By Scott Etkin
On the Upper West Side, it doesn’t take long to encounter someone on the street asking passersby for food. And recent data suggests the need is growing.
“We’re serving 50% more customers than we did at the height of the pandemic at our 86th Street location,” Greg Silverman, CEO of the nonprofit West Side Campaign Against Hunger (WSCAH), which has distributed meals on the UWS for more than four decades, said on a call with West Side Rag.
Given the rise of hunger, it’s especially troubling that 40% of food in the U.S. is wasted. That’s where Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC), a nonprofit based in the city, enters the picture.
The group, founded in 2013, recently passed the milestone of redistributing 300,000 pounds of food – equal to roughly 250,000 meals – since it began. RLC reached that goal by “rescuing” unsold food from cafes, restaurants, and bakeries whose leftover meals used to be discarded each day. Now, RLC’s volunteer “rescuers” gather up those meals every day and take them to nearby food banks and soup kitchens – including the one operated by West Side Campaign Against Hunger.
Nearly 5 million pounds of food is given out per year by WSCAH, so RLC plays a supplemental role in the organization’s massive operations. For example, every Friday, volunteers from RLC pick up leftover cookies and bread from Levain Bakery and bring them to the WSCAH site on West 86th Street. WSCAH purchases 70% of the food it gives away, so it focuses on distributing the healthiest and most delicious foods possible.
“We give out amazing fresh produce and shelf-stable pantry items. And to also complement that with really high-quality, retail goods for our customers – that’s what they deserve,” said Silverman. “They deserve, like everyone, a nice treat once in a while.”
While RLC now has a steady roster of UWS donor partners and recipients (including First Baptist Church at West 79th Street and Broadway, and West End Church at 245 West 77th Street), it hasn’t been an easy path. When it started, the group ran up against the assumption that it’s illegal to donate unsold prepared food. In fact, food donations are protected under federal legislation that was signed into law in 1996.
On the UWS, RLC has partnered with 17 food donors, including Breads Bakery, Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too, By the Way Bakery, and Crave Fishbar. Like all of the group’s donor partners, these businesses make or get fresh food to sell each day, even if the unsold food from the previous day is still safe to eat.
“People want to see their values reflected in the businesses and vendors that they get food from, because they want to see that their favorite restaurant is doing something about this problem, rather than just ignoring it,” said Robert Lee, RLC’s founder and CEO, on a call with West Side Rag.
RLC is a middleman of sorts – finding where leftover meals are being discarded, matching them with nearby organizations that are distributing food to people in need, and physically transporting the food with the help of volunteers. Some 7,000 volunteer-led rescues have taken place on the Upper West Side.
While attracting new donors has become easier for RLC over time, food insecurity has also increased sharply in recent years. City Harvest, the city’s largest food bank, has recorded a 75% increase in visits to food pantries and soup kitchens since 2019 – driven first by the pandemic and then by an increase in migrant arrivals to the city.
Lee experienced food insecurity growing up in Queens as the son of first-generation immigrants from Korea. He had the idea for RLC as a student at NYU when he noticed the food waste happening at its dining halls. (A few years later, when he told his parents he was quitting his job in banking to start RLC, they didn’t speak to him for six months, he said. They eventually came around, becoming the first donors to RLC.)
“We know from our partners that, for some migrants, their very first meal in the US is from Rescuing Leftover Cuisine,” he said. “New York City, you might have seen, has come under fire for providing really poor quality food and meals to migrants. And we don’t have to be doing that. There’s amazing quality food being thrown out literally every day.”
To capture more food before it’s wasted, Lee said that he sees the opportunity to expand RLC’s partnerships to also include large institutions that have food service. The organization is in talks with Columbia University and this past February performed a rescue from Jazz at Lincoln Center for the first time.
“Our bottleneck is food donors,” said Lee. “The biggest way for people to make a difference [about food waste] is to ask their favorite restaurants, ‘What do you do with [your] excess food?’ and recommend RLC as a solution. It may feel like it’s not doing much, but to us it would go such a long way.”
On the broader issue of food insecurity in the city, Silverman stressed the importance of the public-sector safety net, which is currently facing budget cuts. “Charity cannot solve hunger,” he said. “It’s super important to have community engagement and to do direct distribution. But public-sector support dwarfs any level of charity that’s out there.”
