A conflict broke out between grocery store employees and the people who were salvaging food, to the point where a manager called the police

On Tuesday, February 16, grocery workers and food rights activists stood off over the fate of multiple dumpsters full of food. After a Hollywood neighborhood grocery store threw out a massive amount of groceries following a power outage, activists attempted to save the food to redistribute it; instead, employees called the police, and a fierce argument has developed online surrounding the potential risk to vulnerable communities — either by choosing to distribute the food, or by choosing not to.

Like many other businesses and homes, the Hollywood Fred Meyer location lost power due to the snowstorms over Valentine’s Day weekend. After employees were directed to throw out thousands of food items like packaged meats and cheeses, milk, tofu, and juice, activists took to Twitter to alert the public about the available food. The Oregonian first reported that around 2:30 p.m., a number of local residents and activists showed up to salvage the still-intact food, only to be blocked by store employees. A tweet from Dr. Juniper Simonis, a local activist, showed a dumpster filled with thousands of pounds of food. Around 4 p.m., Portland Police officers responded to a 911 call from store employees, asking them to remove the individuals outside the store.

One such individual was Morgan Mckniff, who operates with Team Raccoon, a group that provided clean-ups for parks after the ongoing protests against police brutality, as well as respirators for protestors and families affected by police tear gas during last year’s summer. A former chef, Mckniff tells Eater that around a half a dumpster’s worth of food was successfully salvaged and redistributed; people brought food to food insecure Portlanders’ homes, volunteers dropped food in Portland’s many free fridges, and mutual aid kitchens prepared meals for those still without power. Mckniff said on Twitter that the team checked food temperatures and inspected items to evaluate whether it remained food-safe. “The point is that they didn’t even bother to check,” they say, referencing the Fred Meyer employees. “They just covered their asses and called the cops on the people who did show up to check.”

Fred Meyer, a chain founded in Portland and currently owned by grocery giant Kroger, remained quiet about the incident on Tuesday, but the following day issued a statement: “Unfortunately, due to loss of power at this store, some perishable food was no longer safe for donation to local hunger relief agencies. Our store team became concerned that area residents would consume the food and risk foodborne illness, and they engaged local law enforcement out of an abundance of caution. We apologize for the confusion.”

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), food in freezers during an outage would remain safe for around 48 hours; food in refrigerators would last closer to four. Other items, including shelf-stable ones, would remain safe for longer. A spokesperson for Fred Meyer was able to confirm that the shop had lost power due to the storm, and that the outage had lasted 48 hours, though it was unclear if that was 48 hours before the disposal, or total; Fred Meyer’s spokesperson did not respond to emails with follow-up questions.

It’s also unclear whether the Hollywood Fred Meyer had closed at any point, or if the market had considered donating the food before the full 48 hours had transpired. In the last year — facing untold crises like the pandemic, wildfires, and most recently, catastrophic snowstorms — mutual aid groups, food shelters, and restaurants have worked to help alleviate hunger around the city and state. Many of them accept donated food from places that have lost power or otherwise been forced to close, including Blanchet House and Feed the Mass. Julie Showers, marketing and communications director for Blanchet House, says that the nonprofit often accepts food related to power outages; the team inspects the food to make sure it’s safe for consumption, and then repurposes it for use. “We rely on food donations to meet the need,” Shower says. “It’s also an incredible way to keep good food from going to waste.”

Some Twitter users have expressed concern that donating the food within the window would have put them at risk of a lawsuit. If Fred Meyer had chosen to donate the food when the power first went out, they would have been protected, in part, by the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act. The bill protects businesses from being liable when donating products in good faith. Mckniff tells Eater that they are aware of the bill, and even brought it up to Fred Meyer workers during the standoff. “It was a disgusting display of capitalism and property over people,” they say.

According to police, workers called the cops out of fear for their physical safety. A representative from Portland Police told Eater they responded to two 911 calls from a Fred Meyer manager, who was reportedly concerned about the size of the crowd, and said there were threats being levied at the workers.

Three officers remained on the scene for around an hour, during which a number of others, including trainees and their training officers, arrived. According to the PPB, at one point 11 police were on the scene for around 5 minutes. According to the police report, as well as witnesses on social media, the police vacated the area a little after 5 p.m.

Debate on social media regarding the safety of the food has raged on over the course of the day; some assert that the food could cause food poisoning throughout the unhoused community, while others say the food was obviously safe and showed no signs of spoilage. The heart of this debate comes out of an urge to help the one million Oregonians who are food insecure, a number that doubled in 2020. The question remains: If the food was sitting untouched in a power outage, why was there no effort to donate that food before it became a question of safety? Instead, much of it joined the 40 million tons of food thrown away by Americans each year.

• Portland police officers ‘guarding’ Fred Meyer dumpsters as residents seek discarded food [O]
• The Eater Portland Guide on How to Help [EPDX]

The American system of law enforcement is so deeply embedded into our national psyche that if you find the idea of defunding or abolishing the police challenging, I don’t blame you. But imagine calling an ambulance because a loved one was having trouble breathing or was suffering a stroke and, instead of the expected trained paramedics, a man with a gun showed up. Not great, right? As Jamie Ford explains in this thread, that was not unusual in America until recently.

Until the 70s, ambulance services were generally run by local police and fire departments. There was no law requiring medical training beyond basic first-aid and in many cases the assignment of ambulance duty was used as a form of punishment.

As you can imagine, throwing people with medical emergencies into the back of a paddy wagon produced less than spectacular health outcomes. Now imagine how much worse it became when disgruntled white police officers were demoted to ambulance duty in black neighborhoods.

