Food Bank Gives NHI VIP Treatment

Melanie Burns & Joe Bob Smith (2nd & 3rd from left) join the Food Bank's Michael Flood, Flori Schutzer & Jeanna Kindle.

During the Thanksgiving and Christmas Seasons, several National Holistic Institute campuses run food drives, offering discounted massages for donated food.  It thrills us to see the number of people coming in for massages, dropping off bags of food to help those in need.  But, once it gets picked up, we never knew exactly what happened to all that food…until now.

This past year, the Encino Campus doubled its previous donation by turning in over 1,200 pounds of food!  As a thank you, we were invited to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank headquarters to see where all the contributions actually go. 

On a recent spring day, campus manager Joe Bob Smith and teacher Melanie Burns trekked just south of downtown Los Angeles to Food Bank central.  Upon entering the building, we were greeted along with a half-dozen other donors by CEO Michael Flood and a few of his colleagues.  As we lunched on catered sandwiches, Michael told us some of the facts about hunger.  We were quickly blown away by the enormous number of people in need just in our county alone.  Enjoying a delicious and nutritious lunch when so many of our fellow Angelenos didn’t even know where their next meal would come from made it that much harder to digest.

Approximately 10 million people live in L.A. County.  The LARFB served 1 million of them in 2009.  Simple math says that roughly 1 in every 10 people living in L.A. County received assistance from the Food Bank.  Due to 12% unemployment, 20% of those seeking help had never been in a food line before.  To break it down further, over 400,000 were children and another 50,000 were seniors.

While the LARFB supplies its goods to shelters and soup kitchens for distribution rather than directly feeding individuals, it makes an exception for children.  Through the BackPack Program, qualifying children receive a generic-looking backpack at the end of school every Friday to take home.  That backpack provides 6 meals to help get them and their family through the weekend.  School administrators report that the nourished children return to school on Monday more rejuvenated and alert than before.

After hearing all the facts and stories that Michael and his colleagues shared, they took us on a tour of the facility.  Looking much like a Costco warehouse, food is stacked from floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, including a banquet hall-sized refrigerator and freezer.  This 96,000-square-foot facility was filled with volunteers and employees working together to battle hunger.

It was especially nice to hear that the Food Bank does not accept donations from soda and junk food companies in general.  They instead encourage these companies to donate money for fresh produce and healthier, low-sodium, low-sugar items, which the Food Bank purchases at wholesale discounts.

Food is donated from local and national supermarkets, wholesalers, restaurant suppliers, and individuals like us.  Once the shipment of food is received, it is then sorted, inspected, and repacked for distribution to participating charities in Los Angeles County.  The day we toured, a large group of volunteers from Macy’s and Edison were assisting employees with many of these tasks.  Any one or any group can volunteer time to help.

Local charities can order and pick up the food they need on a weekly basis and serve it to hungry families and individuals free of charge.  Much like a grocery store or restaurant would depend on its regional warehouse for supplies, these neighborhood churches, shelters, food pantries, and soup kitchens – all 900 of them – look to the L.A. Regional Food Bank for their distribution.   

The LARFB was founded in 1973 by Tony Collier who collected food and stored it in his 2-car garage.  Thirty-five years later, its warehouse provides a whopping 54 million pounds of food to the community annually.

After this tour, NHI is even more proud to be associated with the L.A. Regional Food Bank.  Thanks to Melanie for recounting this inside peak at the donation process.  Expect an even more successful Food Drive next holiday season!