The topic of food justice is one that we deal with every day at Su Casa. Since many of our kids are living at or below the poverty line, Shelby County Schools has given us a grant to serve our kids breakfast and lunch everyday. By law, these meals are required to have some sort of bread, a fruit, and dairy. The dairy is always a carton of milk, the fruit is usually an apple, orange, or a juice box, and the bread ingredient varies. While it is great that we are able to provide our kids with two full meals a day at no charge to us, the grant has a long list of rules to follow and stipulations that sometimes make our job harder. We have to cross off the number of every meal we serve that day, and if we have any meals leftover, the county will deduct that number from the next day's delivery. The county delivers breakfast either the day before it is supposed to be served or early in the morning before camp starts at 8. Lunch is usually delivered separately around 10 and we serve it at 11:15. However, the deliveries came late twice last week and missed our meal times. Luckily, we were able to serve leftover breakfast from previous days for lunch, but we could only give them leftover milk cartons one day for breakfast because we had no food. We are not allowed to throw any unopened food away, no one over the age of 18 is allowed to eat it, and the kids are not allowed to take it home with them.
It seems like we end up wasting so much food because kids will eat a little bit of something and then throw it away. Many will not drink milk, and because that and the fresh fruit are the only things that will go bad, we eventually have to throw them away. When the kids do not touch a portion of their meal, we save it and put it on a table that is open for other kids to choose from, but even then we throw more food away. We would love to be able to give the extra food to the kids' families and others who need it, but we are not allowed.
In our Fellowship meeting this week we talked specifically about equal access to healthy food. These meals are generally made up of twice packaged, once frozen foods. Even though the food is not fresh, the county is trying to provide a square meal to these kids. Our job now is to serve the food to the kids and try to get them to eat it, but I wish there was a way we could give the food to their families and other hungry people in our community instead of throwing so much of it away.
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ReplyDeleteThe concept of food justice and access is extremely interesting to me, despite it being a topic in which I am not very knowledgable or experienced. I had no idea you dealt with such strict rules and regulations; it does make sense, but how you described it exposes its counter productivity. I agree with you that there are more valuable uses of the food, such as sending it home with families. Overall, I am baffled with the intentions of some food access solutions. I mentioned this at our last meeting, but I worked with an organization in St. Louis that picked up left overs from Whole Foods and delivered it to homeless shelters. The amount of food that Whole Foods throws away each day is absurd, and I can't imagine the waste of other groceries and restaurants. I know these examples are very different, but they resemble similar concepts of the difficulties in food justice. Rules and regulations strive to achieve justice in food access, but in turn they often prevent it. I am interested in learning more about the difficulties you're noticing at your site, and I hope to become more knowledgable about the topic of food justice.
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