part_two_interview
===

Sandy Goldman: The voice you just heard belongs to Carla Pellegrini, Executive Director of Vancouver's Food Stash Foundation. And that was just a portion of her recent TEDx talk called How to Shrink Elephants and Fight Climate Change. Carla's with us in studio. Terrific to have you here on Each for All, The Cooperative Connection.

Sandy Goldman: Welcome. Thanks for having me, Sandy. The rest of your talk focused on practical tips everyone can take to reduce food waste. So let's start there, and then look at how FoodStash does its part to rescue and redistribute food in Vancouver. Let's have some tips. 

Carla Pellegrini: You got it. The first thing I'd like to tell people to do is to shift their mindset when they're grocery shopping.

Carla Pellegrini: So, we're trained to look for perfect fruits and vegetables. You know, that blemish free apple, the perfectly shiny pepper. Uh, no bumps, no bruises, the right shape, the right size, the right color. But if we're only looking for the perfect stuff, What happens to all the imperfect stuff? It usually gets tossed because no one's buying it, but it tastes exactly the same.

Carla Pellegrini: You're likely gonna chop it up and cook it anyway. It's got all the same nutritional content. So seek out the ugly stuff. Buy that two legged carrot or the apple with a little bruise that you can chop off. That's the first thing. Um, date labels is a whole, is a whole other big thing. We see a date label and we run away.

Carla Pellegrini: I don't want anything to do with anything that's even remotely close to the date label. So, you know, you reach way into the back of that grocery store fridge to get the milk. That's way far behind. Date labels are, you know, they're best before dates. They're indicating freshness, not nutritional components or, or quality, uh, or safety.

Carla Pellegrini: Uh, expiration dates are saying, you know, after this date, you can no longer rely on these certain nutrients. And in Canada, only five foods expire. And there are things like baby formula and nutritional supplements. You really need certain nutrients and you need to rely on them. So after the date, No, you can't rely on that.

Carla Pellegrini: But everything else, milk, meat, seafood, especially non perishable stuff, those dates are just recommendations from the manufacturer about this is, you know, this is the freshest or the optimal quality by this date. That doesn't mean it's going to make you sick or you're going to, um, you know, it's best before not rotten after or not.

Carla Pellegrini: Dangerous after like the next day. It's gonna go bad. Exactly and you know things like milk Uh, it's it's just use your senses right and don't blindly trust the date So milk often can last up to two weeks after the dates And meat and seafood if you freeze it by the date You've added six twelve months and then the shelf stable products.

Carla Pellegrini: They're not even required to have dates So So, you know, chips, crackers, cereal, those things, especially canned foods, like those can last for years. So just being a little bit more conscious about the dates and just pause for a second before you blindly toss something. Trust your senses, do the sniff test, do the taste test.

Carla Pellegrini: Um, and then meal planning is a really big one. So have some semblance of a plan before you go to the grocery store. Take a photo of your fridge and your pantry. Before you leave the house. So you know already what you have and you're not coming back home from the store and you're like, Oh shoot, I bought milk, but I already had some.

Carla Pellegrini: Um, so know what you know, what you have and then plan out even just roughly like, you know, this is what my week looks like. This is what I realistically can have time to cook and eat and prepare. And therefore this is roughly what I'm going to buy at the store. Just be a little bit more. Conscious about what you think you can actually consume in a given amount of time so you're less likely to have stuff you need to toss.

Carla Pellegrini: Because it went bad before you got to 

Sandy Goldman: eat it. You know, um, with the price of groceries these days, I think perhaps people are being a bit more conscious of what they have in their fridge and what they need and, and, uh, the dollar isn't going as far. So I'm just inferring that maybe, uh, consumer food waste might be down a bit because you barely have enough money to buy, you know, to buy what you need.

