Lifestyle
Where does L.A.’s leftover produce go? This group helps get tons to the hungry every day
It’s 4:30 a.m. on a Tuesday and the lights are blazing at Food Forward’s Pit Stop warehouse. Big trucks are lining up waiting their turn while forklifts whiz around the loading dock, pulling pallets of donated asparagus, lettuce and strawberries off one truck or pushing boxes of purple potatoes, green beans and heirloom tomatoes onto another headed to needy clients later in the day.
Everything moves fast at Food Forward — a nonprofit devoted to redistributing produce that would otherwise go to waste — because fruits and veggies don’t last. When you’re moving tons of food at the edge of its usefulness — an average of 250,000 pounds or 125 tons every day — no one can afford to dawdle.
Lupe “Papi” Rodriguez uses plastic wrap to stabilize a wobbly pallet of unsold berries, tomatoes and other produce at the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market, before loading it into his truck bound for Food Forward’s warehouse.
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
Mini watermelons are among the wide variety of fruit and vegetables brought into Food Forward’s warehouse.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The whole point of this hustle is to get food that would otherwise be wasted to hunger relief groups, who get the produce for free and must distribute it for free as well, without imposing any rules like listening to prayers, making donations or joining a club. Food Forward works with some 250 nonprofit groups to get it done, serving 13 counties in Southern and Central California along with seven states and tribal lands when there’s too much surplus for regional groups to handle.
So even though it’s dark and cold, Food Forward driver Lupe “Papi” Rodriguez is smiling as he gets ready to pick up pallets of unwanted fruits and veggies from wholesale produce vendors. “I enjoy my work,” said Rodriguez, who drove a produce truck for 20 years before joining Food Forward in 2021. “It’s a beautiful job, because you get to help people too.”
And it all started 15 years ago, when documentary photographer Rick Nahmias was nursing his ailing, elderly dog and a deep disappointment with politics. During their slow walks through his San Fernando neighborhood, Nahmias had lots of time to notice all the unpicked fruit on people’s trees, and consider how he could best proceed in helping the world.
The year before, Nahmias had worked hard on two political campaigns, to elect Barack Obama as the nation’s first Black president and to defeat Proposition 8, a state ballot initiative to ban gay marriage. Obama won, as did Proposition 8. Although the measure was later overturned, in January 2009 Nahmias was still aching. He and his husband had married just three years earlier, and the vote to ban their marriage “was pretty brutal,” he said.
“It felt like total whiplash, and I was so discouraged, I decided, ‘I can’t deal with politics anymore. I’ve got to go do something positive.’ And Food Forward was my way to turn the other cheek.”
It was also the height of the nation’s economic downturn, he said. “We were seeing long lines at food pantries, who didn’t have the storage to handle fresh fruit. These people were being forced to eat Cup of Noodles when just a mile away there were all these beautiful oranges and grapefruits hanging on trees … and I was thinking, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’”
At the Food Forward warehouse, founder and CEO Rick Nahmias poses in front of a sculptural light display created from old fruit harvesting tools, which the organization still uses to glean unwanted fruit from residential trees.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Warehouse manager Leo Paz, right, says it’s rewarding to help the community and to get paid for it as a job. On left is Amir Zambrano, managing director of wholesale recovery.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Addressing that imbalance was all Nahmias had in mind when he put an ad on Craigslist that January, asking for volunteers to help him pick unwanted fruit for donation. Six people responded, he said, but only one showed up at the first event. He persisted , and slowly, a group formed that picked 800 pounds of fruit off his neighbor’s tangerine and orange trees, and identified many more that needed picking.
That initial core group — Nahmias, Carl Buratti, Marie Boswell and Erica Kopmar — were all strangers who became close friends, “like a little tribe,” he said. For the next nine months they’d gather on weekends, picking fruit and delivering it to local food pantries. They did it to help people and build community, Nahmias said, but also because it was fun.
