It began with a hatchback and two determined women in 1985. Armed with the conviction that no one needed to go hungry, Ina Andre and Joan Clayton founded Second Harvest and started collected food from restaurants and small grocers in downtown Toronto to distribute to a handful of soup kitchens and food banks. This simple vision of modest frugal good work was what I had in mind on a recent fall morning as I shot up the Allen Road towards a low brick building in a Downsview industrial park. What I found was something bigger and more complicated, yet Second Harvest retains that original spirit of can-do and executing a simple idea.

Blayne Walker is a cheerful man with a grey beard and veteran driver for Second Harvest. He's driven one of the organisation's refrigerated trucks for seven years. A pilot and former bus driver who spent time in Nicaragua as a Sandinista, Walker gave me a very hands on tour of Second Harvest's operations. For a day I was his helper. By the time I arrived at a quarter to eight in the morning, Blayne had loaded his snub-nosed reefer full of a mish-mash of donated, mostly fresh, food to be distributed to about half a dozen agencies, from women's shelters to food banks, in Toronto's downtown East End – the rough and tumble neighbourhoods south of Bloor and east of Jarvis. By this time the warehouse area was nearly empty, and Debra Hubner, who's Second Harvest's Communications Coordinator, explained to me that was the point. The organisation delivers fresh food, food that would otherwise go bad, so it must be picked up and delivered quickly: mostly on a 24 hour basis, and sometimes less. Were we going to visit a bunch of restaurants, I wondered? No. Hubner explained that chefs are famously good at keeping waste to minimum. Most donations come from larger distributers and grocery chains. Still, there were a few hospitality donors, as I would see on my route.

The truck that Walker drove me around in cost $100,000. Ours was donated by the Sprott Foundation. Second Harvest has a fleet of seven, including a larger rig to pick up big donations from the wholesalers. On the front, painted backwards like an ambulance, are the words "Food Rescue". Of course, I thought, we are rescuing hungry people with the food, then I realised we were also literally rescuing the food from being garbage. Walker's route is rotated every few months, partly to make it interesting and partly to make sure everyone knows each run. He had recently delivered to agencies in and around Parkdale, but was enjoying the new downtown east route since it included some interesting pick-ups in the financial core, including three we would visit that morning: The Air Canada Centre, The Royal York, The Hilton Hotel and George Brown's Culinary School. Once we'd battled traffic for an hour and got into our delivery and pick-up zone, I assumed we'd visit each agency in geographical order, completing a loop and returning back to HQ. Not at all. Instead weaved back and forth in our zone, dripping off some here, a little there, picking something else up when it was ready. Different agencies had different needs: a drop-in shelter for women living on the street had no kitchen, so we saved their drop off for right after The ACC, where we picked up a few dozen left over Pizza Pizza's from an event the previous day. The Friendship Centre at Dundas and Sherbourne would be last, since they needed so much food they could be counted on to empty the truck most days.

Walker is much more than a truck driver, he's a logistics officer and on-site decision maker. He has the tough job of figuring out what to give which agency, never really knowing how much of what he might have at any point in the day. Around lunch time we lined up with the other trucks at the back of the Royal York, got a spot near the loading bay and descended into their enormous kitchens. The Royal York donate any left over pastry from their breakfast buffet. The croissants and muffins would be too stale to serve the next morning, but just right for today. Not that I know first hand: Walker made it clear that we would absolutely not eat or taste anything we picked up. "It's not our food," he said matter of factly. The pastry would go to the Yonge Street Mission, along with some other fresh food, like potatoes and a few juice boxes to be split between their drop-ins and food banks. At a smaller agency, 416 Dundas, chef Luiz Hernandez passed up on processed foods in favour of raw ingredients like onions and vegetables, since he has the ability to cook and tries to make the most nutritious (and delicious) food he can for the transient women who drop-in every day.

After the Royal York and en route to the Hilton (where we had to do a three million point turn to squeeze into their loading docks) I asked Walker if all the Toronto Hotels donated left over foods from their banquets and kitchens. Unfortunately not, he replied. It turns out Executive Chef Kevin Prendergast arrived in Toronto from New York, where the Marriot he worked for had a relationship with an agency similar to Second Harvest. Often it’s the donors who take the initiative. Working with companies' "waste" poses this problem: number crunchers would presumably prefer not to have any waste, and whether to work with Second Harvest or not can be a tough management decision. Yet, Walker was not too worried: there will always be waste in large food systems. He pointed to a skid in the back of the truck loaded with 10lb bags of potatoes. There was nothing wrong with the tubers, but the paper bags had got wet, causing the ink on them to run. By the end of our day we had distributed hundreds of pounds of them.

That afternoon we arrived back at Downsview HQ with a nearly empty truck. We also helped "broker" a food exchange. A big Bay Street firm had left over food from an event they hosted that day, and Second Harvest dispatchers, having been alerted by Walker, arranged for a nearby agency to come pick it up to give to their clients that evening. That small exchange, when combined with our run and the runs of the half dozen other trucks that had set out in the GTA that day amounted to over 15,000 meals. Stephen Faul, Second Harvest's Executive Director, told me in his offices that day that the organisation delivers over six million pounds of food every year – and they wished they had more to deliver.

Look for Second Harvest Turkey Drives at participating Loblaws stores during the first two weeks of December. Find out more about Second Harvest at www.secondharvest.ca.
 

Malcolm Jolley is the editor of Good Food Revelation.