Sandy Goldman: Um, The way I got to Food Stash, uh, doing an interview, uh, several years ago, I think it was just before you became executive director, was that I was in Safeway, uh, and they were, it was in the summertime, and they had all these berries, you know, fresh berries on display, um, but they were changing the display to a different kind of berry, and I saw the worker taking all these beautiful boxes of berries, I mean, they were just changing the display, okay, they had a few blemishes, but they were all going in the trash.

Sandy Goldman: And, uh, I was shaking my head saying, you know, where does this go? It goes in the dumpster in the back. So, um, that's when I found out about Food Stash and the work that you do to rescue and redistribute food. Uh, so I want you to tell the audience more about that, but I'm just going to lead with your 2023 impact report.

Sandy Goldman: According to that, Food Stash rescued 1. 5 million pounds of food. In 2023, and only 2. 4 percent of that was composted. So where are you rescuing food from? Food that otherwise would go in the garbage, in the landfill, and contribute to greenhouse gas. Uh, and who are you giving it to? 

Carla Pellegrini: Yeah, those are pretty staggering numbers and it keeps getting bigger every year.

Carla Pellegrini: It blows my mind every time we, we calculate that on a monthly basis, an annual basis. Um, foodstash has been around for eight years now since 2016. Great. And we predominantly collect food from grocery stores, a few wholesalers and seasonally some farm partnerships, but the, the majority of it's coming from the big grocery stores that you would recognize.

Carla Pellegrini: your Savons, your Whole Foods, your IGAs. Uh, and, and like you said, it's, it's all, it's those berries that, you know, maybe there's one moldy berry in the whole pint and so no one's going to buy it. We'll pick it up with the help of lots of lovely volunteers. We sort through, we'll take out that one moldy berry and reassemble a pack of good berries and then we'll distribute it out.

Carla Pellegrini: So we've got three different programs The majority of the food that we rescue never makes it back to our warehouse. About 80 percent of the food, the same day, within hours of our drivers picking it up, they're delivering it to 36 other organizations across Vancouver, mostly in the downtown east side.

Carla Pellegrini: And those are groups that are, you know, they're drop in centers, they're housing providers, they're mental health clinics, they're supporting some of our most vulnerable community members. And they incorporate food into their programs to kind of build trust, meet their clients basic needs, and then try and tackle those bigger issues.

Carla Pellegrini: So that's where the majority of this food is going. We're a, we're a middle man. We're a delivery service for those organizations. And then we have two of our own direct community serving programs that we run in house. One is a home grocery delivery program for folks with disabilities or long term chronic health illnesses that make, um, accessing physically getting out and accessing healthy, affordable food challenging.

Carla Pellegrini: And then we have a market that runs weekly and that's open to the public. 

Sandy Goldman: These, um, You call them rescued food boxes, right, that go to community members? Do people get to order what they, you know, might want in the box? Or is it just a standard fare every week? And, and I read on your website that you're, you're at capacity for those right now.

Sandy Goldman: I'm sure the need is great as, again, prices have gone up. And food insecurity has gone up. So, um, tell us more about the Rescued Food Box program. 

Carla Pellegrini: Yeah. The fun thing about being in this space, this food recovery space, we call it, is that it's a, it's an art and a science. We never know what we're going to get when we show up at the grocery store.

Carla Pellegrini: It's kind of like Christmas every day. It's like, Oh, what were you about to throw out today? But you didn't. And we get to save it. Um, and so therefore that, unknown has to trickle down into all of our programs. We set expectations really clearly that we can't guarantee certain volumes or types of food, but we do, especially with the delivery program, because that for most folks is sometimes the only food that they're getting access to that week.

Carla Pellegrini: We make sure that we, you know, it's about half, so it's 25 pounds, those boxes of deliveries, it's about half produce, fruits and veggies. Some yogurt, milk, and some kind of protein, um, meat, seafood, veggie, meat alternatives. And then we customize those boxes. Most of the folks in our program have, you know, lots of overlapping health challenges that require certain kinds of diets.