A community newspaper wrote a small article about their gleaning events, and in October 2009, while he was shopping for a Halloween costume, Nahmias got a call “out of the blue” from Evan Schlesinger of the Jewish Venture Philanthrophy Fund, offering him a $25,000 grant to see if his weekend “fun” could become a sustainable organization.
Nahmias thought the call was a prank at first, but after confirming it was real, the foursome hired consultants to review its viability. The verdict was yes, if they got nonprofit status and a strong leader, Nahmias said. His “tribe” sat him down and said, “‘This could go somewhere. We should do it,’ but when it came to leadership, they all took a step back.”
Thus Nahmias became the founder and CEO of Food Forward, a gleaning operation that distributed unwanted residential fruit to community organizations feeding needy people. But it didn’t take long for its scope to grow.
By 2012, farmers markets were reaching out to Food Forward, asking if its volunteers could help find a home for the produce left unsold. Farmers didn’t want to take it back, but no one wanted to see it thrown away. What began with the Santa Monica Farmers Market has grown to 16 farmers markets in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
The biggest jump came in 2014, when Food Forward started working with wholesale produce sellers. “We set 300,000 pounds as our first goal, and ended up collecting 4.1 million pounds,” despite working with borrowed trucks and loading docks, and having to coax vendors to trust the food wouldn’t be resold, Nahmias said.
Rick Nahmias stands in front of a new trailer that the organization purchased to help with produce pickups.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Driver Lupe Rodriguez brings in a pallet of produce he picked up during his early morning route.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Now, a decade later, Food Forward’s warehouse and its new giant truck trailer, pulled by an electric Volvo-made cab, features a mural by Brian Peterson depicting its three-pronged attack on hunger: gleaning, farmers markets and its Pit Stop warehouse in Bell, which in 2023 distributed 87 million pounds of free, unwanted produce primarily in Los Angeles County, on a budget of $6.3 million, or at a cost of 7 cents a pound.
The organization has about 50 employees and 2,000 volunteers. Its new goal — recognized by the White House — is to collect and donate 90 million pounds of produce this year, and 100 million pounds by 2025. Funding comes from grants and individual donations, “ranging from $5 to more than $1 million,” Nahmias said.
Back at the warehouse, Rodriguez disappears behind a forklift to unload his truck as warehouse manager Leo Paz congratulates Karlen Nurijanyan, founder and CEO of Student LunchBox, a nonprofit that provides food and other items to college students living in poverty. The group began in 2020, during the pandemic, and initially, Nurijanyan would pick up produce only from the warehouse’s smaller “Sprout” section, which provides boxes of fruits and veggies to groups too small to use big trucks.
This day, however, Nurijanyan has gotten funding to rent a truck big enough to use the Pit Stop loading dock, and he’s thrilled to be getting his first produce on pallets. During college, Nurijanyan was poor, with almost all his money going to rent. After college he got a corporate job but couldn’t shake the memory of his poverty and embarrassment.
When the pandemic forced him to stay at home, Nurijanyan knew it was time to pursue his dream of helping needy college students. Four years later, his group is serving around 4,000 students at 10 universities around L.A. County. The group distributes about 15,000 pounds of food every week, often in open-air “markets” where students can pick the produce they are most likely to eat. Food Forward’s support gave his little organization credibility with other donors, he said, and this year, his program is expanding to include donations of clothing, hygiene kits and other essentials.
This is why people want to work here, said Paz, watching Nurijanyan climb into his rented rig. Paz is all about relationships. He was already working with another hunger relief group when he learned about Food Forward’s growing to work with wholesale vendors. He knew he could have a bigger impact with Food Forward, and his expertise and warmth have helped it grow. Throughout the morning, Paz makes a point of greeting drivers and vendors by name, usually with handshakes that end in hugs.
These kinds of relationships are a large part of why Food Forward has been so successful, Nahmias said, and they must continue for the organization to get the staff and volunteers it needs to grow.
