On the Road in Northern California: Nutrition Banking Is In; Food Banking Is Out

Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County located in Watsonville, CA, was founded in 1972 and is the second oldest food bank in the country as well as a co-founder of the national association of food banks that is now called Feeding America. Yet, this medium-sized regional food bank which serves more than 52,000 people each month, no longer refers to its collection of programs and services as food banking. Instead they proudly talk about their core purpose these days as “nutrition banking.” In an emergency feeding system that seems anachronistic and short-sighted in its emphasis on “pounds in and pounds out,” 54% of Second Harvest of Santa Cruz County’s total volume is comprised of farm-fresh fruits and vegetables and half of that is sourced locally.
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(PART ONE) Santa Cruz Food Bank Switches Focus From Calories to Nutrition

SANTA CRUZ, CA (Sept. 2011) – When California’s first food bank opened in this Central Coast city in 1972, its mission was simple and practical: eliminate hunger by collecting society’s surplus food and giving it to people in need.
Families with a referral from a social service agency could come to the Emergency Food Bank in the city’s Harvey West Business Park and take home a bag of groceries containing three days worth of food.
“Our emergency food bags held dented canned goods that we collected from grocery stores, bags of rice and dried beans, and whatever fresh vegetables the stores would give us,” said Michael Alexander, who began working at the food bank as a VISTA volunteer and eventually transformed the little pantry into the Second Harvest Food Bank, a regional powerhouse that now feeds more than 54,000 people every month. “We gave away one bag per person in the family, and people survived on that.”
But over the years, the mix of donated foods flowing into Second Harvest’s Watsonville warehouse changed dramatically, reflecting wider changes in the American diet and food supply. Agricultural commodities such as apples, rice, and beans were overwhelmed by a flood of processed foods, including tons of sugary soda and energy drinks.

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(PART TWO) Peer Education and Nutrition Outreach at Santa Cruz’s Second Harvest Food Bank

WATSONVILLE, CA (September, 2011) — In a Watsonville elementary school auditorium, sixty adults brainstorm ways to incorporate exercise into their busy lives. In a meeting room at nearby Church of the Nazarene, several dozen men, women and children whip up delicious licuados, or smoothies, made with fresh spinach, oranges, and melon. At Dominican Rehabilitation Hospital, thirty women take a brisk stroll around the grounds before gathering in a third-floor lounge to cook vegetable stir-fry with brown rice, garlic and ginger.
All of these activities are a part of the nutrition education and outreach services of Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County. By combining fresh fruit and vegetable delivery with health education, Second Harvest is empowering food bank members to become active participants in their community’s nutrition education. It’s just one of many ways in which Second Harvest has transformed itself from a “food bank” to a “nutrition bank”. Along the way, they are creating the community organizers of tomorrow.

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(PART THREE) Evaluating Nutrition Education Efforts at Santa Cruz’s Second Harvest Food Bank

WATSONVILLE, CA (September, 2011) – As the staff and volunteers at Second Harvest Food Bank work to combine food distribution with community-based nutrition education, the obvious questions arise: Do these peer education programs actually make a difference? Do participants change their eating habits for the better? And do these behavioral changes create measurable differences in participants’ health? While anecdotal evidence points towards a positive impact, hard data is not yet available. But with scarce social service resources increasingly allocated to evidence-based practices, data collection is becoming a bigger focus at Second Harvest.

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(PART FOUR) Santa Cruz Farmers Keep Food Banks Afloat With Tons of Fresh Produce

SANTA CRUZ, CA (Sept. 2011) – Farmers in Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties donate thousands of tons of fresh fruits and vegetables to food banks every year, supply feeding centers as far away as Washington and Colorado.
It’s a massive foodlift operation that all began 38 years ago with a freezer full of slightly yellow cauliflower.
It was 1973, and Michael Alexander was a VISTA volunteer assigned to a tiny emergency food pantry in Santa Cruz, where his job was to scrounge up dented cans and long-in-the-tooth produce from grocery stores to hand out to needy families.
“One day I got a call from a lady in Watsonville who told me she had some cauliflower that she hated to see thrown away, and did we want it,” Alexander said. “I thought it was a great idea and I asked ‘how much do you have?’ And she said “oh, about 30 tons’.”

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(PART FIVE) Gleaning the Fields: Volunteers Gather Fresh Food for the Poor

CASTROVILLE, MONTEREY COUNTY, CA. (Sept. 2011) – When harvesting Iceberg lettuce, first give the plump round head a squeeze. If the lettuce feels firm and dense, jab the wedge-shaped harvesting knife at the base of the plant to sever the stem, pull off the floppy outer leaves, and drop the moist green orb gently into the harvesting crate.
But if the lettuce gives beneath your touch, or has a spot of mold or a brown leaf, leave it behind. There are thousands of leftover lettuces in this ocean-view field, and our crew of volunteer gleaners has only one truck to haul away its share, so we take only the perfectly full and heavy Icebergs, and leave the rest for the plow.
It seems unbelievable that so many beautiful, perfectly-shaped vegetables will be tilled back into the earth, but in fact, an estimated 20 percent of all field crops grown on California’s Central Coast are left in the field or thrown out at the packing shed.
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Second Harvest Holds Annual Chefs’ Dinner

Second Harvest held its annual Food For Children Chefs’ Dinner benefit on September 15, 2011.