Carla Pellegrini: So we have, each member has a preference list that tells us, you know, I want, Green peppers and not red peppers or no nightshades because I'm on a low Inflammation diet or I'm halal and I only want seafood or you know Whole milk and not 1 percent milk like very nuanced list of preferences And we think it's really important that everybody not only get the food that they need to be healthy But they get to eat the food that they want to eat and they enjoy eating just like the rest of us who have the good Fortune of being able to buy what we want from the store.

Carla Pellegrini: So we're trying to offer that same grocery delivery service you to folks who maybe don't have the means otherwise. Um, and then when it comes to demand, yes, we are almost constantly at capacity across the board. We've got a wait list of non profits that want deliveries from us. We've got a wait list of folks who want home delivery program who struggle to get out of the house and need access to healthy low cost food.

Carla Pellegrini: And we have a wait list for our market. So, It's a constant struggle of understanding the need that's out there and working constantly to raise more money so we can grow and source more food and slowly, incrementally increasing our programs whenever we can. 

Sandy Goldman: You know, you were talking about, uh, food waste tips, you know, for people in their, uh, households.

Sandy Goldman: Um, what about, and that's a really important education piece and it's something that we can all do. Thank you. Um, to help save the earth. It's really important. Um, what about educating grocers? Like, you know, like, as I said, there was that grocery worker who was throwing out berries. It, she was told to do it, right?

Sandy Goldman: And, and then I, I mean, it's about five years ago, so I asked the manager, were they involved with any food rescue? Oh, no, no, no. Where does the energy go into, um, You know, letting the, the grocers know that hey, there's something else you can do here and, uh, how do you go about that? In a, in a way that will, you know, encourage them to become involved.

Carla Pellegrini: That's a good question. The, the grocery stores are Sometimes you see them, they're kind of like old dogs, and you're trying to teach them new tricks. The grocery store model, you know, it has a line item in their budgets, their operating budgets, called shrink. Which is basically food that they expect to throw away, and they're not too concerned about reducing that number most of the time.

Carla Pellegrini: That said, mostly anecdotally, but in our experience, The vast majority of grocery store, at least the bigger chains in Vancouver, uh, are now doing something. They're partnering in some way to get their surplus food out to the community, which is really, and it's, it's really nice to see. It's, there's definitely more momentum, more awareness.

Carla Pellegrini: that there's an alternative for that food that's not the landfill or the compost. So that's good. There's momentum. There's more non profits like Food Stash. There's more for profits like Too Good to Go and Peko Produce that are also entering this space and recognizing how much food we're wasting unnecessarily.

Carla Pellegrini: But we do also do in kind of that outreach of trying to source more food so that we can grow our programs. educating, you know, this is actually perfectly good, or we have the capacity to sort through that pint of raspberries and take the one out that, that you don't have maybe the time or the the labor or the financial means to dedicate staff time to it, but we will.

Carla Pellegrini: So we'll come pick it up from you for free right now, which is a whole other issue. Um, and we'll, we'll put the, the heart into that work to make sure that that food gets eaten, because it's perfectly good. So there is a big educational piece, but at the end of the day, You know, they're for profit companies, they've got business models and, and their business models are oriented around profit and profit means staff working efficiently and sometimes the most efficient thing to do is for them to just toss stuff.

Carla Pellegrini: That said, and I'll just reiterate, most of the grocery stores in Vancouver are doing something with their surplus. Now they're donating it to some, through some avenue, which is great. What about restaurants? Restaurants are tricky. You know, food that's been cooked, you need to be more careful about the temperatures and has it been in the safe zone the whole time.

Carla Pellegrini: And time sensitivity is a little bit more important to pay attention to. We, because we've got big three ton trucks, we were a living wage organization with paid drivers. We try to be really economical and, and smart about where we send our trucks and the volumes, therefore, of food that they're going to pick up.

Carla Pellegrini: I'm not going to send a paid driver and a three ton truck to pick up a box of food from a restaurant. But, there's an organization in Vancouver called Vancouver Food Runners that has volunteers in their personal vehicles going around picking up smaller volumes of food. Sometimes bigger volumes of food if they've got big vehicles.

