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that it is close to home."
No questions are ever asked about
the recipients of food assistance, so
there are no breakdowns — other
than the figure cited by Yad Ezra —
of how many Jews are helped by
Gleaners. Despite the fact that there
are no distinctions made as to the
religion of recipients, some of the-
fund-raising efforts by the Gleaners in
the greater Jewish community have
been hampered in the past by the
mistaken belief that it is a Catholic
organization.
Gleaners founder Gonya was a
Jesuit brother, and one of his co-
founders was Lewis Hickson, execu-
tive director of the Capuchin Soup
Kitchen, the largest agency Gleaners
served. Gleaners began when a load
of frozen potatoes was supposed to go
to the Capuchins and there wasn't
/-- enough room to store it.
The Detroit Catholic Archdiocese
put money into Gleaners to get it
started, but so did the food service
industry and the Greater Detroit
Chamber of Commerce. Today, Jews,
Catholics and other religions are rep-
resented on the Gleaners board.
As Loewenstein puts it, "We are a
nonsectarian organization and our
mission is to help the needy."
On a recent day at the vast
Gleaners warehouse on Beaufait Street
in Detroit's near-downtown east side
industrial corridor, a truck was being
unloaded from Forgotten Harvest, the
Southfield-based perishable food res-
cue program. "They go around to
restaurants and pick up food. Then
they come to the food bank to pick
up some of our perishable foods, like
fresh produce and dry milk, to add to
their foods. Their van then goes to a
soup kitchen or shelter or day care
center and drops off the food," said
Loewenstein.
The agencies using Gleaners pay
12 cents a pound for the food they
pick up from Gleaners. But since
Gleaners' cost of operation is 21 cents
a pound, the difference has to made
up through fund-raising.
The Gleaners warehouse is almost
90,000 square feet with a storage
capacity of 1.5 million pounds of
food, a little more than one month's
supply. During the height of Detroit's
industrial boom, the building was
home to a lumber company that
manufactured wooden car bodies.
Between the main warehouse and
new hub, or distribution, sites in
Taylor, Hamtramck and the Delray
area of southwest Detroit, there are
\Th
35 employees. Like Loewenstein, the
employees are clearly driven by their
mission.
When Gleaners began operations
in 1977, it rented space on the first
floor of the warehouse. Today, its
grown to three floors. In the second
phase of the expansion, Gleaners
added freezer/coolers occupying a
total of 7,500 square feet (82,000
cubic feet).
Everywhere you look, food is
bountiful at Gleaners. There are fresh
potatoes and apples from Michigan
farmers, a truckload of grapefruit
from Florida. The freezers are filled
with corn dogs and chicken because
the boxes might be damaged or the
product didn't sell. The bounty could
have been a result of over-production
or mistakes, or maybe even a test
product.
Without Gleaners, all this food to
feed the hungry would have gone to a
landfill.
When food comes into the receiv-
ing area, the workers give it a bar
code for tracking in the computer sys-
tem. Still, they never know from day
to day what's coming in.
Gleaners spends transportation
dollars on picking up food. The call
sometimes comes through Second
Harvest, the national association of
food banks. There are 180 nationally,
12 of them in Michigan.
Gleaners even has crates at the
assembly line at the Kellogg cereal
factories in Battle Creek, Mich., to
rescue overstuffed or underfilled boxes
right at production. When there's
enough to fill a truck, the cereal is
delivered to the Gleaners warehouse.
Another major donor is Frito-Lay.
If there's too much air blown into a
bag of snack food, it will burst when
it is shipped to the mountain states.
Instead of going to the dump, the
bags come to Gleaners.
During the past nine months, 14.2
million pounds of food have been dis-
tributed from the Gleaners ware-
house, or 14.2 million meals -- the
rule of thumb being that one pound
equals a meal.
That nine-month total almost
matches the 14.6 million poilinds dis-
tributed during the previous 12
months. If this rate continues,
Gleaners easily could distribute 17-18
million pounds of food this year.
Is that a symptom of more people
needing food or Gleaners doing a bet-
ter job of getting more food through
the system? Loewenstein said it is a
little of both.
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