Driver Lupe Rodriguez unloads pallets of produce from his truck at Food Forward Produce Pit Stop.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Typically, volunteers from Food Forward harvest thousands of trees, including these navel oranges, picked from a Newbury Park backyard in 2020.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
They’re working hard to bring in more volunteers, said Ally Forest, senior manager of community programs, especially those willing to be trained to lead gleaning and farmers market volunteers. People who are curious can participate in the group’s so-called Zestfest on June 1 at Cal State Northridge’s orange grove, where Food Forward will celebrate 15 years of gleaning fruit by inviting volunteers to harvest hundreds of citrus trees.
And then, after working nonstop since he began, Nahmias is taking a three-month sabbatical to travel, rejuvenate and plan for the future, since visioning is one of his biggest jobs these days.
“‘Share the abundance’ is not just a slogan, it’s a way of life,” he said. “We need to get people out of their own selfish ways and realize how much they have that they can share. It doesn’t have to be fruit; it could be money, time, love. … We all have abundance; we just need to find out what it is, and give it.”
In 2021, Zhao made history as the first woman of color to win the best director Oscar for her film Nomadland. Her Oscar-nominated drama Hamnet has made $70 million worldwide.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
It took a very special kind of spirit to make Hamnet, which is nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Chloé Zhao brought her uniquely sensitive, mind-body approach to directing the fictionalized story about how William Shakespeare was inspired to write his masterpiece Hamlet.
Zhao adapted the screenplay from a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and for directing the film, she’s now nominated for an Oscar. She could make history by becoming the first woman to win the best director award more than once.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, in setting an intention, a mood, a vibration for any event. Before Hamnet premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, she led the audience in a guided meditation and a breathing exercise.
Zhao also likes to loosen up, like she did at a screening of Hamnet in Los Angeles last month, when she got the audience to get up and dance with her to a Rihanna song.
She, her cast and crew had regular dance parties during the production of Hamnet. So for our NPR photo shoot and interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, I invited her to share some music from her playlist. She chose a track she described as “drones and tones.”
Our photographer captured her in her filmy white gown, peeking contemplatively from behind the filmy white curtains of a balcony at the Waldorf Astoria.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, and makes them a part of her filmmaking process.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
Then Zhao and I sat down to talk.
“I had a dream that we were doing this interview,” I told her. “And it started with a photo shoot, and there was a glass globe –”
“No way!” she gasped.
It so happens that on the desk next to us, was a small glass globe — perhaps a paperweight.
I told her that in my dream, she was looking through the globe at some projected images. “We were having fun and it was like we didn’t want it to stop,” I said.
“Oh, well, me and the globe and the lights on the wall: they’re all part of you,” Zhao said. “They’re your inner crystal ball, your inner Chloé.”
“Inner Chloé?” I asked. “What is the inner Chloé like?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” she said. “Humbly, from my lineage and what I studied is that everything in a dream is a part of our own psyche.”
Dreams and symbols are very much a part of Zhao’s approach to filmmaking, which she describes as a magical and communal experience. She said it’s all part of her directing style.
Chloé Zhao used painting and dance to connect with actors on the set of her latest film Hamnet.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
“If you’re captain of any ship, you are not just giving instructions; people are also looking to you energetically as well,” she explained. “Whether it’s calmness, it’s groundedness, it’s feeling safe: then everyone else is going to tune to you.” Zhao says it has taken many years to get to this awareness. Her own journey began 43 years ago in Beijing, where she was born. She moved to the U.S. as a teen, and studied film at New York University where Spike Lee was one of her teachers. She continued honing her craft at the Sundance Institute labs — along with her friend Ryan Coogler and other indie filmmakers.
Over the years, Zhao’s film catalogue has been eclectic — from her indie debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, set on a Lakota Sioux reservation, to the big-budget Marvel superhero movie Eternals. She got her first best director Oscar in 2021 for the best picture winner Nomadland. Next up is a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“A creative life,” she notes, “is not a linear experience for me.”
