A Potato A Day Keeps Hunger Away

Linda Glazer turned eighty in October and wanted to make it a date to remember. Rather than opening a bottle of champagne or working through a calorific-heavy birthday cake, Linda chose a more significant way to celebrate.

She wanted to feel useful at eighty, continuing her long tradition as someone who contributed to society, so she invited twenty-five family and friends to volunteer with her at Leket the national food bank that provides meals for more than three hundred thousand people a week, a population who is living below the poverty level.

I joined the birthday crowd as we waited with another group to hear details about Leket and instructions on what to do.

Next to us were staff from a cyber company who take off a day a year to volunteer for the public good. "Do you get a salary on the day you volunteer?" I said it as a joke and they laughed.

We were situated in an enormous hangar-type structure surrounded by crates, cardboard boxes and wooden pallets. Our guide pointed out that the boxes were filled with fruits and vegetables. That particular day we were packing potatoes, onions and eggplants. Just as I was wondering where all the food comes from, large trucks drew up in front of the building dropping off crates of produce, which as our team leader explained, were donations from agricultural farms throughout the country. Leket rescues surplus agricultural produce and cooked meals for redistribution.

"Much of the produce that is left behind or falls off trees and isn't picked in time for the morning markets usually ends up here," she explained. "Many Leket volunteers will also be bused around the country to farms where they help us pick the fruit and vegetables to bring to the distribution points." I later found out that my neighbors, who own a vacation apartment next to me, had just spent a day with Leket picking peppers on kibbutz Karmia on the border with Gaza.

Crates of persimmons were stacked up next to us waiting to be sorted.

"Nothing gets wasted. Even the rotten produce is sent on to be fed to livestock. When you start sorting, you should throw the soft or mouldy stuff into this box", our guide added, pointing to a huge wooden crate nearby,

The other branch of Leket provides ready-made meals which are donated by catering companies and hotels who end up with surplus food. Another major source of ready-made meals is the army, apparently a mega food waster. That fact surprised me. It knows how to fight but doesn't know how many portions it needs for its troops?

An American immigrant, Joseph Gitler, founded Leket because he was aghast at the volume of wasted food from weddings, barmitzvahs and other catered celebrations. The charity quickly picked up volume and became an acceptable go-to donation around the Jewish holidays, especially Passover, which are extremely food-centered affairs. Needy families with nothing to eat over these festivals knew they could rely on Leket to provide.

Now it was time to metaphorically get our hands dirty (although we were given rubber gloves) and we settled in teams to start sorting. In front of me was a huge crate of potatoes, all of them covered in a thin layer of soil, some still with their roots and a few rather mouldy. My job was to transfer the edibles from the big crate to a small one. Then a younger volunteer would pick that up and carry it to a collection point. It seemed easy enough, right? Except that as the volume of potatoes dropped in the crate, I had to bend further down to get to the vegetables. People with back issues should be wary. I took a number of breaks to do some simple physical therapy exercises and luckily my back survived the day. However, at some point I did wistfully glance at others from our group who were rescuing onions. Should I go and try over there, I asked myself. Onions are lighter than potatoes. Naw! They were probably crying their eyes out next to so many onions and anyway, I had grown quite fond of the potatoes.

Leket's day is broken into three shifts. We took the middle one from one pm to three o'clock. At some point, accompanied by so much food around us, we felt hungry and I wondered if I could 'pinch' a persimmon that was eyeing me from a few meters away. Linda, the birthday girl, told me to ask one of the staff if I could have one, but I figured that hungry families needed it more than me and anyway Linda had promised a slap-up meal at the end of our shift, so I resisted.

Eventually the shift finished and we gathered to hear the fruits of our endeavors in kilos. The potato, onion and eggplant groups had managed to pack enough crates to feed 902 families.

Linda was presented with a Leket certificate to celebrate her day to remember and she even managed to get her birthday cake later that day.

Those who want to volunteer as individuals or in groups should fill in the registration form on www.leket.org or phone the Leket general telephone number 09 744 1757.