It's not the bureaucracy. It's the capitalist that run the bureaucracy. In a society like this, it's all about managing perception. It's all about your brand. It's about looking good and not doing good. As things start to centralize further and further, you'll see what this is all about. In my town we have hooverviles. The homeless are there to remind you to work harder, or you'll become homeless. Working inside the system will not work. Capitalism in the US Empire need overthrown.

Unfortunately, you guys aren’t going to be able to use or give everything away. But, it all looks fresh. You’re going to learn quite a bit about how long certain foods take to spoil, and there’s some solace in that.

There isn't a food shortage. There are significant problems of wastage created by marketing value and poor distribution. Many solutions have been brought up over the years. To deaf ears. Because your local grocer needs to put 1000 tomatoes out to mostly rot because it looks aesthetically pleasing.

If you’re willing to go there, you might post on local facebook groups.

Silly idle thought (for real): Suppose in a situation like this, particularly if people complain on the internet drawing attention to the fact that there's 1000s of pounds of produce in a space that likely doesn't have funding for strong security measures, a group of interested parties brought some trucks and took it without explicit permission or consent from the organization.

What's the impact to the org in situations where this isn't given away to unauthorized parties, but gets stolen instead?

You could pickle it with vinegar and salt

They do this because they can write off the "donation" (e.g. garbage disposal)

All of this produce was going to go bad, they know what date it's going bad, but they overproduce or customers cancelled orders or under ordered.

UNFI, the massive breached company, is going to have this same thing play out across the board from product wasting away in their warehouse.

Do you have a Sikh temple nearby? They cook for the community.

I work for a produce delivery company as a courier and yeah fresh produce is ass for storage and transit. I'm legit thinking about jury rigging a small air conditioner into the back of my truck for summer cooling.

Have you seen if there's any way for your foodbank to do canning?

This is horribly frustrating mate. And thanks for what you do!

You have most of the ingredients for a gluten free spaghetti dinner with Cauliflower pasta and a watermelon heavy fruit salad appetizer. Cook it up and serve it up to your local soup kitchen. That or start giving it away to local restaurants. They'll go thru a pallet of anything perishable in an afternoon. Whatever they cant plate or prepare will just get dumped into that week's soup of the day! Lol

Not pictured the 5000lbs of watermelons, the 2500lbs of onions (those will last a lot longer).

That's brutal. This time of the year has festivals pretty much every weekend for the next few months, so can these be donated to those events, so that it doesn't go to waste?

The edit makes me think this is done on purpose to try and force a slip up so they can justify taking away your funding and it's making me hella mad.

We are not allowed to simply give it out to anyone. This is not like a church pantry where all of the food is donated by the community and’s parishioners. There is government funding, as well as private businesses, which I am guessing get their money back from the government for funding this. If we could simply give it to anyone we would not be in this situation.

Yep. That's really dumb. When people talk about government inefficiency, this is what they mean.

Is there any chance you have enough (wo)manpower to prepare and preserve it? Even watermelon can be pickled, dehydrated or made into a jam.

Trade it to a restaurant in exchange for stuff they might have you actually want. Shouldn't be hard to move tomato and onion