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This is a wonderful attempt to help people, but I don’t understand one thing. UWS is one of the most expensive places to live in NYC, if someone can afford to live on UWS but not to buy food, perhaps it makes sense to live in a cheaper neighborhood? That’s what most of my friends and relatives do.
Stop being classist. That’s it. UWS is an income diverse neighborhood and has been a for a looooong time before you came here.
Or we could just round up all the low-income people in the vicinity of the UWS and ship them off to North Dakoka, where I understand it’s really cheap. What your friends and relatives choose to do isn’t necessarily feasible for our poorer neighbors. Nor should it be.
Sorry, North DAKOTA.
Yet another of the meanspirited and frankly appalling comments that have come to proliferate this wonderful publication serving our wonderful community where I and three generations of my family have lived. Do you mind if food insecure people from outside the UWS come here to feed their family? Are you aware of the thousands of NYCHA residents on the UWS, and many thousands more longtime residents – often elderly – continuing to live here, as I do, thanks to rent stabilization? Or would you just prefer, I suppose, that all of the above just leave/stay away from your neighborhood?
Feature, not a bug. Moderators do NOT do their job
People who come to food pantries like West Side Campaign Against Hunger may come from the Upper WEst Side, which has plenty of apartments where people may be crowded and without enough food, even if you don’t notice them as you go along the street. They also may come from other parts of the city; if you’re hungry and running a household, you go where the food is.
Wow. You do realize that there are many working class residents who have lived here their whole lives – or people that have lost jobs, have illness etc.? Go somewhere else is not the most charitable response
I do realize it. My friend (73 years old) just moved with his wife who is very ill from UWS to Riverdale because it was cheaper, even though they have lived on UWS for two decades. He
Please give contact info for RLC which we can pass on to “our favorite restaurants.”
Here you go:
info@rescuingleftovercuisine.org or https://www.rescuingleftovercuisine.org/contact-us.
“We know from our partners that, for some migrants, their very first meal in the US is from Rescuing Leftover Cuisine,” he said.
Replying to ‘Mike’. Move to a cheaper neighborhood? In New York City? So, you’re asking people who likely have lived on the UWS for decades to abandon their rent controlled or rent stabilized apartments and move to an apartment in, where, Brooklyn? Queens? The Bronx? Staten Island? Abandon, schools, friends, neighborhoods they’re comfortable in for someplace not even close to public transportation? Where, oh by the way, they will likely pay more rent for a dump. How about seniors in public housing? They should move, too? I bet your friends are students or young adults fully capable of navigation public transit to their jobs and schools, they’re not disabled, or old, or otherwise challenged. Please. Show some common sense, if not compassion.
First of all, many landlords would gladly pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a rent-stabilized or controlled tenant to move. My friends and relatives sadly are between fifty and seventy years old, and yes, many of them have moved neighborhoods, cities and countries in their 30s, forties and 70s. A friend just moved from UWS to Riverdale because UWS became too expensive, and he is 73 years old and his wife is in ill health.
If you are really compassionate, you would not put seniors into public housing in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. You would give them half the money that is being spent on their public housing and they would be able to rent very nice apartments in Riverdale for instance.
You have no heart, or sense of community. Please stop putting your foot in your mouth
I think instead of Westside Rag having a column on the best comment of the week, they should have one that highlights the most ridiculous one. Mike’s original comment followed quickly by this one would certainly win this title. Suggesting people, who have probably lived in this area longer than most to move because they are food insecure, is just plain stupid. It lacks the basic understanding of not only the causes of poverty but of the cost of living in Riverdale where the average household income is $125,000.
Keep digging. None of what you said is true. There are NO landlords in Manhattan who will “pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a rent-stabilized tenant to move.” I’d love that. But it’s a lie.
This. I would love to know who the landlords are that would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a rent stabilized tenant to move. I live in a rent stabilized building where most of the apartments are vacant & am wondering if I should ask for hundreds of thousands of dollars so I can move to Riverdale where there seems to be cheaper apartments..
This is wonderful. Food waste at the restaurants always bothered me.
I m wondering if the increase in need for the food banks is solely due to an increase in asylum seekers or if it is also due to the increase in the price of food. I am lucky in that my job provides a COL increase. But people loving on fixed incomes are particularly hard hit.
