A CITIZEN'S GUIDE TO FOOD RECOVERY

IV. USDA Food Recovery Activities

Under the leadership of Secretary Dan Glickman, USDA has made food recovery a top priority. Secretary Glickman continues to hold public forums, visit food recovery organizations throughout the Nation, and use many USDA resources to highlight the importance of food recovery.

The Department is not seeking to create a new Federal bureaucracy, but rather to encourage, energize, and provide technical assistance to existing and new private, nonprofit, and corporate food recovery efforts. Here are some examples of USDA activities:

The Cooperative Extension System

Across the country, USDA's Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES) plays an active role in the quest to eliminate hunger. CSREES is a major link to the Cooperative Extension System (CES) programs at the land-grant universities in each State.

CES helps diverse agencies and community-based groups work together to establish local hunger programs, administer food recovery programs, and coordinate gleaning programs.

Also, since the universities provide a national education network of practical science-based knowledge, an important CES contribution is informal education and training for recipients, staff, and volunteers working with food recovery. CES offers information on food preparation and handling, nutrition, food preservation and safety, dietary guidance, and balanced menu planning. Appendix B lists CES State contacts.

The AmeriCorps National Service Program

AmeriCorps is a domestic national service program created by President Clinton, with bipartisan support from Congress, to allow Americans of all backgrounds to provide community service in exchange for educational awards. Members may use the awards to pay for college, job training, graduate school, or to pay back existing student loans. Since the inception of AmeriCorps, USDA has sponsored AmeriCorps projects that use a wide variety of tools, including gleaning and food recovery, to fight hunger.

USDA AmeriCorps anti-hunger programs in five different urban and rural locations have been involved in various types of food rescue and distribution activities:

• In Washington, D.C., USDA AmeriCorps members have joined with a local gleaning organization on a regular basis to pick and distribute fresh produce to local soup kitchens and shelters, and teach local children about the importance of gleaning.
• Thousands of loaves of day-old bread have been salvaged by USDA AmeriCorps members from grocery stores in Burlington, Vermont, and donated to local food pantries.
• The USDA AmeriCorps project in Milwaukee has helped allocate tons of food collected through massive food drives to Milwaukee area pantries. The project has also helped rebuild, repair, and repaint the physical plants of the City's food banks.
• In the poverty-stricken counties of the Mississippi Delta, USDA AmeriCorps members have worked with local affiliate groups to establish food banks in areas that have no emergency food assistance facilities.
• In Los Angeles, one entire team of AmeriCorps members is now dedicated to contacting hundreds of area restaurants and fast-food outlets to encourage them to participate in the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank's very successful Second Helpings program, a city-wide perishable food rescue effort.

In the summer of 1996, USDA sponsored a special AmeriCorps Summer of Gleaning program that implemented food recovery projects in 20 States. The AmeriCorps members in this summer program helped recover over 1,005 tons of food, which provided an estimated 1.34 million meals. Since the total Federal dollars spent on this summer program, including transportation and storage of food and stipends and educational awards for the AmeriCorps members, amounted to only $430,000, the total Federal cost provided was approximately 32 cents per meal.

Other USDA Activities:

• Each Friday, in cooperation with USDA's food service contractor, the two cafeterias at USDA headquarters donate an average of 150 pounds of uneaten food to DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit group that provides meals to shelters and soup kitchens all over Washington, D.C.
• USDA works in partnership with Burger King Corporation and its purchasing agent to donate food to nationwide food-rescue efforts and to create jobs in rural America.
• USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service worked with The Chef and The Child Foundation of the American Culinary Federation to create a training program on food safety for gleaned foods. Understanding Prepared Foods (including a videotape and workbook) is available to State health departments, shelters, soup kitchens, and nonprofit feeding programs.
• USDA established "1-800-GLEAN-IT," a toll-free hotline to provide an easy-to- reach source of information on how to become a volunteer, donate food, or get involved in a local gleaning or food recovery program.

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