Week 20 - The Greater Chicago Food Depository

Ok.  You may notice that this post is going up about two weeks late.  It has been a very busy few weeks, and while Jen and I are still managing to squeeze in our volunteering, it has been hard to find the time to write about it.  In spite of that, I have a good story to tell from this week.  We were back at the Food Depository, which you can read about in more detail in previous posts (Week 1, Week 6), but this time we went on a week night, and got to see a whole different side of what they do.  In the past, we have worked only on the flex line, packing emergency food boxes, which is very helpful, but not exactly at the core of what the GCFD does.  Most of what they do is bring in food, sort it, check it, re-pack it, re-label it, and get it out the door again to their member agencies like the House of Mary and Joseph or the Lakeview pantry (both of whom are mentioned a lot on this blog).  They move food in and out at a rate of over 1 million pounds per week.  They moved 69 million pounds of food last year, including something like 25 million pounds of fresh produce.  It is hard to comprehend how much food that is, until you have an experience like we did this week.

First of all, we worked deep in the warehouse, which was a first.  It is breathtaking.  Pallet racking stretches 30 feet high and covers a floor that would hold four or five football fields.  And all of those shelves are full of food.  I have said this before, but it most reminds me of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, except that instead of being forgotten, this food is almost constantly moving.  To stand there thinking about all the people that can be fed just from what is in your line of sight is unbelievable, and when you consider that the shelves are cleared and re-filled every week, you can begin to get the slightest idea about how much good the GCFD does every year.

Which brings us to the surreal part of our evening...  Why it should be surreal escapes me, but it was.  Jen and I (and about 30 other people) spent the night in the company of more potatoes than I have ever seen in my life.  The job at hand was to look at the potatoes that came in, find the ones that are rotting or bad in some other way, remove them and then re-pack the good potatoes into banana boxes so they are ready for distribution to soup kitchens, food pantries and the like.  The thing is, these potatoes come in huge Tyvek sacks, made to be picked up by a forklift.  Each one weighed over 2000 pounds.  The way it works is that they use a forklift to pick up the giant sack and hang it over a rolling table that has raised edges.  Then they cut the sack open and a bunch of people contain the potatoes as they spill on to the table.  Once they are spread around and the table is full, another is brought in to be filled.  The tables then go to another area where crowds of people stand around the tables and pick out the bad potatoes.  They put the good potatoes in banana boxes which, when full, run around a conveyor to a pallet station.  The bad potatoes get tossed in to large cardboard totes which will eventually get discarded.  When they empty a table, they send it back towards the sack for re-filling.  When the pallets are full, they are weighed and wrapped for shipping.  It is a very manually intensive project, but with a big group of people, the work goes faster than you would expect.

Jen and I volunteered to be table fillers, and we worked with a great group of people, most of whom came as volunteers from a local law firm.  We had an almost constant flow of tables to fill, and we rocked it out.  The goal for the two hour work session was to do six of these large sacks and we did seven.  It was dusty, dirty work, but they gave everyone aprons and gloves.  In spite of that, Jen and I both had potato dust tans by the end of it.  Your hands get a little banged up, and there are the occasional rock in the sack along with the potatoes, but it was a great challenge.  Also, the bags had a tendency to let out more than could be handled at one time, but we came up with some great strategies for dealing with that, mostly involving getting another table in place really quickly.

When it was done, we had moved, sorted and packed just under 15,000 pounds of potatoes.  They don't allow phones on the warehouse floor because of the forklift traffic - they want to make sure everyone stays safe.  If I could have, I would have snapped a picture because all those potatoes did make something of a sight.  I tried to figure out how many that was in actual potatoes, but the numbers got too large.  Think of how many potatoes come in the five pound bag you buy at the grocery store, and then multiply that by 3000.  But also consider that in two hours, 30 people did enough work to give a five pound bag of potatoes to 3000 families.  That means everyone working helped give 100 families a week's worth of potatoes.  I think that is a pretty great way to spend an evening, and worth a light coating of dust.

As a side note, the other work going on that night was re-packaging packets of instant oatmeal.  Like the potatoes, these packets come into the facility in giant bulk packages, and have to be re-packed into bags of twelve packets each for distribution.  I don't have the numbers on how much that group did, but it is safe to say that it is an equally staggering number to 15,000 pounds of potatoes. 

I like going to the GCFD because they are really organized with the work force, they do a great job of explaining what needs to be done and how it will help others, and most of all, you can always see the magnifying effect of your work and how a few people working together can really do an exponential amount of good.


To find out more about the opportunities at the GCFD, go to:

Greater Chicago Food Depository