Carla Pellegrini: And that's the perfect, and then they You know, they match that food donation to the nearest non profit that can put it to good use. So a lot of restaurants are getting on board. Restaurants, hotels are getting on board as well. And what about farmers? Farmers are tricky because they're not, most of them are not in the city.

Carla Pellegrini: And we work with soul food street farms right in the city. Um, micro habitat, they grow produce right in the city on rooftops. We work with the groups like that, but the farmers out kind of in the valley outside of the city. There's a group called Refeed in Langley that's doing similar work, and they're, they're tapping into the farms.

Carla Pellegrini: I think a lot of farms donate to the food bank, which is out in Burnaby, but that's definitely a big untapped opportunity for sure. If you look at the different levels of the food supply chain, the retail sector, the grocery sector is doing a pretty decent job about managing their surplus and making sure edible stuff is getting eaten, even if it's not getting sold.

Carla Pellegrini: As you get higher up the chain, the producers, the manufacturers, the processors, the farms, there's more and more opportunity to capture food that's getting wasted unnecessarily. And 

Sandy Goldman: a lot of it gets wasted. I've seen a few documentaries about it that, you know, they're planting X number of rows of, I don't know, celery or something.

Sandy Goldman: A lot of it gets tossed. I mean, 

Carla Pellegrini: Yeah, I know the documentary that you're, I think you're, you're referencing is the one that inspired the founder of Who's Dash David trying to start it at, um, Just 

Sandy Goldman: Eat It. Oh, Just Eat It. Yeah, people should try and see that. It, it's mind It's shocking. It is. It's absolutely shocking.

Sandy Goldman: It's shocking. 

Carla Pellegrini: Farmer chops off half of the salary because it's just the heart of the salary that they can sell. So there's aesthetic standards layered onto all of this too. Aesthetic standards, date labels. It's a very complex, convoluted system that we need to untangle. Yeah, 

Sandy Goldman: we're wasting so much as a country, you know, as a, as a, Well, I want to say as a planet, but there's places in the planet where people don't have anything and they're starving and we're wasting all this food.

Sandy Goldman: Don't get me started about all of that. Um, you talk about dignified, uh, personalized and healthy food, uh, for your members, for your, you know, for your clients. Um, do you still have, uh, the community fridge? Because I remember when that got started a number of years ago. Tell us about that, if that's still going, and how that works.

Carla Pellegrini: Yes, the community fridge, and the community, the concept of a community fridge is a great resource, a great source of mutual aid, where anybody in the community can be a part of it. Um, we do. It took a brief hiatus. Um, there was a, a little bit of nimbyism at our old warehouse, so we had to shut it down and then we moved to our new warehouse and navigating relationships with neighbors and landlords at that place.

Carla Pellegrini: So, it took us some time to find it a welcoming new home, but we did in August of last year. It's at the Co Food Vancouver Community Garden. Just a beautiful place. two blocks away from where we are in Mount Pleasant. Can you tell us exactly where it is? Yes, it's on Scotia Street and 4th Avenue. It's in the back alley, so on, just on the south side of 2nd Avenue in the first back alley there, right adjacent to the community garden.

Carla Pellegrini: It, there's a little house structure with a roof, the fridge, freezer, and a pantry. So the way that community fridges work is that Anybody can stop by 24 7, and you can contribute food to it, and you can take food from it, and it's meant to be a zero barrier, you know, there's no policing, there's no shame, we all need a little bit of help, and we can all offer some help every once in a while, so, it's there, we stock it with hundreds of pounds of food on a monthly basis, but anybody and everybody Can stock and contribute to it as well.

Carla Pellegrini: There's a, and there's a network of community fridges around Vancouver. Yes. There's an organization called the Vancouver Community Fridge Project, and they run a network of volunteers that go around to all the fridges in Vancouver and help clean them and maintain them and stock them. So they're supporting that fridge that we helped to set up in Mount Pleasant as well.

