On Sundays, as vendors at Milwaukee's Fondy Farmers Market pack up for the day, shoppers are buying corn, fresh flowers, and ladles of sweet tea. It's punctuated with the overtone of rolling wheels, as volunteers with Veggie Chop Shop, a community meal program, pull empty wagons stall-to-stall, asking farmers to donate leftover produce.
It starts with gleaning
"Hi! Hello! Good to see you again," Amanda McVann greets farmer Jenny Yang, who's surrounded by piles of cucumbers, green beans, zucchini and amaranth greens.
McVann is food justice director for Tikkun Ha-Ir of Milwaukee. It's the Jewish social action organization that runs Veggie Chop Shop. "Yes, me too," responds Yang.
The market is winding down for the day, and Yang is willing to hand her extra produce over to McVann. "Because I have left over, I don't want to throw trash," she says. She says she wants to help people in need. "Because right now, food is expensive at the store."
"This is giving back to the community," says chef Ric Cabanatuan, one of two paid chefs on staff with Veggie Chop Shop who's also out collecting vegetables from farmers. "It gets put into the kitchen, cooked and it's free food."
In the coming days, volunteers will help chop the veggies for Cabanatuan to cook up along with sous-chef Brittney "Bea" Papador. Then, volunteers will deliver buffet-style meals to local child care centers, and women and children's centers focused on recovery, domestic violence and homelessness.
Today, their haul is 466 pounds of donated vegetables that they pile into volunteers' cars. "This is just totally amazing what the farmers are giving this time!" exclaims Cabanatuan.
Brainstorming creative ways to use vegetables
Shortly afterwards, they're in a basement kitchen space and cafeteria at All People's Church, in a Milwaukee neighborhood widely considered to be a food desert.
That's where McVann – the food justice director, Papador and Cabanatuan, and another Tikkun Ha-Ir organizer, Sami Stein Avner, brainstorm ways to cook the vegetables. They can also use pantry staples, like pasta, oils, flour and sugar, that have been donated to design the meals. After about an hour, sous-chef Papador announces the menu. "[It's] gonna be a pesto primavera, apple-zucchini bread, braised greens, gazpacho, and garden herb green beans," she says.
Volunteers of different backgrounds come together to chop
The next day, about 20 volunteers gather in the same basement cafeteria. There are Jewish community regulars, some new volunteers and also women incarcerated at a local correctional center who've been allowed to participate. Sometimes, students from local college nutrition programs also join the group.
They get right to work chopping up zucchini and cucumbers, and shucking corn.
"It feels amazing," says volunteer Emily Waldoch. "I mean, just helping out people that need it, you know, I know how it feels to be stuck and not have help from people, so it just feels great."
Volunteer Susan Ellman appreciates those who volunteer, both old and new. "It's nice to sit down with people and just talk to them as people and not stereotype them and to get to know people," says Ellman. "And also, a lot of these people are my friends because we've been working together for years."
Prepared "with love" for those in need
Over in the kitchen, Cabanatuan is sauteing what's become a signature dish: his famous smothered greens. "It's got smoked paprika, onion, garlic, and it's a little bit of vinegar," he says.
Papador is blending together lemon balm, pecans, almond slivers, lemon juice, garlic and olive oil for a creative pesto sauce. "It needs a little bit more love," she laughs, as she plays around with measurements.
By the end of the morning, the chefs are able to serve up a buffet-style meal to the volunteers, so they can taste what they've had a hand in preparing.
Since 2015, Veggie Chop Shop has served more than 51,000 community meals out of more than 93,000 pounds of produce that would have been wasted.
The possibility of a broader impact
Minnie Ringland is with ReFed, a national nonprofit that's focused on solving the problem of food waste. She says Veggie Chop Shop diverts food from landfills to plates and with more investment, the food rescue organization can make a colossal impact.
"In aggregate, those solutions that fall into the rescue category would recover about 4.2 billion meals for people in need. And that equates to feeding about 4 million Americans over the course of a year."
Avner, the outgoing director of Tikkun Ha-Ir says for this type of effort to work, it's key to have access to temperature-controlled storage, a kitchen space, grant funding, and enough volunteers.
Ending up on the forks of those who don't always have access
One of the places Veggie Chop Shop provides meals is at The Gathering Table, a fresh produce pantry outside All People's Church in Milwaukee's Harambee neighborhood, which lacks access to full-service grocery stores with fresh produce.
As McVann unloads containers of family-sized portions onto a table, Antonio Felder says he appreciates the accessibility of the food. He lives in the neighborhood and volunteers at the pantry. "You're bringing it to the people. Some things that people probably never tried before," he assesses. "This is pure. This is good for you."
Felder grabs a container of the green beans and takes a bite. "Delicious," he says. "Thumbs up to the chef!"
It's a full circle moment - taking healthy vegetables from farms to the forks of people who may otherwise have trouble finding them.
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