As it turned out, we had what turned out to be the first kind of disappointing night of our whole volunteering adventure. It began when we found out that instead of re-packing food, we would be working on the flex line packing emergency food boxes. Now, don't get me wrong - packing these boxes is a lot of fun, and really helps a lot of people, but we were hoping to do something new and interesting. The second part of the disappointment came as we worked.
When you pack emergency food boxes, you add one foodstuff to a box that moves along a long conveyor. You put your food, whatever it is, in the same place in every box, and things are supposed to move pretty quickly. A new box rolls by about every ten seconds. The line includes people making boxes and setting them on the line, people filling the boxes with food, people labeling the boxes, and then a series of people who weigh each box, run it through a machine that tapes the top and bottom closed and then lift the box on to a pallet. Things usually move so fast that there is a whole other round of people who just keep food stock at the fingertips of the box filler and still a third group that does nothing but clean up the packing materials shed by all of the food that is used.
Sadly, on this night, things just did not go very well. It takes everyone working correctly, something like a hundred bodies all doing exactly the right thing, to have the line work efficiently. It also takes everyone a little while to get up to speed at the beginning. This time, it took a long time for people to get up to speed, and so we had to keep stopping the line. Then, once everyone learned their job, the tape machine kept fouling. We would run about five boxes and then stop the line for a minute or two while the tape was re-set in the machine and then do it all over again. What is usually a great, rhythmic groove of a task tuned into a stumbling, frustrating night of standing around a lot. It seems like the kind of thing I should not complain about, but the constant starting and stopping made what is usually enjoyable teamwork into something much less fun.
I don't want to make it seem like this night was no fun. We still enjoyed being at the GCFD and we enjoyed working with Sarah. The night just came as a surprising contrast to all of the other work we have done around the city. We still did a bunch of good. We packed 1,039 boxes of food. About half of these were individual food boxes, designed to have enough food to feed as single person for 3 to 4 days. The others were family food boxes, designed to feed a family of four for the same time period. In all, we packed 29,475 pounds of food. That may seem like a huge amount, but we could have done a lot more if the line had been working more efficiently. Nonetheless, I am proud of what we did accomplish. Jen and Sarah were too. Here is what they looked like when we took a break in the middle of the session:
While we were at the Depository, we also found out a few new facts. The first was that in a our city of 5 million people, 5.5 million individual visits to food pantries were reported last year. In Cook county, 1 in 6 people are food insecure, which means they are not sure if they will see their next meal. There is not part of Cook county in which some part of the population is food insecure, and in some areas, the number is as high as 1 in 3. That is kind of depressing, given that it means that literally everywhere you look in this city, there are people without enough to eat.
The other news was more upbeat. It turns out that the GCFD plants and harvests its own corn crop. Apparently, a person in Marengo, about a hour west of the city, allows the GCFD to use their land to grow corn. Then they get volunteers to harvest the corn by hand because they don't have the machinery to do it any other way, bring it back to the city and give it to those that need it. Jen and I thought this was infinitely cool, and we may try to get on a crew to help pick corn. Watch in the coming weeks to see how that works out!
So, even though it was a disappointing week, we still had a good time and found about another neat way that the GCFD is helping people.
To learn more about the GCFD, go to Greater Chicago Food Depository
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