Food bank search engine

By JUSTIN HARMON/Staff

Every year, gardeners grow more food than they can eat and that food typically gets tossed out or composted.
To Gary Oppenheimer, it’s a terrible reality to see people toss out perfectly good food that could instead go to feed hungry people. The problem is that it can sometimes be hard to locate a food bank or food pantry in the area.
“Google told me the closest food pantry was 25 miles away,” Oppenheimer said of his home town. “We had six.”
Oppenheimer said it was a sobering reality, leading him to create Ample Harvest, a search engine and series of profiles that deal with smaller food banks and food pantries.
“Think of us as a Google for food banks,” he said.
According to Oppenheimer, the site lets food banks and pantries of any size register for free as well as list what sort of goods they are looking to stock their shelves with.
While Oppenheimer said they’re building this site for anyone who would like to donate anything from apples to canned zucchini, one of the biggest aims of the site is to hook up gardeners with those in need.
Being a Master Gardener and the head of a community garden himself, Oppenheimer knows a few things about growing produce.
“Assuming what we plant has grown, it’s usually way more than we can use,” he said.
While many people will throw their surplus vegetables in the compost pile or garbage, Oppenheimer doesn’t see this as a true travesty.
“The majority of people in America don’t use these services and don’t know where they are,” he said.
However, with his Web site, Oppenheimer hopes to reach out and put a stop to the waste.
“Hunger just felt like the wrong thing in America,” he said.
With two Web designers, he built his site and started reaching out to the smaller food providers that have less of a presence.
According to him, there are a few big operations around the country with somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 food banks with fleets of trucks and vans,  but smaller providers, such as those found in Washington County don’t have those luxuries.
“Those are the ones we’re most concerned about,” he said.
A quick glimpse at the Ample Harvest Web site shows that no food banks or food pantries in Washington County are registered yet.
While food banks are have been hit hard recently with the decline in the economy, Oppenheimer hopes to lend as much help as he can muster.
On the Web site is a printable flyer that he encourages people and businesses to print off and post around communities to raise awareness of the site, thereby raising awareness for people looking to lend a hand.
For more information, visit http://www.ampleharvest.org.
Justin Harmon can be reached at 276-628-7101 or