Carloads of carrots, piles of potatoes, towers of turkey, seas of sweet potatoes, mountains of mushrooms, oodles of eggs, endless emails…this past couple of weeks have given all of us at Fair Shares some weighty dreams indeed. We wanted to take a moment to give thanks for the extra efforts our awesome farmers, staff and volunteers are putting in to make our early Thanksgiving week pickup come together.
There’s a whole lot of heavy schlepping and long hours involved in getting these Thanksgiving shares together. We’ve been working (almost) tirelessly all week and weekend to get it all ready, and we even still like each other after all is said and done (speaking for myself here). With just a few of us, we purchase, weigh, organize and distribute a tremendous amount of food for all the members for Thanksgiving. For example:
350 pounds of carrots
700+ pounds of red and Yukon gold potatoes
700+ pounds of sweet potatoes
1650 pounds of turkey (86 birds plus a few breasts)
450 dozen eggs
Colleen still isn’t sick of carrots, even after having weighed out 100 of the 350 pounds we purchased from Yellow Wood and St. Isidore for the Thanksgiving shares. This girl weighs out a LOT of food every week–this one, even more.
Arianna’s mom Jan Aerie came in on Saturday to weigh pecans and potatoes–and she already volunteers for us every Tuesday. We also want to give special thanks to our Kirkwood and UCity volunteers, who adjust their schedules to be available on Tuesday this week. A special thanks to Ann who hauls out the tables and sets up the room each week, and often provides a snack for the members, too. That’s dedication.
I know all our workers would be justified in never wanting to see a potato or sweet potato again, but Lindy admits she would be perfectly happy to live on potatoes and bread. We should also mention Lindy’s extraordinary talent as box whisperer, which has certainly been put to the test this week as she’s had to organize the billions of boxes all this food has been delivered in so that we aren’t tripping over them and so that we can give them back to the farmers when they deliver next.
Several of our farmers are sick with fevers and colds, probably because they are hardly sleeping in order to get everything harvested, washed, or processed for us. We sure hope all their hard work buys them a day of relaxation over the holiday, although that’s not really enough to catch up on two weeks of very little sleep.
We got in more than 85 fresh turkeys to be sorted, assigned, bagged, labeled, hugged and organized on Saturday. They came two or three to a box, which gave us over thirty boxes. We stacked them in one tall tower going right through the roof–you can see only half of it here in the video below, but it’s still impressive.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1206222846060237