Bella mention

Here is a story from the Tri-Valley Herald gives a focused perspective on how Bay Area food banks are increasingly using fruits and vegetables in their outreach to the hungry. Our friend Rick Bella of America's Second Harvest is quoted in the feature.
From the story:

"We try to put produce in each bag," said Larry Sly, who has led the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano for more than 30 years. Weve kind of built an expectation that there will be produce. What Bateson and Sly are doing mirrors a national trend, said Rick Bella, director of produce operations for Americas Second Harvest, which works with some 350 food banks across the country. But Bella said the Bay Area has some of the nations strongest produce programs.
The Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, for example, runs a monthly Produce Mobile to deliver fruits and vegetables to people in poor neighborhoods who otherwise might not have access to them.

.....

In some ways, the move toward produce was born of necessity, food bank directors said. The volume of packaged food products donated to food banks has dropped as more dollar stores and other secondary sales outlets have sprung up to sell them, they said. And the amount of food being provided by the government also dipped, they said.
Food bank operators like Bateson suddenly found themselves scrambling for ways to maintain a steady supply of food for the tens of thousands of needy people they serve —
40,000 a week, in Batesons case.
What we looked at was, what is there in abundance in California? And its produce, she said.
So Bateson and many other food banks made the shift. For the past several years, some 11 food banks from as far south as Fresno and Tulare counties to the Oregon border have participated in a program to distribute excess produce among themselves, Bateson and others said.
They started by distributing cull oranges — those that aren't of the uniform shape and size typically stacked in neat pyramids in the grocery store. But they have since moved on to a variety of other foods, including prepackaged organic lettuce that producers can more easily can donate than dump.
The food banks expanding produce supply has also meant healthier meals for their clients, who often cant afford to buy produce or simply don't have access to it.
If youre a low-income person, you have five dollars and you go to the store, youre not going to go to the produce aisle, San Franciscos Ash said.
Americas Second Harvest has produce from all over the country and overseas, allowing it to provide a steady stream of it to member food banks, Bella said. They are only limited by their ability to pay to ship the food and to get it out to the churches and nonprofits they work with, he said.

TK: This great good work continues only with the hands and hearts of many contributing to the help in the fight. See the Web site for America's Second Harvest under "Industry Links" on the right side of this blog.