I volunteer at a food bank, and the company that sends us our food decides what we get. Last Tuesday they sent so much produce we could not fit it all into fridges. We were trying to give away cases of the food on Wednesday, but people were turning it down because they had no place to store a case of tomatoes, or cauliflower. This was what we had left after last Wednesday's morning give away. Not pictured the 5000lbs of watermelons, the 2500lbs of onions (those will last a lot longer).
The company that supplies us wants to move from sending shipments every other week, to once a month. This would cause even more no produce loss.
It is so frustrating to have all this food for it to go bad. Even if we got the same volume of produce, but there was variation in what it is we could give it away easier.
Edit: I posted this in a comment.
Because of bureaucracy we have to request this. If it is found out we are giving away the food to unapproved recipients we can lose all of our funding. If we give to unapproved recipients and they in turn give us prepared food to give out, that is okay.
Word got out that we were loading up my pickup with food and taking it to the homeless camps. I did get a number of them to start coming to the bank to get food. But it was easier when I could take stuff to them.
We are not allowed to simply give it out to anyone. This is not like a church pantry where all of the food is donated by the community and's parishioners. There is government funding, as well as private businesses, which I am guessing get their money back from the government for funding this. If we could simply give it to anyone we would not be in this situation.
Tomatoes, dont need any cooling, storing them in the fridge does prolongs their live but they taste like shit afterwards.
Greetings from a German Italian who cries often when people put tomatoes in fridges.
The ones I took home on Wednesday were moldy and a mess Friday evening when I got home from work.
As an Italian American I would have so much fun jarring all those tomatoes into sauce.
Just waiting a couple more weeks for my step-dad to harvest all his tomatoes so the fun can begin.
You can freeze them if you plan on cooking with them. I ended up with an obscene amount of tomatoes one year that were amazingly tasty and I was so sad that I couldn't process them before they went bad. My aunt told me to freeze them - it was perfect! They also make for great weapons when frozen, and when you thaw them the skins come right off!
Don’t they get their taste back when they reach room temperature again?
Afaik they don't. Something about storing them at low temp changes the thickness of the skin. At least that's what I've been told working on produce.