Just off the path bending around towering power line poles, running alongside railroad tracks, the sound of lettuce leaves crunching in children’s hands was drowned out as a Metrolink train rumbled by. The elementary school children talked with one another and occasionally yelled a question to their teacher last Thursday, using dull knives to harvest vegetables grown by the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County for the needy. 

Harvest coordinator Sam Caruthers looked on carefully, sweat darkening the crown of his baseball cap. 

“If you see any rabbits, I want you to catch ‘em!” Caruthers yelled before laughing to himself. 

In two hours of work that morning at the eight-acre Incredible Edible Park in Irvine, the 50 children and teacher volunteers had harvested 2,000 pounds of produce, enough to contribute to 8,000 meals. 

The Incredible Edible Park was created about a decade ago on land owned by Southern California Edison. The land under their power lines wasn’t being utilized and needed weed maintenance. 

The park was developed by A.G. Kawamura, a local farmer and former agriculture secretary of California. 

“His family’s been farming in this area for probably 80 years,” Caruthers said. “He’s the one who started this program about 20 years ago.”

Kawamura and his employees are still active in the project but it’s primarily run by Second Harvest through three staff members and thousands of volunteers who plant, water, weed and harvest the produce. The city of Irvine pays the water bill.

Second Harvest then takes the produce, refrigerates it and distributes it the following day. 

“Anything we pick normally gets out on somebody’s plate within about four days,” Caruthers said. “We lose a little but we don’t lose a lot.”

Every year, Second Harvest has between 5,000 and 6,000 volunteers involved in the program. Caruthers said 500,000 pounds of produce are donated annually to make two million meals. 

The program isn't certified organic but the produce is grown without the use of pesticides. 

The food bank donates food to a network of agencies and nearly 500 distribution locations, according to Jerry Creekpaum, Second Harvest’s general manager. Those locations include soup kitchens, church groups and senior citizen homes.

Second Harvest distributed 18.2 million pounds of food last year, Creekpaum said.

“I’ve gone out to soup kitchens and saw people [who received the food], they’re really grateful to get this stuff,” Caruthers said. “The food bank also gives them canned goods, meat and bread. We try to give them a balanced meal. We do the best we can with what we have to work with."

The food bank saw a rise in the number of hungry and needy after the recession. 

“[The number of those in need] peaked in the middle of 2009 and our agencies reported they had grown from 30 to 40 percent during the course of that year,” Creekpaum said. “Thus far, we have not seen them begin to go back down yet.”

Feeding America, a national hunger-relief charity, reported in their latest data from 2010 that 13 percent of Orange County residents - 386,020 people - are food insecure, meaning that they struggle at times with access to enough food or nutritious food. Of the food insecure population, 155,210 of those were children.

In comparison, California's percentage of food insecure was 17.1 percent. The national rate was 16.1 percent. 

“Orange County, California, from the outsider’s eye and even in the eye of its own residents, it’s an affluent county,” Creekpaum said. “It’s very true of not just Orange County but all parts of the country where you basically have both [affluent and not affluent] in the same geographic area. And I don’t believe there’s sufficient awareness of the sheer magnitude of the problems with hunger in Orange County.”

Katie Mullings, 16, of Yorba Linda, volunteered to glean produce through a ministry mission on Tuesday morning. A mix of junior high school and high school students helped gather produce and weed. 

“The fact that they fill any empty lot with produce that they can take to people that don’t have that, it’s just great,” Mullings said. “It might surprise some people [that there are people who go hungry in Orange County] but I don’t think it’s the most uncommon thing that people have heard.”

Caruthers works Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and the occasional Monday. Each day, he takes up to 50 volunteers.

Along the pedestrian and bicycle pathway, numerous signs let local residents know that the produce will be donated to local food banks and ask that people don’t trespass.

“Sometimes [people] walk through and they just take what they want,” Caruthers said. “We don’t grow watermelons, cantaloupes, tomatoes or anything like that anymore because we never get any. They don’t need it but they come and take it anyway. Other than that, it runs pretty smooth.”

The elementary school children and Mullings’ group helped harvest the winter crop of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and romaine lettuce. The acres will soon be filled with the summer crop of cucumbers, zucchini and onions.  

Dozens of fruit trees on the property are growing lemons, grapefruit, limes, naval oranges and Valencia oranges.

“They could probably take what they put into this and buy more produce than we get here but we would lose out on the kids having the experience,” Caruthers said. “We would lose out on 6,000 people that come out and have an experience, get the experience of helping the community, help feed needy people and you can’t put a price on that.”

The program is able to fit in one or two more crops per year if volunteers and school programs grow seeds into seedlings to be planted.  

“I have another program called Seed The Harvest,” Caruthers said. “Right now I have about 14 elementary schools involved. I give them trays, seeds and soil and they will grow the plants at school. They take care of them for a month until they get to be about that size and if they can, I let them come out and plant what they grow. And they can come back and pick what they grow so they can see the process from beginning to end to plate.”

It takes 90 days to grow a seed to a full plant to be harvested. The help of the elementary schools growing seeds into seedlings cuts the process down to 65 days.

After 13 years of running the program, Caruthers said the experience of farming and harvesting is as beneficial as receiving the produce.

“The people that really benefit the most are the kids because they look at produce as growing in the market,” he said. “When they come out here and see, for example, this is how broccoli grows, it’s an experience for the kids. I think they benefit just as much as the people we feed.”

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