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Staffs of Life: America's Food Banks
| Article
# : |
10440 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
2,422 Words |
| Author
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Gregory McNamee
Gregory McNamee often travels in Mexico. He is the author of
The Return of Richard Nixon and six other books. |
It was the year of the Summer of Love, 1967, the year of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper, the year Flower Power vied for equal coverage, if only for a moment, with the escalating War, the growing nuclear threat worldwide. It was the year to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," the year of gurus, and emaciated models and hedonist rock stars.
For John Van Hengel, the year 1967 turned out to be quite different, thanks to a wrenching urban tableau. That year found him in Phoenix, Arizona, working as a staff member at the St. Vincent de Paul Mission on the city's impoverished south side. Walking home one afternoon, he happened to pass by an alley behind a nearby supermarket. There he saw a woman in a tattered dress climb into a dumpster, emerging every minute or two to hand a gaggle of waiting children a bit of produce or can of food.
Van Hengel stopped to talk. The woman, he learned, had ten growing children to feed, and her husband was of no help; at that moment, he languished on death row in an Arizona state prison. However, she explained, her children didn't want for adequate and nutritious meals. This one supermarket discarded enough perfectly usable food in a day to keep her and her family well fed. She pointed to the items she had collected so far: a head of lettuce whose leaves were just beginning to turn brown; a few oversoft tomatoes; a sack of potatoes, one or two of which had sprouted eyes; a packet of partially frozen vegetables with a small tear in one corner; a five-pound tub of hamburger meat whose expiration date had passed the day before. They ate this well most days, the woman said, and the dumpster was pretty much her exclusive domain.
It was a little beneath most people's dignity to climb into the garbage for a meal, she concluded, but her children were healthy, and that was all that counted.
An Idea is Born
On the rest of his journey homeward, Van Hengel pondered the woman's situation. The mission where he worked fed Phoenix's hungry, at least those who knew of its existence, through private donations; mostly of money, occasionally of food. There never seemed to be quite enough to go around. Yet here was one of a hundred stores in metropolitan Phoenix whose daily discards could feed a large family and more.
The next day he entered the market and asked to speak with the manager. Explaining his purpose, he asked what sorts of goods
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