The Road Runner Food Bank (Albuquerque – Thursday)

Today was my first ever experience of volunteering at a food bank. I was expecting to sort cans, pack boxes or something. What I was not expecting was the chicken broth….


Quite a noble goal!

MacAdam, Alex, Willen and I hit the Road Runner Food Bank at 10:30am. Jenny was off doing more trip logistics and Sandy and the Doodles were walking in a park I assume.

First things first; we had to be sterilized. We washed our hands, put on lab coats, snapped on hairnets and put on gloves. We looked like mad scientists.


Willen scooping chicken broth. (Look at the mess that I made.)

We were then led into a sterile room (it looked like a lab) where we would be working. Our job was to repackage dry chicken broth. Tyson Chicken, bless their misguided soul, had donated over 1,700 lbs of dry chicken broth in 90 lb boxes. As it turns out, nobody wants nor needs 90 lbs of DRY chicken broth (a shocker, I know). We had to open the 90lb boxes, scoop .75 lbs of broth into plastic bags, heat seal the bags, staple directions and ingredients to each bag and then pack them 30 to a box.


Alex stapling directions and ingredients to the bags.

Let the chaos begin. First, the powder is extremely fine and gets everywhere (and I mean everywhere). It gunks up the scale (which is now covered in a giant plastic bag) and the heat sealer. For awhile, every time we swallowed, it tasted like chicken Top Ramon. It was going pretty well but I am a disaster in the broth packaging business. I spilled more of the fine dust then everybody else combined. After four very sticky (the chicken broth becomes sticky after being exposed to the air for a few minutes) and chickeny hours later we successfully completed repackaging two of the 90 lb boxes. (I feel like the Food Bank has a ways to go with the Tyson chicken broth.)

Afterwards, we got a tour of the facility by an extremely competent woman named Christine. New Mexico, like Oregon, is considered to be one of the hungriest states in the nation. The Road Runner Food Bank has been in its current location for two years and is the largest hunger relief organization in New Mexico. The warehouse currently holds two million pounds of food and eventually will be able to hold seven. Sixty percent of the food being processed is considered to be fresh produce.


You are looking at two million pounds of food.

The Road Runner is not the only food bank in the state but they are the largest and deal directly with Feeding America. As a food bank, they are top of the line and deal not only with Albuquerque but with the entire state of New Mexico.

The food bank runs many worthwhile programs including the Food for Kids Program, the Mobil Food Bank, the Senior Helpings Program as well as many others. The tour really opened up my eyes to how families with hunger insecurity live. Christine showed us a food box that was supposed to last a family of four for a whole month. I was shocked. These families really have to know how to best utilize the food that they receive in order to make it last. Not to mention the fact that they also have to ration it correctly.


This is suppose to feed a family of four for 30 days. That is 76 meals assuming that weekday lunches are skipped or found else where.

The most interesting story that I heard was about a boy named Frankie. The Backpack Program is meant to provide weekend meals to school aged children and their younger siblings up to third grade. After third grade, the kids are on their own. Frankie was a high schooler who was on scholarship to a private prep school. Although he went to a school where tuition was $20,000 a year, he was living in extreme poverty. Christine (she used to work as a teacher at this private school) said that it was heart wrenching to watch him try to stay awake in class. It was not the fact that he was slacking off, he just literally was exhausted from not eating. It is sad and interesting how often situations like this occur, even in affluent environments.