Be The Change
By Mahesh Grossman
Helen Palit had a self-described thing for itinerant men. That’s how she explains the fact that, after she graduated high school, she held 26 jobs in 16 cities worldwide.
She took the best job she could find wherever she landed.
To the naked eye, Helen wasn’t building a career where she would have much of an impact on the world. In one city she was a truck driver; in another, an accountant; and in yet another, a restaurant manager.
But there really was a master plan at work. It just wasn’t Helen’s.
The turning point came in New Haven, Connecticut, where Helen took a job with Yale University’s soup kitchen.
For many of the people served at the kitchen, the one meal a day they ate there was their only meal, so they made the most of it. “When Frank, one of my guests, was hungry, he would eat 12 bowls of soup and a loaf of bread," Helen recounts.
There was usually enough food for everyone, but some days, an extra large crowd showed up, and Helen had no choice but to water down the soup.
But one day, while she was having potato skins and margaritas at the bar across the street from her soup kitchen, Helen asked a question that would eventually change her life: What did the restaurant's kitchen do with the part of the potato they scooped out to make the potato skins?
The answer: They used some for mashed potatoes and potato salad. And the rest got thrown out.
So Helen told the manager about her soup kitchen across the street.
After that, every day the manager brought 30 gallons of potatoes over to Helen’s soup kitchens each day.
“Now I could thicken my soup," she says.
But that was just the beginning. Another day, this manager showed up with a dozen quiches.
Why?
The bar’s “quiche of the day” was ham and cheese. But the chef had made a dozen quiches before he realized he was leaving out the ham.
Helen realized any company that had food as part of their business, at some time would have leftovers, so she started the New Haven Food Salvage Project.
“In three months I had a gourmet soup kitchen, with appetizers, salad, entrees, meat, poultry, fish, desserts and beverages," Helen says. "I had more than enough food to feed everyone who came.”
Helen then decided to spread the wealth to other agencies in her area. It was just a matter of logistics in terms of getting perishable food to the programs at the right time. In a flash of inspiration, she realized she needed a 24-hour hotline where anyone could call to pass along their leftover food.
So Helen used all the knowledge she had gained from working as a truck driver, an accountant, and a restaurant manager, and delivered food to 25 soup kitchens and shelters in the greater New Haven area.
Then she took her act on the road. Her first stop was New York City, where she called her program City Harvest. Then she took it around the world.
It has now spread to 215 cities worldwide including122 cities in the United States. The results are nothing if spectacular. Before you finish your dinner tonight, a harvest driver will pick up enough food for 700,000 meals today. That adds up to 250 million meals a year.
It’s a good thing Helen fell for all those itinerant men.
If you would like to create a program like this in your area, or just contribute food to an existing program, go to www.AmericaHarvest.org, where you can find e-books on how to start a harvest program as well as contact information for all the harvest programs around the world.
— Mahesh Grossman is the author of Write a Book Without Lifting a Finger and the upcoming 101 Ways You Can Help the World Using the Internet.
