Hunger · fiction
What to do with leftover food
A story of one early morning at a wholesale supply center, where a porter sees tons of tomatoes go to waste and, at the same time, hunger.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
The wholesale supply center wakes up at two in the morning, when the rest of the city is in its deepest sleep.
Trucks arrive from every direction, headlights on, loaded with everything the land gave that week. Tomatoes, lettuce, bananas, cassava, oranges, pumpkins. The porters carry the crates down on their backs, in a line, like ants under leaves. Traders shout prices. The smell is of wet earth, ripe fruit, diesel and coffee from a thermos.
The porter was fifty-three and had worked there for thirty years. He knew every shed by its smell.
That early morning, he was pushing his empty cart back when he saw the dumpster.
It was a rubble dumpster, huge, at the end of the shed. It was filled to the brim with tomatoes. Good tomatoes. Some a little bruised, others with a spot, most of them perfect, red, shining under the white light of the lamps. They were left over. They hadn't been sold in time. The trader would rather throw them away than lower the price, because lowering the price spoiled next week's price.
He had seen it a thousand times. But, that early morning, he stopped.
Maybe it was tiredness. Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was the fact that, that afternoon, he had seen on television a line of people waiting for bones at a butcher's. He stopped in front of the dumpster and had a vision.
He saw the tomatoes going back in time. Leaving the dumpster, climbing back into the crates, back onto the truck, back down the road, back to the farm. He saw the farmer who had planted them, a man in a straw hat, kneeling in the earth, setting each seedling by hand. He saw rain falling on the field. He saw the sun ripening each fruit, one by one, over months. He saw all the work, all the lifetime of people and plants, that fit inside one tomato.
And then he saw the tomatoes going forward. Not to the trash. To other places. To school kitchens where, for many children, it was the surest meal of the day. To shelter kitchens. To sealed jars, cooked, that lasted months on a shelf and arrived, intact, in places where there was no refrigerator at all.
He saw, all over the world, the same pattern. On one side, mountains of food thrown away. On the other, lines of hungry people. And between them, nothing. An empty space no one crossed.
The space wasn't one of distance. It was one of decision.
When the vision ended, the porter was standing with the empty cart in his hand, and a coworker was shouting his name.
He didn't answer. He went to the trader who owned the dumpster.
"Sir, are those tomatoes going in the trash?"
"They are. Why?"
"If I bring a car tomorrow, can I take them?"
The trader looked at him as if he were crazy. Then he shrugged.
"If you take them, you'll save me the cost of hauling the trash."
The next early morning, he came back with his brother-in-law's old pickup. He took the tomatoes to a church in his neighborhood, where a woman made soup on Fridays. The next week, he took lettuce. The week after, bananas. The week after that, a second porter went with him.
He didn't change the world. He changed a Friday. Then another.
At two in the morning, the center still wakes up, the trucks still arrive, and a lot of food still goes into the dumpster. But now there's a cart that passes by it before the trash does.
Bairo says that, alongside what he built, came the humanitarian venture of Instituto CEASA, whose aim is to broaden access to food using the surplus from the wholesale supply centers. Read: A whole body.
The way forward
Between the food left over and the hunger going unmet there's almost always a decision no one made. Ask where the surplus near you goes, at the market, the street fair, the restaurant. A cart that passes by before the trash is already a bridge.