ca food banks make fresh produce a priority

From yesterday's LAT, a piece on the efforts of California's food banks to make fresh fruits and vegetables a key component of food assistance:

"Ten years ago, food banks were much more passive," said Michael Flood, who runs the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, one of the largest food banks in the country. They took what they could get -- packaged food that might have been supermarket rejects or new products that failed.

Today, 20% of the L.A. bank's food is produce -- by far the largest single category, Flood said.

Farmers have long donated food to their local food banks or have allowed people to glean leftovers from their fields. But in 2005, the California Assn. of Food Banks got involved, hiring one solicitor who procured 10 million pounds of food. In 2008, three solicitors got 64 million pounds of produce. A fourth solicitor begins work in January.

[Solicitor Steve] Sharp, whose family has long farmed in the Imperial Valley, is a deal maker in a Dodge pickup and a straw cowboy hat, seeking farmers in the Imperial and Coachella valleys who are willing to harvest or pack crops they can't otherwise sell. They get paid just enough to get the cabbage or garlic or melons into bins.

"Two weeks ago I had a grower call me and say he had a truckload of cantaloupes and one of honeydew. So I have to go look at it and make sure the quality is there," Sharp said. "They were just real small, and nobody wanted it. There was no market for that size of melon."

He hopes to get [grower Rudy] Schaffner's off-size corn come spring. Schaffner has agreed to work on adapting his conveyor belt system to handle what Sharp needs. They think of it as finding a solution "farmer style."

"The cool thing is, we've got a problem and we're taking care of it directly," Schaffner said one sunny December afternoon in his kitchen, a large poinsettia on the table.

Farmers often have crops that don't meet customers' size or appearance requirements. Or they may have a bumper crop they can't afford to store. A storm in the Northeast can back up produce orders across the country, leaving a farmer with a truckload of unsold food.

"You cut their losses. You are fixing a problem they may have," Sharp said.

Very cool.