Nah. They’re in line too but the need was growing well before the pandemic started and the recent influx of immigrants.
I hear NIMBY comments like this all the time. I’m a low income formerly homeless not quite a senior person living on the UWS. I’m on disability and I live on the UWS on way less than you could ever imagine.
Why don’t I just move? Because my housing voucher is tied to living in NYC and this is where they put me. I don’t mind because in my 20’s I lived here and I liked it. Still do. It’s HOME and I was very pleased to end up back here on the UWS rather than way out in a borough where transit might be iffy and harder for me as a mobility disabled person.
Newsflash there are THOUSANDS of people just like me living on the UWS. People who pay a certain portion of their income and who have rent controlled apartments. Some live in NYCHA buildings, some live in buildings run by other management firms. Some are old. Some are disabled. Some are formerly homeless and perhaps all of it.
For the most part I do okay but I will admit that just going to the grocery store of late is a bit of a shock at times. Without my food stamps and these food pantries I probably wouldn’t be eating very well at all. That would be the same way out wherever only I would have less access to food pantries and that probably and I’d be living in an area that is likely plagued with gangs and crime.
I’m your neighbor and you’d never know I was as poor as I am unless you met me in the line for the food pantry maybe. I’m not going anywhere.
No, it’s due to overall COL increases, which include rent
Kudos to Robert Lee especially at the cost of a stinging rebuke from his parents. Glad they came around and appreciated what he has done with his life and career. As an Asian American I can fully understand what he went through. Follow your heart is what I always say!
Frankly, if you live in the immediate vicinity of the West Side Campaign Against Hunger distribution center on 86 & West End you’ll see a bunch of double parked cars and cars parked in no standing and hydrant zones whose occupants are loading up on their food. And they’re not cheap or old cars and many have out of state plates.
I’ve discussed this with a paid staff member because they frequently block the intersection and sight lines making it difficult if not dangerous for pedestrians to cross the street and navigate the sidewalks. I mentioned the words Lexus and Maserati to him and his reply was ‘I’ve seen that too.’
And he told me that there is no income or wealth test for eligibility.
The West Side Campaign Against Hunger operated in the basement of St Paul and St Andrew for decades and expanded for the pandemic. They talk of expanded operations as an indicator of need and with migrant families now housed within blocks of the church there is need. But the fact remains that a lot of food is going to people who are not needy.
Advocates tell us that daylighting intersections and eliminating double parking are essential to safety. They’re correct.
Give food to the people who need it but stop endangering your neighbors.
Mike, you should take a look at the long, long lines waiting for food from the WSCAH oiutside the church on West End Avenue and 86th St. There are lots of low-income people in our neighborhood, and people come to WSCAH from other neighborhoods,too. Saying people should just leave if they need a little help is not a solution.
I hope high-end food markets on the Upper West Side sell discounted perishable foods in the evening so we can save on our food expenses and use the savings for inflated phone WiFi maintenance bills.
That would be great – I wish this were a thing.
A mobile app called Too Good To Go is becoming popular in Manhattan, including the Upper West Side. It is a food waste solution business already popular in European cities. Local food stores, like Breads Bakery in Lincoln Center pictured in this article, sell leftover merchandise to individuals for $5-6 per bag. Pickup times are limited, but the deals are very affordable.
We can discover and enjoy new tastes from stores we never bought from before, like Rosetta Bakery, DIG, Bagel Talk, Le Pain Quotidien, Santa Fe, Tartinery, and more. With a map in the mobile app, we can enjoy navigating the city as food waste savers.
I wish more stores would engage with Too Good To Go other than SNAP. It’s good advertisement for new food business to local individuals on the Upper West Side and promotes discipline as social responsibility. Customers can save more with larger options and become aware of sustainability.
More stores/restaurants should participate in Too Good to Go, and/or offer discounts after certain time. There is a big grey area of middle class in between those without financial constraints and those with food insecurity.
The WSCAH site at 86th Street offers really healthy foods, including plenty of vegetables, fruits, and beans, which are excellent for cooking in large quantities. There is no cream cheese or sugary candies. The WSCAH map below shows many sites around 180th Street and further north.
https://www.wscah.org/distribution-sites-map/
The 86th Street location is safer and easier for UWS volunteers. We could join the line and practice Spanish for free while waiting.