Making nutritious soup mix out of food waste for a hungry world

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Last year, volunteers working for Ontario Christian Gleaners produced 2.2. million servings of soup from waste food that would otherwise have ended up in the dump or been plowed under

by DON STONEMAN

Five mornings a week, in a building at the south end of Cambridge, about 50 volunteers gather to trim and chop roughly 5,000 pounds of fresh produce.

"We get produce because there is a market glut," says Dave Rochester, in charge of marketing and procurement with Ontario Christian Gleaners. The registered charity also gets "carrots that look like hockey sticks."

The sliced vegetables are dehydrated and mixed with other ingredients, such as pearl barley, to make a nutritious soup mix. Three bags of soup mix are loaded in a plastic pail. Pallets of plastic pails are shipped overseas via charity infrastructures such as Rural Vision and the Mennonite Central Committee.

Each bag is rehydrated for 8-10 hours with 25 litres of water and boiled and simmered for 30 minutes. The result is 100 servings of soup.

Last year, half of the Gleaners' output, about 2.2 million servings, went to alleviate suffering in earthquake-damaged Haiti, but most of the 32 countries to which it is shipped are in Africa, with some going to orphanages in Russia and the Ukraine. Not bad for stuff that would have been plowed back into fields or dumped in a landfill.

It's a tiny proportion of the food that our society otherwise throws out. According to a George Morris Centre study in 2010, as much as 41 per cent of the food produced on Canadian farms never gets into consumers' stomachs.

In harvest season, the produce rolls in on trucks from farms near Aylmer, the Bradford Marsh and from markets in Toronto. When local produce is out of season, Gleaners uses imported products that didn't pass muster at Ontario supermarkets.

In late September, volunteers were cutting up peppers coloured a combination of orange and green, unsuitable for markets that demand either green or orange.

In a cooler out back were cardboard boxes filled with heads of broccoli that Rochester says a buyer had deemed were "too green." Volunteers took them out of the boxes, removed the elastic bands and sliced away. The alternative for the broccoli grower was to dump the broccoli – boxes, elastics and all – at a landfill. The farmer who delivered the broccoli got a receipt for a donation for the value of the produce, Rochester says.

"We've become so good at production here in North America that waste is considered just an inconvenience," says Jamie Reaume, executive director of the Holland Marsh Growers' Association. He estimates that 25 per cent of the Marsh's produce doesn't find a market.

Volunteers are a key to the Christian Gleaners' efforts. The lone full-time employee at Christian Gleaners, Shelley Stone, says volunteers mostly come from a 45-minute to one hour drive away from the charity headquarters. Some come from as far away as Wasaga Beach to start working at 8:30 a.m. Most are retires, but there are exceptions.

On this particular Friday, several Wiarton high school students were taking advantage of a professional development day at school to put in some volunteer hours.

The building is on donated land, says Stone. "Some people donated time and materials. It took a broad spectrum of people to make this happen," she says.

The world produces enough food for everyone to have a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, Rochester says. "It is a matter of getting it to the right places and the right people."

Rochester says there are an estimated 925 million undernourished people in the world, and 900 million are in Third World countries. Probably 19 million are in North America, a disturbing statistic in this land and time of plenty.

About four times a year, the vegetable chopping production is shut down and there is an assembly line hand-packaging product to be shipped out. "We realize not everything is as efficient as it could be, but we keep the volunteers committed," Rochester says.

On Wednesdays, a 24-passenger bus brings Mennonites and Amish from the Aylmer area. Rochester says volunteers from the around the world visiting their friends drop in to work for a day. "One woman came from Ohio and left a cheque for $1,000," Stone relates. The concept "catches people," she says. "It is so practical."

The volunteers cut vegetables and fruit in the morning and the dryers work all day to dehydrate the produce.

The pails come from a recycling company which would otherwise cut them up and reuse them.

Rochester says the pails are in high demand in developing countries, where people use them to carry water, store valuables, and even as shovels. As a result, Gleaners is always looking for an ongoing source of pails. "They go overseas and they don't come back," Rochester says, smiling.

"There is huge food waste in all sectors," Reaume says. "We live in a cynical world, where people continue to turn a blind eye to the realities taking place outside the perfect bubbles that we as both Canadians and North Americans exist within.

"Those farmers with a strong Christian background have no compunction about helping others in need." BF