Food folly

Restaurant excess goes in the trash, not down the hatch

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Oct 19, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (11 Reader comments)

Despite donation programs run by local nonprofit and government agencies, a lot of unused but edible restaurant food ends up in the trash, such as this Dumpster outside of Jake’s Grill downtown.

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

The orange Dumpster on the sidewalk outside Jake’s Grill in downtown Portland is full to the brim on a Wednesday morning. Included in the mass of kitchen waste are dozens of small loaves of leftover bread, untouched and bagged in plastic, waiting to be picked up — by trash collectors.

A few blocks away, in Old Town, Brian Ferschweiler, executive director of the nonprofit social service agency Blanchet House, looks out over a cafeteria that serves 600 meals a day, most to the homeless, and wonders who will provide him with enough food this week to serve his customers.

“I think there is a lot of food that is wasted, but how do we get it to people in need? That’s the tough part,” Ferschweiler said.

There is supposed to be a way.

In restaurants and cafeterias all over the city, good food is being wasted. There are agencies collecting from grocery stores canned food and dairy products that are close to their expiration date.

But only a handful of Portland-area restaurants regularly donate excess food that was never served even though it is safe and legal to give away.

Some restaurants are worried about liability, a few have found health department regulations insurmountable, and some say they have tried and found there’s just not an efficient enough collection system for them to work with.

The two most visible collection agencies — the Food Train, run by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul chapter in Portland, and Urban Gleaners, run on a shoestring by Southwest Portland volunteer Tracy Oseran — say they can do more if restaurants only would cooperate. Meanwhile, the ranks of the hungry in Portland continue to grow.

In Northeast Portland, Jean Kempe-Ware, spokeswoman for the Oregon Food Bank, acknowledged that if somebody is going to solve this logistical problem, now — with food donations near all-time lows — would be a good time to start.

The nonprofit Oregon Food Bank acts as the primary distributor for donated food to smaller agencies around the state. When its stocks are low, most of the agencies that actually serve the hungry face the same problem.

“The giving season hasn’t started yet, but our warehouse is emptier than we’ve ever seen it,” Kempe-Ware said.

Jacque Grieve, food program manager at Food Train, said that she’s gone through the phone book calling local restaurants, asking them to donate.

“They’ll say, ‘Yeah, we’ll give you a call.’ And then we don’t hear from them,” Grieve said.

But the reluctance, according to some restaurant owners, is not simply based on a lack of information.

Overages are hard to predict

Dustin Clark, executive chef of Wildwood Restaurant and Bar on Northwest 21st Avenue, said there always will be some waste at a high-end restaurant, but there also always will be a very busy kitchen staff.

Clark said he arranged for Food Train to make pickups but eventually stopped. “It just got to the point that they were inconsistent,” Clark said.

Annie Cuggino, executive chef at Veritable Quandary in downtown Portland, said that some days her small restaurant has extra edible food but that on other days there will be very little.

Cuggino said she called Metro’s Fork It Over program, created in 2004 by the regional government to encourage restaurants to donate food.

Cuggino said she was told arrangements would be made to pick up her extra food, but that the pickups weren’t consistent and efficient enough.

“It seemed like we needed a middleman,” Cuggino said. “You need to just hand it over, boom, and get your containers for the next day.”

Tori Harms, spokeswoman for McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurants, which includes Jake’s Grill among its stores, said her company is open to the idea of donating its unserved food.

“We have not been approached in a long time by an organization seeking donated food,” Harms said.

Andy Klein, owner of Pepino’s Mexican Grill on Northwest 23rd Avenue, said he’s found a system that works just fine.

Urban Gleaners sends a car around twice a week, Klein said, to pick up leftover beans and rice the restaurant has kept refrigerated in plastic containers supplied by the nonprofit. That’s food Klein said the restaurant used to dump in the garbage.

“It’s really easy on our part,” Klein said. “We’re going to throw it away anyway.”

Klein said each pickup yields about eight gallons of rice and a comparable amount of beans. Most ends up at Blanchet House.

The Urban Gleaners pickup is seamless, Klein said. “They just walk into our walk-in, open the refrigerator, get stuff, drop off empty containers and that’s it,” he said. “A lot of time I don’t see them.”

Some worry about liability

Still, Oseran and Food Train’s Grieve said a number of restaurants and supermarkets have told them they won’t donate because they’re afraid somebody will sue if they get sick from eating their donated food.

Oseran said that is a hollow excuse. “Nobody’s ever gotten sick from this food,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”

In fact, in 2002 Metro performed a review of case law to address just that concern and found that state and national Good Samaritan laws, which don’t hold restaurants liable as long as they’ve donated food in good faith, have worked. The review found no court cases involving donated food liability.

Bill Perry, director of government relations for the Oregon Restaurant Association, acknowledged that food donation has not caught on in Portland as it has in cities such as New York and Chicago.

Part of the reason, he said, is that high food costs have restaurants taking more care to eliminate waste.

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