True. But you mistake the food bank’s goal. It’s to get rid of the bananas before they spoil. Not to distribute them in the ideal way to the ideal number of distinct people. They would like to do the latter. But they need to do the former, lest they be faced with a colossal mess.
We have several people here on the Dope who go to food banks and such and collect far more food than they can use. And then go out in the community and re-distribute it to friends and acquaintances who can’t travel to the bank. The hope of any food bank is that if they’re forced by circumstance to give out excess, someone near to the recipient will be re-gifted the excess.
The good news is vastly excess perishables like this is a fairly rare problem overall.
I should shut up about this, but I think food banks work with other food banks, soup kitchens and other such agencies and a surplus at one would be shared with others. And they must have been given a huge amount of bananas if every recipient got two forty-pound boxes of them.
Or it was a very small food bank with very few customers.
Agree that lots of those sorts of charities coordinate to manage their excess. This 80 lbs of free bananas case is worth a conversation exactly because it’s so unusual.
Watch (at least some of) the video in my OP link–it shows the processing of bananas from stripping bunches to shipping, and shows many of the 40 pound boxes. And yes, it was two boxes like that.
I’m the occasional recipient of other odd food bank over-supplies. Once they were handing out whole flats (12 one pint comtainers) of fresh strawberries. Along with the bananas yesterday I was given two pounds of raw shelled hazelnuts.
I’ve never food-banked but one year wife & I subscribed to a local organic farmer’s produce club. This was in MO which had 4 distinct seasons.
The basic idea was the farmer had planted a variety of crops that matured at different times of the year. And every 2 weeks they’d harvest whatever was ripe, bag it up, and deliver a couple paper shopping bag’s-worth of whatever per customer to a few volunteers in the city who’d act as distributor to end-users. We’d drive over to our distributor’s house and pick up the bags with our name on it from the pile of bags for all their other subscribers. Always a surprise what was inside.
It worked … badly.
One time we got 1-1/2 paper shopping bags filled with turnips. And only turnips. The remaining 1/2 bag was IIRC little red potatoes. 2 weeks later, more turnips. There was also the time we got a bunch of IIRC Swiss chard and a smidgen of basil. Yaay basil! Then two weeks later it was 2 bags-ful of basil. Doesn’t freeze, and we weren’t home canners. The vast majority went to waste despite us giving away what we could to friends & neighbors.
Bottom line being the nature of the harvest was 2-4 weeks of feast and 50 weeks of famine for each crop. Which really did not fit the lifestyle of an urban 2-person household with no basement and a small kitchen. I gained a new appreciation for how difficult year-round eating and year-round food preservation was ~150 years ago.
The produce itself was fantastic; fresh & wonderfully flavorful. But we did not renew for the next year.
Generally speaking, I’ve never heard of any banana brands besides the usual large fruit companies (Dole, Chiquita, Del Monte). I know there are more, but around here at least, bananas and fruit in general are sold as commodities, not branded items. The only time I notice is when the sticker is not one of the big three, and that’s more of a “Huh.” kind of moment than anything else. Note- brand isn’t the same thing as variety; people can and do care about varieties when it comes to things like apples, pears, pineapples, and citrus.
Is it different elsewhere in the world? Do people actually care about brand when it comes to fruit?
There is also a group here that for a while has been doing monthly giveaways of bulk amounts of near-random stuff. Haul out pallets full of cases of things. A lot of it has been Covid lockdown era supplies. Like, they hand you a case of 50 packs of 50 alcohol hand sanitizer wipes. Or a box of–I don’t remember how many, around a couple of hundred–child-size cloth face masks. I saw photos from a recent giveaway where items included duct tape, work gloves, hand lotion, and Gorilla Glue. People cause traffic jams lined up for the stuff. (I’ve also been the secondary recipient of some of those items but never lined up for them myself.)
A near neighbor volunteers at a local food bank - every couple of days she drops off a goodie bag of produce that has ‘aged out’ - she can take it home on the day it’s slated for disposal, with the proviso that she can’t give it to folks who NEED to use the food bank - their bylaws and perhaps state law prohibit them from distributing to their clients anything that couldn’t legally be sold in a market. I’m an old Yankee, and have no problem with not wasting old potatoes, or peeling a few layers off a cabbage. I thank my lucky stars she doesn’t bring bananas…
Oh, a story! Once that cousin of mine passed along an unlabled 5 lb bag of frozen mozzarella sticks. I popped a layer of them in the air fryer for a few minutes, took a bite of one, and was horrified by the vile taste. After a few moments I realized that what I was told was mozzarella sticks were in fact fish sticks. Which were perfectly fine once my expectations were adjusted.
