Maggie

Left to right: Bob, Maggie, Mike, Arabind, Renan. The team split two shifts: nine to noon and noon to three. I was on the morning shift; these guys, the afternoon.

This week, for the third time over the past five years, I took my team with me to volunteer at the Fort York Food Bank. The Bank has moved from larger premises on Dundas Street to the compact space of the former Amadeo's Pizza at the corner of Borden and College Streets. 

We were met, as always, by Maggie, the Bank's volunteer coordinator. Maggie is herself a volunteer, dedicated to the point of obsession with her work.

Maggie's somewhere between fifty and sixty years old. Five foot five or six in height, soaking wet she might weigh 95 pounds. From the back, she looks more like a large child than a small adult. Her wiry, scant hair falls past her shoulders. She sometimes pulls it to the front and twists it in her hands when she talks.

On Wednesday she was wearing a new-looking pair of jeans and a thin grey sweater. She always wears a hat because it gets cold in the back.

The past two times we've volunteered, we spent three very full hours sorting, packaging, unpacking and shelving food.

This time, we "made" lunch, by refreshing salad, reheating cooked chicken and frying roasted potatoes. This was all done and the food loaded in the steam table by 10:30 a.m. 

To pass the rest of the way to lunch time, we hauled food out of the back and put it on the shelves out front where people get their food baskets.

I helped in the back, as Maggie, muttering to herself about the kinds and quantities of food that she needed, pulled heavy boxes off of overloaded shelves, which I then handed to members of my team who carried them to the front. 

I thought about the logistics of food banks. Shipments arrive several times a week from the central Daily Bread Food Bank (the shipments balance protein, vegetables, starch), from the Ontario Food Terminal (Maggie had several huge boxes of green onions on Wednesday, two 100-pound bags of carrots starting to sprout and at least one crate of deeply rotten apples) and from donors (while we were there four young women arrived bearing large bags of packaged food). 

So, the inputs are hard to control. On top of this, food banks have no way to gauge demand. Over the past two months, crowds at the Fort York Food Bank Wednesday lunch had ranged from under fifty to more than 200. You never know, when you're running a food bank, what food you'll have available and you never know how many people you'll have to feed. "It depends on the weather," says Maggie, "if it's cold they'll come for lunch to get inside."

While I mulled all of this over, and helped lift more boxes off the shelves, I noticed my team members had stopped coming to the back.

Uh oh, I thought. They better not be shelving the food.

I'd long since learned that Maggie manages the chaos of the food bank by being very particular about how some things are done, especially shelving food.

So it was when Maggie and I brought out the last haul from the back that my team learned the first rule of the Fort York Food Bank: do what Maggie tells you to do the way Maggie tells you to do it or don't do it at all.

Hundreds of cans and jars and packages had been egregiously mis-shelved. They had to do it all again.

Maggie keeps up a steady stream of patter on the job, talking to herself if she doesn't have an audience. She mentioned a couple of times when we were there to listen that she has a thirty-year-old son who lives with her. According to Maggie, he complains that she spends too much time at the food bank. He asks her why she doesn't stay home more. "Because," she explains, "No one knows how to do it right like I do."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen