Greater Chicago Food Depository

On Tuesday, March 19th, we had the privilege of visiting the Greater Chicago Food Depository. This is a huge food bank that provides food to 650 pantries, soup kitchens and shelters to 678,000 adults and children in Cook County every year. We did not spend a whole lot of time in this location but we still managed to have a lot of fun! Once entering the actual food bank, we saw an enormous amount of food in an area as large as 10 Costcos combined...if not more. We were in charge of inspecting the bread (as if we didn't have enough carbs in our systems already) for molds and packaging it.

The fun part of this visit was working together with other group members as well as another group of volunteers in an assembly line. The bread was taken off the shelves, checked for date expiration, checked for molds or other weird spots (by my fellow doctors and I) and then sent to the packaging team. There were many conditions that my group and I saw in the bread such as molditis, jaunditis, and burntitis. The bread with molditis was usually thrown away (which would be given to pigs) and the bread with the other two conditions were usually passed on to the packaging crew to be sent out. There were some disagreements among my fellow doctors about some of the conditions among the bread, but nonetheless, we usually came to the same conclusion and were able to work it out. After going through a ton of bread ranging from white, wheat, onion (my favorite), Italian, French, rye, powdered, etc, we were finally done! More bread please!...NOT :)

Greater Chicago Food Depository - Community Impact Every Day (check out this link for more info!)