Living in such a great food city such as Portland and enjoying the richness of food and drink experiences available here, it may be hard to fathom that as we debate where to eat next on our wishlist, also here in the Portland metropolitan area there are children and families who go hungry. Many schools in the East Multnomah county have students living below the poverty line. 1 in 5 Oregonians live with food insecurity. Not so long ago Oregon even ranked #1 in childhood hunger in the United States. The just released Upcycled Ice Cream Series by Salt and Straw is the theme for June 2023 of their monthly rotating seasonal flavors, and helps spotlight a local non-profit helping to fight food insecurity and bring awareness to food distribution. Salt & Straw also created flavors with 4 other partners also promoting food sustainability and reducing food waste. The flavors are available starting today, May 26th – just in time for world hunger awareness day on May 28th.
At Urban Gleaners, a non-profit founded in 2006 by the inspiring Tracy Oseran, collects fresh food before it can go to waste. The difference from other food banks is that Urban Gleaners collects perishable food, bit by bit from grocery stores and restaurants, corporate campuses, event sites, colleges, farms, and food wholesalers, aka gleaning what is left behind after a harvest for charitable use.. The food tends to be fresher and healthier because of its fresh perishable nature. During my visit we saw not only fresh fruits and vegetables but also breads, cakes and pies, sour cream and milk, and salsas and guacamole. Within a couple days, food that comes in goes out as Urban Gleaners sorts, prepares some ingredients into convenient packaged meals thanks to volunteer chefs, and others are offered “farmers market” style. Recipients can pick what they want – no set food boxes or limitations. 
Multiple items are high quality – from organic produce to speciality coffee beans, fresh ingredients that are systematically sorted and labeled by when they came in and stored in several cooler rooms to go out first in first out or based on how much longer it will last (so that guacamole will go back out very quickly). Donors include Whole Foods, Zupans, New Seasons, Pastaworks, Odwalla, Dave’s Killer Bread, Elephants Deli, Intel, Nike, Lewis and Clark, Reed College, Portland Farmers Market and more. 
Urban Gleaners distributes at over 35 sites including weekly deliveries to schools, mobile markets and summer free farmers markets at parks and apartment complexes, and through hunger services organizations in the Portland area. It’s inspiring and sobering to see the number of schools on the list.
The mission of Urban Gleaners is to feed hungry children and their families and make the community healthier, and also to reduce food waste. They do this not only by re-distributing food, but also spreading the message of gleaning. “Best buy” dates on packaging are often arbitrary, there may only be 1 bad asparagus in a bunch but the whole bunch would be removed and not sold, and no one is picking up the ugly looking apples and oranges. And maybe there’s leftover food from a catered event because no one wants to entertain and run out of food. There may be overstock of ordering or making too much or a bad weather week where customers didn’t come out, or holiday items that didn’t sell by the holiday. There is nothing wrong with the food here being gleaned – it just needs to be rescued.
This is where upcycling can come in. Upcycling is a new certification and overall awareness and movement to create new products from surplus food. If you’ve heard of upcycling clothing or furniture to create new clothing pieces from unwanted or leftover material, it’s the same school of thought. For instance, making croutons from older bread or tomato sauce from a slightly squashed tomato. It’s a path to let items find it’s fullest use, the food is still good. An example of this is the Cacao Fruit Smoothies offered by Blue Stripes Urban Cacao that saves the fruit from the cacao pod that usually is discarded after the cacao bean is removed to use the whole cacao pod, from pulp to shell, and utilize them in these Upcycled certified fruit smoothies.
Tyler Malek, one of the co-founders of Salt & Straw, has been involved with and is a board member at Urban Gleaners. You can see more details on the Salt and Straw Upcycled Food Series here but here’s my executive summary and my thoughts after taste testing all of them. The flavors for the series available from Salt and Straw partnering with five brands participating in sustainability and reducing food waste are
- Day-Old Bread Pudding & Chocolate Ganache with Urban Gleaners. Salt & Straw stored some of the donated excess bread beyond what went to those over time to save up for production of this bread pudding combo and IMHO is my favorite of the five flavors.
- Cacao Pulp & Chocolate Stracciatella Gelato with Blue Stripes Urban Cacao supporting using all of a cacao pod not just the cacao bean
- Salted Caramel and Okara Cupcakes with Renewal Mill uses okara in this vegan ice cream. Okara is a product of plant based milk production and can be substituted for flour in gluten free baking or egg in vegan baking, making tempeh. Here okara flour is combined with salted coconut oat milk ice cream base studded with bits of dark chocolate cupcakes, frosted with vegan caramel. This was a close second favorite of the five for me – Japan also has used okara in ice cream so maybe we’ll see it again in a future Salt & Straw flavor?
- Malted Chocolate Barley Milk with EverGrain. This barley protein from AB InBev brewing left from the spent grain in the beer making process adds a stupifying amount of creaminess to this dairy-free ice cream well also giving it a slight grain/malt undertone.
- Lemon Curd and Whey with Spare Food Co. that saves the whey byproduct from creating Greek yogurt to compliment the tartness of the lemon here and in their own whey-based Lemon & Ginger Spare Tonic. If you’ve seen a little liquid sometimes at the top of your Greek yogurt cup, that’s what the whey is like – but so much more of it from the process.
This menu is all officially Upcycled Certified®, awarded by the Upcycled Food Association (UFA). With 229 million tons of food going unsold or uneaten each year, Salt & Straw is able to rescue over 38,000 pounds to use in the creation of these special flavors for the Upcycled Food Series – just amazing. You can find these at all their scoop shops or order pints to be shipped and delivered via their website until the end of June. I often get pints of their limited edition limited time flavors to save and store on a freezer shelf, although I also love getting their tasting tray.
Which of these flavors do you want to try? Were you aware of food upcycling?
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