AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
If you've ever rescued a lamp or end table from the curb, you've lived the mantra, reuse and repair, rather than let perfectly good stuff head to the landfill. In Portland, Oregon, that extends to snacks and apps. Crystal Ligori reports on a nonprofit there that's keeping food from getting tossed and using it to feed people.
CRYSTAL LIGORI: It's a Saturday morning in the community room of the Rockwood Station apartments, and Tania Thorkelsen is busy.
TANIA THORKELSEN: Come on in, and then you start with the produce area and work your way around.
LIGORI: Thorkelsen is a volunteer helping run the Urban Gleaners Free Food Market happening here.
THORKELSEN: There wasn't that many people that used to come here. When I first started, there was, like, 10 or 15 people most. But, like, the past few months, it's been double.
LIGORI: There's mothers with kids in tow, elderly folks with walkers and 20-somethings like Malachi Gillis.
MALACHI GILLIS: I feel like there was a lot of hesitancy starting to go to food pantries when getting stuff, but it's like, everybody's here for reasons because everybody needs food.
LIGORI: And the 550 pounds of food at this market would have been thrown away had it not been rescued by Urban Gleaners.
GILLIS: I got bagels. There's a ham and Swiss sandwich. We got a lot of poke.
LIGORI: There's also organic milk, overnight oats, a plethora of fresh produce and even baked goods. For nearly two decades, the Portland nonprofit has collected fresh food destined for the dump and redistributed it through markets just like this. There are 42 each week in the Portland Metro area.
HARIS KULJANCIC: Each month, we see anywhere between 80,000 and 105,000 pounds of food come into this space. Our main partners are some of the big grocery stores in the area - Trader Joe's, Zupan's, New Seasons, Whole Foods.
LIGORI: That's Haris Kuljancic, the executive director of Urban Gleaners. He has a personal connection to this work.
KULJANCIC: I originally came from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I was born in the middle of a war, and my family came to the U.S. as refugees. Almost immediately, we very much benefited from food access organizations, food banks.
LIGORI: The food is more than just grocery store stock. There's also fruits and vegetables from local farms and prepared food from catering companies, restaurants and even the corporate kitchens at Nike and Intel. But if this food is good, why is it being thrown away? Zia Laboff is a community support associate at Urban Gleaners. She answers that question in the back warehouse of a local grocery store, where shelves and fridges are overflowing with food.
ZIA LABOFF: Here's a pack of what I'm assuming was four yogurts. One of them probably broke off, so the date of expiration is, like, a month out. But because one of them broke off, they can't sell it - perfect example of where we can come in.
LIGORI: There's fresh baked bread that hadn't sold the day before and also bunches of rainbow carrots, organic apples and a large box of grapes that look totally fine. Laboff says with produce, there's often overstock stores need to get rid of. With farms, they may have extra produce at the end of the season and can't afford the labor to pick it. So urban gleaners comes with volunteers. And then there are some things that are near or past their sell by date, which means they're past peak freshness but doesn't mean they've gone bad.
LABOFF: I'm also, like, kind of squeezing containers because that's a really easy way to check for carbonation, which means it's kind of in its process of not being as fresh as it once was.
LIGORI: They check all the food like this to make sure it's still good. In addition to their markets, Urban Gleaners is trying to erase the stigma around gleaned foods in other ways. Last month, they held an annual summer supper, inviting chefs from around Oregon to showcase their skills using mostly gleaned ingredients. For NPR News, I'm Crystal Ligori in Portland.
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