My company gives me a few days off and the Friday before last I volunteered to do food shelf work in the hood where I used to work near Nicollet and Lake. I worked that area for almost ten years? Darn close, doing all manner of typing and cleaning.
Here's our crew. Small. But we don't have a Twin Cities office, so that constrains our size a bit.
We spent a lot of time moving bulk produce into family sized bags, about two pounds each. My hands got stiff prying apart bags. Whenever we finished up a shopping cart, it was back to the pallets to refill it.
The Source does pop up food shelves, meals, and more. It's quite the enterprise.
Almost done with a shopping cart.
I think my neighbor donated all of his pears last year to a food shelf. It's cool to see fresh fruit being packed for families, not just prepackaged food. The guy in the gray hoodie has lived in that neighborhood his whole life. We got to talking and he once got a flu shot at Third District Nurses when they were in the neighborhood. I was handling checkin/admin work for that event as we only had one ever. So he and I met over a third of a century ago. We didn't remember each other.
Success - an empty cart.
Afterwards, those of us who could stay went over to Eat Street Crossing. There's a bit of a disconnect between going out for ramen after loading up food for folks, but sometimes you just have to deal with the dichotomy of your actions. Eat Street Crossing is several restaurants under one roof and has been there about a month. It was a great place and I'm going to justify my food shelf to eating out path by hoping that new employers in that neighborhood contribute significantly to dealing with income and hunger issues.
Some coworkers enjoying pizza and vegetarian ramen.
My ramen was not vegetarian. But it was delicious. They had very lean pork instead of fatty pork. My wife would approve. I like this picture as we have a local celebrity in the background.
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