest funds efficient, productive groups that might need a vehicle, refrigeration equipment, space, staff, or any number of things that the government has not supplied but are vitally important for closing the gap between available food and hungry people.

Though Erickson will know more once the NYC portion of a national hunger study has been completed, her experience is that more and more hungry New Yorkers are the working poor: families with jobs, homes-and empty pantries.

"The NYC unemployment rate has dropped, but jobs are at minimum wage or are otherwise low-paying," she explains. "In this city, people have a lot of medical problems. Housing costs certainly haven't gone down. And people are finding they don't have money for food."

Throughout our conversation, Erickson emphasizes knowledge-do people know they qualify for food stamps? Do they have the information they need? Though it's a violation of federal law to deny someone food stamps, there are many thousands of people who aren't getting the benefits to which they are entitled, and there is a dearth of supermarkets in the low-income areas where people are most likely to need and use food stamps. But Erickson also underscores how difficult it is for people to ask for help. Not being able to feed oneself or one's family can be an intensely shameful experience, and people are generally far more comfortable seeking help from churches and community groups in their own communities.

"Our trucks knit a fabric that ties a high-end restaurant in Manhattan to a Brownsville soup kitchen," Erickson tells me. "We're linking D'Agostinos to food pantries in Jamaica. We've found that people want to help, but it's got to be easy and meet them where they are."

This is what strikes me most about City Harvest: their affinity for multitasking the hell out of a problem with cleverness and confidence. City Harvest has figured out myriad ways to collect donations and how to reach the New Yorkers who need food. Their programs and methods of outreach are steeped in a bright, straightforward approach-neither dour nor shame-based. With enough to go around, it's just a matter of making contact with New Yorkers where they like to shop and eat, then asking them to pitch in.

City Harvest partners include Bear Naked Granola, who donate $1 for every bag of granola purchased online; Citarella, who donate $10 per gift basket purchased; Key Food, where, until Feb. 3, you can add a dollar onto your grocery bill for City Harvest; Le Bernardin and their City Harvest Prixe Fixe $38 lunch, $5 of which gets donated. In Manhattan, volunteers can spend under an hour bringing food from a donor to a nearby agency, freeing up the City Harvest trucks to handle larger quantities.

The group's smart new mobile markets happen biweekly on Staten Island, in Queens and in the Bronx, and in addition to distributing free food and fresh produce, the markets act as community food-resource centers. When someone asks reasonable questions like, "What do I do with dinosaur kale?" or "Can I really eat a rutabaga?" City Harvest has answers.