From Kevin Hazzard’s The First Responders:

Emergency care was mostly a transportation industry, focused on getting patients to hospitals, and it was dominated by two groups: funeral homes and police departments. Call the local authorities for help and you’d likely get morticians in a hearse or cops in a paddy wagon. If you received any treatment en route to the hospital — and most likely you did not — it wouldn’t be very good. At best, one of the people helping may have taken a first-aid course. At worst, you’d ride alone in the back, hoping, if you were conscious, that you’d survive.

Pittsburgh’s Freedom House Ambulance Service changed all that, ushering in a new era of much improved medical care for communities around the US.

Together the two men hashed out a plan: Hallen would raise the money, Safar would contribute his medical expertise, and together they would design advanced ambulances and teach paramedics to provide care on the scene of an accident or emergency. It would be a pioneering medical effort, and Hallen, who was white, suggested another first. The Falk Fund was committed to mitigating racism, and Hallen wanted to staff the service with young black men from the Hill. He hoped that empowering individuals long deemed unemployable would be a source of pride in the black community, a symbol of equality, and a signal that bigoted notions about the black people of Pittsburgh standing in their own way were nonsense.

To help with recruitment, Hallen and Safar partnered with an organization called Freedom House Enterprises, a nonprofit dedicated to establishing and supporting black-run businesses in the city. Freedom House handled staffing for the fledgling ambulance service and recruited the first class of paramedics, including Vietnam veterans and men with criminal records.

So this is a great instance in which armed and untrained police officers have been relieved of a particular responsibility and replaced with specially trained personnel, resulting in a greatly improved outcome for members of the community. If you want other examples, just think about how odd, unhelpful, and dangerous it would be for our communities if the police showed up — armed with a loaded weapon — to collect your garbage, to put out fires, to inspect restaurants, to fix potholes, or to deliver the mail. No, we have sanitation workers, firefighters, public health inspectors, municipal maintenance workers, and postal workers to do these jobs — and they’re all trained in the ins and outs of their particular disciplines.

With these examples in mind, instead of armed personnel handling a wide variety of situations for which they are often not trained, it becomes easier to imagine traffic patrols conducting transportation safety stops, social workers responding to domestic disputes, special crisis centers assisting rape victims, mental health counselors helping people behaving erratically in public, housing guides finding homeless folks a place to stay, student safety coaches helping struggling students navigate school, unarmed personnel responding to property crime, and drug addiction counselors helping drug users stay safe. These are all areas where American communities have applied policing by default, like a flimsy bandaid. It’s ineffective, expensive, and dangerous, and communities should think seriously about supporting and funding alternatives that will be more effective, cheaper, safer, and produce better outcomes for everyone.

The short answer is: not yet, but that doesn’t mean that libraries shouldn’t prepare for the eventuality.

Many academic, public, and special libraries offer virtual reference services to their users. The American Library Association defines virtual reference as:

Virtual reference is reference service initiated electronically, often in real-time, where patrons employ computers or other Internet technology to communicate with reference staff, without being physically present. Communication channels used frequently in virtual reference include chat, videoconferencing, Voice over IP, co-browsing, e-mail, and instant messaging…

Reference services requested and provided over the Internet, usually via e-mail, instant messaging (“chat”), or Web-based submission forms, usually answered by librarians in the reference department of a library, sometimes by the participants in a collaborative reference system serving more than one institution.

There has been extensive academic research done on libraries offering services in predecessor virtual worlds such as Second Life. Libraries’ and librarians’ presence in SL has waned after an initial burst of enthusiasm, mainly due to budgetary constraints, the relatively steep learning curve associated with Second Life, and the fact that few people were expecting to use what they considered a game platform to access library services (user mismatch). However, this earlier research gives us a glimpse of what virtual reference via VR could look like. In fact, one person (Cedar Librarian) has already built a functional library on the social VR platform High Fidelity, using public-domain versions of classic books.

One important issue that virtual reference service via VR would face is the licensing of resources. Libraries sign license agreements with commercial database publishers which restrict access to institutional users only. This means that, if I were to provide reference services to a user not affiliated with my institution, I would not be able to provide them with copies of books and articles. However, there are still many useful non-commercial information resources such as Google Scholar that we could refer users to, as well as the myriad of resources of their own local public and academic libraries. Librarians refer users to other libraries all the time.

Another key issue is the cost of VR equipment and the learning curve associated with social VR platforms. While I would argue that it is easier and more natural to get started in Sansar than it is in Second Life, it’s still a significant challenge for many people to take their first steps in VR. The first generation of VR headsets, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, were complicated to set up, and required an expensive gaming-level computer. However, cheaper standalone VR headsets like the Oculus Quest promise to bring VR to an ever larger audience of consumers, including potential library users.

I can forsee a future (starting perhaps a decade from now) where many libraries would offer virtual reference services to users via virtual reality (“VR in VR”, if you like). Users could make appointments for their avatar to meet in-world with a reference librarian, who would assist them in finding electronic and printed information resources to answer their questions. Alternatively, library staff could sit at the virtual reference desk at regularly scheduled shifts, available to whoever dropped in with a query. The reference interview would encompass both text chat and voice chat, and include hand gestures, body language, and facial expressions, just as in real-life conversations. Academic, public, and special libraries could even work together to create a collaborative, 24/7 reference service which spans the globe and has locations on many popular social VR platforms.

As I said, it’s not here yet. But it’s coming, and perhaps sooner than you might think.

In response to the May 23 tweet, thousands of veterans and their loved ones shared stories of trauma, depression, illness, sexual assault and suicide.

(Image credit: Erich Schlegel/AP)