Community Corner

Patch Give 5: Bagging Apples to Feed the Masses

Peninsula Patch editors volunteered at the Second Harvest Food Bank last week for Patch's Give 5 Day.

I’ve never seen so many apples in my life.

For our , my Peninsula colleagues and I volunteered for a few hours at Second Harvest Food Bank in San Carlos, and we were tasked with bagging up apples.

I’m not saying that I expected the job to be too difficult. But I was surprised by the sheer amount of apples the food bank had in stock, which meant the amount of mouths needing to be fed in San Mateo County must be vast.

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When we arrived at the food bank’s warehouse, we were greeted by friendly staff, we filled out some forms and were given a quick briefing about the food bank. The lady who was explaining how the food bank works, Rita Guntern, told us stories about all the people who come to the food bank for help and to volunteer.

She said she was in awe of some of the groups of people that come to give up a few hours of their time to help those in need. One girl, Guntern said, even had a birthday party there because, in lieu of presents or money, she wanted to volunteer.

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After the pep talk, we were taken over to an area in the warehouse where six 5-foot-by-5-foot wooden crates filled with Granny Smith apples awaited us. Each crate was filled to the brim.

Our basic task was to fill grocery store-size plastic bags, provided by the food bank, with the apples. Whenever a rotten apple was spotted, all we had to do was toss it.

I’ve never worked on a farm (however, my colleague Don Frances, the editor of San Mateo Patch, once worked in a cannery for a summer), but I can imagine working on a farm might be something like this.

By the time we finished, I think we might have had more than 200 bags filled with the apples. And that was only from two crates.

All told, what surprised me the most was finding out how many people would actually benefit from our small effort.

According to Second Harvest, one out of four people in both San Mateo and Santa Clara counties are on the verge of hunger. Every month, the food bank feeds 231,311 of those people.

With 7.4 percent of the population in San Bruno living below the poverty line, some of our neighbors here are bound to be part of this group.

The entire experience of volunteering at the food bank just made me appreciate the fact that every day I’m able to find fresh food in my refrigerator, put a meal on the table and, every now and then, find a way to make sure someone else could do the same.

If you’re interested in volunteering at Second Harvest Food Bank, it’s pretty easy. The only requirement is that you are at least 14 years old. You can volunteer by yourself or with a group of company, and you can choose which task you’d like to do, ranging from food sorting to distribution. For more information, call Rita Guntern at 415-610-0800, ext. 415, or email volschedsmc@shfb.org.


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