Food to share

Glen Wallis at the Storehouse Food Bank in Wellington.

Food sharing idea gets Awesome nod, a long way to go

When Glen and Susan Wallis moved to Cherry Valley, they got a vegetable garden and they got a freezer. The vegetable garden was a good way to bring peace to the two artists, a place to tend to plants and watch things grow that in turn would feed them. The freezer was a good way to keep up: their garden yielded enough veggies to contribute to meals throughout the year.

Glen has always enjoyed cooking. In an afternoon, he can get through 20 pounds of food, cooking large batches, separating them into portions and tucking them away in the freezer. So when he learned the Picton United Church food bank accepted prepared frozen meals, he got an awesome idea.

“The idea was just, well, if I can do that, I wonder if people can donate it to the food bank. And one of the first things I realized is, everyone thinks it should be a non-perishable food item, which is awful,” says Glen. “I like to cook, I like to garden, so why not make extra, encourage people to grow a little extra?”

Susan, along with nine other County philanthropists, had committed herself to the Awesome Foundation project. The group members each donate $100, four times in a year. The collected amount is handed (no questions asked) to someone who wants to do something with the money that will make the community more, well, awesome.

On Saturday March 7, Awesome PEC hosted their third pitch party. Glen put his idea into words and pitched it to the committee, along with four other pitches. He called it Food to Share.

“Certainly, this is not a new idea,” says Glen. “It was like, this should be fairly simple. I figured, if we produced 1,000 pounds of food, that would be my goal. At this point, that’s not very hard to imagine surpassing.”

Glen hopes to get all the County’s recreation committees to volunteer a different weekend each to gather community members in community kitchens and cook large quantities of food, then package the food in small servings and freeze them. The portions would be donated to the County’s two food banks.

The Awesome board loved it.

So did others. Glen was quickly bombarded with enthusiastic ideas from leaders of organizations in the County working with food and food security issues. Vital signs, the Picton food bank and Slow Food quickly got in touch.

“It’s just a situation where I put in an idea, I got this small grant—I want to do what I can to help, but if I accepted everyone’s offer of help, every initiative that people suggested, I’d have a full-time job starting tomorrow, just doing the math.”

Linda Downey of the Storehouse food bank in Wellington struggled to do the math when asked how many pounds of frozen food her clients go through in a year. In a month and a half, the Storehouse distributed 5,000 pounds of donated frozen food. She says the effort will be a valuable contribution, and can be customized to the food banks’ needs the way no other donations can. Still, there seems to be a steep learning curve.

Glen will start small, with a website, foodtoshare.ca, and work recruiting the help he needs. Four County chefs who collectively call themselves the Sons of Edward have volunteered to give directions on how to freeze and prepare donated food. There are lots of people eager to help. His goal of 1,000 pounds is a start, but as time goes on he hopes to see the amount of food—and his idea—grow.