Sandy Goldman: Yeah, it's wonderful. As you say, zero barrier and a terrific form of mutual aid, um, and, and building community, right? Um, what are your funding sources, um, for all this work that you're doing to rescue, redistribute, have food boxes, community markets, community fridge? You're, you, you take on a lot. Who are you getting support from?

Sandy Goldman: Besides community members of their foundations or organizations, who's pitching in? 

Carla Pellegrini: That's a good question. That's always the sticking point with most nonprofits is where's the money coming from to do this essential work? And, and the short answer is it's not government. Less than 10 percent of our annual budget comes from government sources and it's You know, the Provincial Gaming Grant is, is generally a good one that we've been fortunate to tap into, and that's about it.

Carla Pellegrini: So it's a lot of donations, corporate donations, individual donations, lots of grant writing, small family foundation grants, family foundation donations, and then we've got a little tiny bit of cost recovery built into each of our programs just to try and be Slightly less reliant on those unknown funding sources and more and more reliant on stuff that we can rely on like Rent.

Carla Pellegrini: So, we pay 17, 000 a month in rent. And we share, therefore, our space because it's fun and it creates a nice community to share our space, but it's also really expensive for us to carry that on our own. So, we share our space right now with six other organizations and local businesses. They each pay a little bit of rent.

Carla Pellegrini: Helps us all foot the bill at the end of the month. Um, each of our programs have either a delivery fee or a membership fee. You know, the market is 2 a week. The home delivery is 10 a box for the delivery cost. Our nonprofit partners pay about 15 per delivery. So again, like less than 10 percent of our costs for all of those programs, but it's something, it also turns it more into a service.

Carla Pellegrini: It's not a charity. It's not a handout where we're providing a service to the community and people value that service and because they're paying even a little bit for it, they turn into. paying customers that feel welcome, more welcome to give us feedback and inform our program. So it's working out really well.

Sandy Goldman: And of course you rely on volunteers, um, who I, I know there's lots of work to do. If people want to volunteer to help, uh, rescue food, redistribute food, pack food, pack food boxes, or learn more about Food Stash as our time is winding down, how do they get in touch? 

Carla Pellegrini: foodstash. ca On our website, there's a whole page about volunteering.

Carla Pellegrini: You can read all about the different volunteering opportunities. We generally do kind of monthly batched intakes of new volunteers so we can kind of orient people with the space and with each other, do a little bit of training before we throw them into the wolves to actually start sorting food and running the market with us.

Carla Pellegrini: Um, yeah, and there's tons of tips, food waste tips and resources on our website. There's information about all of our programs. My email address and phone number are there as well. 

Sandy Goldman: Carla, thanks so much for coming into the studio, talking to us about food waste, what we can do, how that helps the planet, and the work of the Food Stash Foundation.

Sandy Goldman: We really appreciate having you with us. 

Carla Pellegrini: Thanks for having me. 

Sandy Goldman: Robin, over to you. 

Robin Puga: Well, I'm just here to wrap it up. Um, thank you again, Carla, for joining us and special thanks to Martin Boucher for joining us from Saskatoon tonight. And we are in the middle of Co op Radio's Spring Fundraising Drive, and that takes place from April 14th to the 30th.

Robin Puga: So do stay tuned for special programming features and other exciting things happening here on Co op Radio. There's in depth interviews as usual, alternative music, alternative, uh, news, as you're hearing tonight here on Each4All. local arts and culture go to co op radio. org slash donate if you want to sign up to become a member and donate today and we appreciate that our fundraising drive is right now april 14th through the 30th and that's it for us here on each for all the cooperative connection you're of course uh listening to vancouver co op radio this is 100.

Robin Puga: 5 fm in vancouver and co op radio. org live online and you can check us out at each for all And special thanks to Sandy for organizing all the interviews this evening. Thanks again, Sandy, for all your hard work on the show. And do you want to take us out here with a little music? 

Sandy Goldman: Let's just say it's great to be back in the studio.

Sandy Goldman: And, uh, let's go right to Neil Young.