Zhao still lingers over the making of Hamnet, a very emotional story about the death of a child. During the production, Zhao says she used somatic and tantric exercises and rituals to open and close shooting days.
She also invited her lead actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley to help her set the mood on set. They danced, they painted, they meditated together.
“She created an atmosphere where everybody who chose to step in to tell this story was there for a reason that was deeply within them,” actress Jessie Buckley told me.
Buckley is a leading contender for this year’s best actress Oscar. She said that to prepare for her very intense role as William Shakespeare’s wife, Zhao asked her to write down her dreams “as a kind of access point, to gently stir the waters of where I was feeling.”
Buckley sent Zhao her writings, and also music she felt was “a tone and texture of that essence.”
That kind of became the ritual of how they worked together, Buckley said. “And not just the cast were moving together, but the crew were and the camera was really creating dynamics and a collective unconscious.”
Filmmaker and Hamnet producer Steven Spielberg calls Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
That was incredibly useful for creating Hamnet — a story about communal grief. Steven Spielberg, who co-produced the film, called Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
“In every glance, in every pause and every touch, in every tear, in every single moment of this film, every choice that Chloé made is evidence of her fearlessness,” Spielberg said when awarding Zhao a Directors Guild of America award. “In Hamnet, Chloé also shows us that there can be life after grief.”
Zhao says it took five years and a midlife crisis for her to develop the emotional tools she used to make Hamnet.
“I hope it could give people a two-hour little ceremony,” she told me. “And in the end, I hope that a point of contact can be made. That means that there’s a heart opening. But it will be painful, right? Because when your heart opens, you feel all the things you usually don’t feel. And then a catharsis can emerge.”
As our interview time came to a close, I told Zhao I have my own little ritual at the end of every interview; I record a few minutes of room tone, the ambient sound of the space we’re in. It’s for production purposes, to smooth out the audio.
Zhao knew just what I meant. She told me a story about her late friend Michael “Wolf” Snyder who was her sound recordist for Nomadland. “He said to me, ‘I don’t always need it, but just so you know, I am going to watch you. And when I tell that you are a little frazzled, I’m going to ask for a room tone … just to give you space.’” she recalled. “‘And if you feel like you need the silence space, you just look at me, nod. I’ll come ask for a room tone.’”
I closed our interview ceremony with that moment of silence, a moment of peace, for director Chloé Zhao.
Lifestyle
This spring, have a tea ceremony inside of an art installation and shop the latest Givenchy
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Rocky’s Matcha hosts Japanese tea ceremonies in an ensō-inspired tea house from Oscar Tuazon at Morán Morán.
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Jessie Buckley has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of William Shakespeare’s wife in Hamnet.
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Kate Green/Getty Images
Actor Jessie Buckley says she’s always been drawn to the “shadowy bits” of her characters — aspects that are disobedient, or “too much.” Perhaps that’s what led her to play Agnes, the wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet.
Buckley says the film, which is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, offered a chance to counter a common narrative about the playwright’s wife: that she “had kept him back from his genius,” Buckley says.
But, she adds, “What Maggie O’Farrell so brilliantly did, not just with Agnes and Shakespeare’s wife, but also with Hamnet, their son, was to bring these people … and give them status beside this great man. … [And] give the full landscape of what it is to be a woman.”
The film is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best actress for Buckley. In it, she plays a woman deeply connected to nature, who faces conflicts in her marriage, as well as the death of their son Hamnet.
Buckley found out she was pregnant a week after the film wrapped. She’s since given birth to her first child, a daughter.
“The thing that this story offered me, that brought me into this next chapter of my life as a mother was tenderness,” she says. “A mother’s tenderness is ferocious. To love, to birth is no joke. To be born is no joke. And the minute something’s born into the world, you’re always in the precipice of life and death. That’s our path. … I wanted to be a mother so much that that overrode the thought of being afraid of it.”
