Food Bank Gets Donation of 13K Fresh Salmon. Very Fresh

A New York food bank was offered a huge donation of fresh fish this month—but it came with a catch. LocalCoho, a soon-to-close salmon farm in the small upstate city of Auburn, wanted to give 40,000 pounds of coho salmon to the Food Bank of Central New York, a mother lode of high-quality protein that could feed thousands of families. But the fish were still swimming in the farm's giant tanks. The organizations would need to figure out how to get some 13,000 salmon from the water and process them into frozen fillets for distribution to regional food pantries. And they'd need to do it fast, before the business closed for good: LocalCoho is ceasing operations Friday, reports the AP.

"The fact that we only had weeks to execute this really ratcheted up the intensity and the anxiety," said Brian McManus, the food bank's chief operations officer. Christina Hudson Kohler was among dozens of volunteers who donned waterproof overalls to fill nets and empty the fish into cold storage containers. "It's a little bit different," Kohler said. "In the past, my volunteer work with the food bank has been sorting carrots or peppers, or gleaning out in the field." LocalCoho can process about 600 fish a week by hand. But there was less than a month to clear the tanks of many times that number of fish.

The food bank enlisted 42 volunteers. A local business with refrigerated trucks offered to ship the fish for free to a processor an hour away in Rochester. And LocalCoho staff pitched in. "A lot of companies going out of business would just be like, 'Take what you can get, we'll do the best we can.' I mean, they're working extra hard," said Andrew Katzer, the food bank's director of procurement. The quick-frozen salmon will be distributed among 243 food pantries, as well as soup kitchens, shelters, and other institutions in the food bank's network. All told, the catch is expected to yield more than 26,000 servings of hard-to-source protein for the hungry. "Protein, animal protein is very, very desirable. ... and it's difficult to get. And so this is going to make a very large impact," said McManus.

(More salmon stories.)