REGIONAL – If your student does not eat an apple for lunch at school or passes on the chocolate milk and prepared sandwiches, don’t worry, the uneaten food will not go to waste. Thanks to an amazingly successful program run by the First Parish Newbury Food Pantry, the food feeds needy families or at worst, local pigs.
Every Friday afternoon after lunch, three of the pantry’s volunteers visit Triton, Newburyport, Pentucket and most recently Ipswich school cafeterias to pick up salads, fruits, yogurts, milks, juices and pre-made sandwiches that are uneaten and bring it to the pantry.
There, the recovered food is weighed, logged in and made ready for distribution to drive-through clients starting at 2 p.m. or is driven in the all-volunteer effort to local half-way houses.
In 2024, the pantry’s program recovered almost 17,000 pounds of food that would have been discarded. That was more than double the 7,700 pounds recovered from the schools in 2023.
“We are always looking for ways in which we can recover perfectly good food that would end up in landfills,” pantry director Jane Merrow wrote in her most recent newsletter.
Food is recovered from Triton High School, Newbury Elementary, Salisbury Elementary, Newburyport High School, Nock Middle School/Molin Upper Elementary, Pentucket High School and Ipswich High School. It is always looking for other schools that have free lunches.
The Nock Middle School and Molin Upper Elementary schools set a record last week on the Friday before winter break when the pantry collected 873 pounds.
Lehane and Jason are joined by a third volunteer, Bay James, and could use more helpers.
The volunteers believe the program also teaches the students to be less wasteful. When they finish their lunch, the students drop their uneaten food into cardboard boxes rather than in the trash. They know where the boxes of food are going, said Allison Lehane, who heads the program.
The pantry also picks up surplus food from local restaurants and bakeries, making a nice dinner for happy clients on the weekend, Merrow said.
“It’s like Meals on Wheels on steroids,” said Al Jason, one of the volunteers. Merrow agreed with his description, but added “With heart.”
The food recovery program, the first ever in Massachusetts, was started by Lehane, who was described by her fellow volunteers as the “heroine” of the program. Seven years ago, she was volunteering with both the Newbury pantry and the Nourishing the North Schore program, which started the school recovery effort.
When the Nourishing volunteers, who collect 70,000 pounds of donated food a year and distribute it to 3,000 low-income individuals, decided that collecting from the schools did not fit its mission, Lehane asked Merrow if the Newbury pantry would adopt the program.
At the end of the day Friday, the pantry delivers any remaining school food to Salisbury’s Link House and Maris House that house recovering addiction clients and to the Pettengill House, which serves low-income families.
Lehane and Jason agreed that the credit for the program is with the school staff. “They are lovely people,” Jason said. “They make it so easy.” ♦