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes and Joe Alwyn plays her brother Bartholomew in Hamnet.
Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
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Courtesy of Focus Features/Courtesy of Focus Features
Interview highlights
On filming the scene where she howls in grief when her son dies
I didn’t know that that was going to happen or come out, it wasn’t in the script. I think really [director] Chloé [Zhao] asked all of us to dare to be as present as possible. Of course, leading up to it, you’re aware this scene is coming, but that scene doesn’t stand on its own. By the time I’d met that scene, I had developed such a deep bond with Jacobi Jupe, who plays Hamnet, and [co-stars] Paul [Mescal] and Emily Watson, and all the children and we really were a family. And Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet is such an incredible little actor and an incredible soul, and we really were a team. …
The death of a child is unfathomable. I don’t know where it begins and ends. Out of utter respect, I tried to touch an imaginary truth of it in our story as best I could, but there’s no way to define that kind of grief. I’m sure it’s different for so many people. And in that moment, all I had was my imagination but also this relationship that was right in front of me with this little boy and that’s what came out of that.
On what inspired her to pursue singing growing up
I grew up around a lot of music. My mom is a harpist and a singer and my dad has always been passionate about music, so it was always something in our house and always something that was encouraged. … Early on, I have very strong memories of seeing and hearing my mom sing in church and this quite intense mercurial conversation that would happen between her, the story and the people that would listen to her. And at the end of it, something had been cracked between them and these strangers would come up with tears in their eyes. And I guess I saw the power of storytelling through my mom’s singing at a very young age, and that was definitely something that made me think I want to do that.
On her first big break performing as a teen on the BBC singing competition I’d Do Anything — and being criticized by judges about her physical appearance
I was raw. I hadn’t trained. I had a lot to learn and to grow in. I was only 17. I think there was part of their criticism which I think was destructive and unfair when it became about my awkwardness, or they would say I was masculine and send me to kind of a femininity school. … They sent me to [the musical production of] Chicago to put heels on and a leotard and learn how to walk in high heels, which was pretty humiliating, to be honest, and I’m sad about that because I think I was discovering myself as a young woman in the world and wasn’t fully formed. … I was different. I was wild, I had a lot of feeling inside me. I could hardly keep my hands beside myself and I think to kind of criticize a body of a young woman at that time and to make her feel conscious of that was lazy and, I think, boring.
On filming parts of the 2026 film The Bride! while pregnant
I really loved working when I was pregnant. I thought it was a pretty wild experience, especially because I was playing Mary Shelley and I was talking about [this] monstrosity, and here I was with two heartbeats inside me. Becoming a mom and being pregnant did something, I think, for me. My experience of it, it’s so real that it really focuses [me to be] allergic to fake or to disconnection.
Since my daughter has come and I know what that connection is and the real feeling of being in a relationship with somebody … as an actress, it’s very exciting to recognize that in yourself and really take ownership of yourself.
I’m excited to go back and work on this other side of becoming a mother in so many ways, because I’ve shed 10 layers of skin by loving more and experiencing life in such a new way with my daughter. I’m also scared to work again because it’s hard to be a mother and to work. That’s like a constant tug because I love what I do and I’m passionate and I want to continue to grow and learn and fill those spaces that are yet to be filled — and also be a mother. And I think every mother can recognize that tug.
On the possibility of bringing her daughter to travel with her as she works
I haven’t filmed for nearly a year and I cannot wait. I’m hungry to create again. And my daughter will come with me. She’s seven months, so at the moment she can travel with us and it’s a beautiful life. And she meets all these amazing people and I have a feeling that she loves life and that’s a great thing to see in a child. And I hope that’s something that I’ve imparted to her in the short time that she’s been on this earth is that life is beautiful and great and complex and alive and there’s no part of you that needs to be less in your life. You might have to work it out, but it’s worth it.
Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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