Ammar Kapasi is a 20-year-old student at the University of California, Irvine, and a member of the Dawoodi Bohra community of Orange County in Southern California. Through Project Rise, he has volunteered with Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County at two stages of its work: preparing food for distribution at its packing center and, this time, harvesting fresh produce. Together, the experiences gave him a firsthand view of the many steps—and many hands—involved in moving food from the field toward a family’s table.

A bucket of freshly picked vegetables does not look especially heavy—until I have to carry it down a farm row in nearly 100-degree heat.

The weight surprised me partly because of how I usually encounter vegetables: cleaned, sorted and arranged in a supermarket. I might pick up a zucchini, turn it over once and place it in my cart. By that point, someone else has already searched for it beneath the leaves, decided it was ready, harvested it and moved it through every earlier stage of its journey. My only task is to choose.

On the farm, choosing was where the work began.

As part of the Dawoodi Bohra community of Orange County’s Project Rise initiative, I recently volunteered with the Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County. I had volunteered with the nonprofit before, but this experience looked very different. Instead of working inside a warehouse, I was outdoors on a farm, surrounded by rows of squash, zucchini and peppers.

My fellow volunteers and I were tasked with harvesting the vegetables that were ready and collecting them for distribution. I moved along the rows, looking beneath large leaves and peered between plants for vegetables ready to be picked. The chosen ones went into a large bucket. I lugged them down the field, set them to sort, returned to the plants and began again.

Harvesting required more judgement than I expected. I had to examine the condition of each vegetable before adding it to the bucket. A squash could appear perfectly good while it was still beneath the leaves, only for me to pick it up and notice a bruise or another imperfection.

The significance of those small decisions became clearer when I considered the wider picture. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that between 30 and 40 percent of the American food supply is lost or wasted. At the same time, 13.7 percent of US households—18.3 million households—experienced food insecurity at some point in 2024. Together, those figures reveal a difficult contradiction: an enormous amount of food goes uneaten while millions of households remain uncertain of having enough.

Our work that day occupied one small point within that much larger problem. Filling a few buckets would not resolve it, but I began to understand the importance of examining each vegetable carefully and recognising the difference between food that was unusable and food that simply did not look perfect.

Food-bank reports often measure their work in pounds, a unit I had previously understood only as a measure of scale. Approximately 39,000 pounds of produce are harvested at a food bank each week. If a full bucket weighs around 50 pounds, the weekly harvest would equal the weight of roughly 780 buckets like mine.

After carrying even one, I understood that figure differently. Those 39,000 pounds were not one enormous harvest completed all at once; they were the result of hundreds of repeated actions. Each bucket had to be filled one vegetable at a time, and each vegetable had to be found beneath the leaves, examined, picked and carried through the heat. From there, the produce still had to be transported, sorted, packed and distributed before eventually reaching a person or family.

Seeing both stages, from packing at a distribution, to harvesting out in the field, was humbling because it revealed how small my contribution was within a much larger chain. I took part for only one day, while the work began long before I arrived and continued after I left through people performing different tasks with the same purpose. No one person carried the food from the farm to the table, but the food could not complete that journey without each person carrying one part of it.

The experience also made me check my gratitude. It is easy to be thankful for a finished meal while remaining unaware of most of the work behind it. Now that gratitude extends further back—to the people who grow and harvest food, those who examine and sort it, the drivers who move it, the volunteers who pack it, and the organizations that make sure it reaches people who need it.

My role covered only one day and one part of one field, but it changed how I see fresh food. When I pass vegetables arranged neatly in a supermarket, I can picture what came before: the leaves, the heat, the full bucket and all the hands still needed to move it onward.

The journey from farm to table is easy to describe in four words. It is much harder, and humbling, to carry.