Every year Miss America contestants promise world peace and a
solution to world hunger, but UCLA is actually helping to combat
hunger in its own backyard.
Several times a week, ASUCLA restaurants salvage their leftover
food and donate it to Project Helping Other People Eat, instead of
throwing it away. At the end of each day, if a significant amount
of food remains at any of the ASUCLA-run eateries on campus, such
as Northern Lights, Kerckhoff food services or Ackerman Union, the
food is stowed away and HOPE cofounder and UCLA alumni, Moira La
Mountain, is called to take it away.
“UCLA food goes straight to the street to the people who
need it,” said La Mountain, who picks up the food in
blue-lidded plastic containers at all times of the day and night
and hand- delivers it to various food donation sites and homeless
shelters.
“You’d think the amount of food we give to them was
on purpose,” said Corporate Executive Chef of UCLA, Beni
Velazquez. “But although we order well, we still don’t
know how many people we are going to get at our restaurants each
day and we have a lot of groups who plan pre-paid events here and
have a lot of food leftover,” Velazquez added.
Pre-paid and catered events in Ackerman and Kerckhoff often
generate the largest amounts of food for HOPE, Velazquez and La
Mountain said. On Tues., March 5, La Mountain received a call from
UCLA telling her there were leftover sandwiches from an event in
Ackerman.
She arrived alone to find over three hundred subway-sized
sandwiches that needed to be eaten before they spoiled. Working
until nearly midnight, La Mountain collected all of the sandwiches
in her plastic bins and drove them to New Directions, a 250-bed
shelter.
This was just another night in the life of La Mountain and other
HOPE volunteers.
“What they do is wonderful,” said Kerckhoff Coffee
House manager, Jose Ramirez. “It’s a pretty bad feeling
when you have to throw a lot of food away, so it’s great that
it’s going to a worthwhile cause instead,” Ramirez
said.
“I describe what I do as a sleeping pill because if I
didn’t help feed other people, I couldn’t sleep at
night knowing there is so much wealth and yet people are going
hungry,” said La Mountain.
In addition to providing hot, nutritious meals every Wednesday
and Thursday afternoons to homeless men and women at Palisades Park
in Santa Monica, HOPE delivers food it receives from UCLA and other
donators to homeless shelters and meal services every day of the
week. Food is often taken to various food pantries including PATH,
the Bible Tabernacle, New Directions and SAVES.
The number of relationships La Mountain has with both food
donators and recipient charity services has grown tremendously
since she founded HOPE ten years ago with Jennifer Rafeedie and
Mike Uhlberg, both of whom have since left the organization.
Her relationship with UCLA began around the same time when she
met former manager of the Treehouse, John Roper, at the grocery
store where both were taking advantage of post-July 4 hot dog bun
sales. Their conversation sparked action, and since then, ASUCLA
has donated food to HOPE.
Although La Mountain says HOPE is taking the first step in
tackling the area’s hunger problem, she says a lot more must
be done before the problem of hunger is solved. “There is
such a food shortage in Los Angeles, and people are just ignoring
the issue,” La Mountain said, citing the homeless problem as
another large issue that must be immediately addressed.
“There is just so much leftover food everywhere and it
just sucks that all these people two miles away are
starving,” agreed Dipesh Bhakta, leader of the UCLA student
Food Salvage program, which has previously devoted time to taking
restaurant food to the homeless. “It just requires a little
more work to help those people who really need the help,” he
added.
La Mountain agrees. “All it takes is 100 people helping
one hour a day,” she said.
In the past, La Mountain has tried to work in alliance with UCLA
student community service groups, such as the UCLA Hunger Project,
but she has found that they “have a good spirit but take very
little action.”
“There are a lot of good intentions out there, but people,
especially college students, are hard-pressed for
priorities,” said La Mountain. In the future, La Mountain
hopes UCLA will have a volunteer program in cooperation with HOPE,
that student volunteers can “just plug into.”
For more information about HOPE or how to get involved, call
Moira Gene La Mountain at (310) 392-8911.