‘Food is real energy’
Food Depository founder Bob Strube leaves a legacy of service
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| Bob Strube of Strube Celery & Vegetable Co., one of the six founders of the Greater Chicago Food Depository. |
For years, Bob Strube searched for a way to take unused produce from the South Water Market and distribute it efficiently to hungry people.
“The poor would go and follow the garbage wagon [at the market] and pick food out,” Mr. Strube said.
Mr. Strube eventually found an outlet for food that otherwise may have gone to waste. In 1979, he came together with five other individuals to start the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Mr. Strube died at the age of 91 on Jan. 14.
In 1979, Mr. Strube donated warehouse space for the fledgling Food Depository at the historic South Water Market on the Near West Side. Mr. Strube, then president of Strube Celery & Vegetable Company, had been active in hunger-relief causes for many years.
“Food is real energy,” Mr. Strube said in 1979. “You need the right kinds of food in the right quantities just to have the energy to get up and go to work.”
The forerunner to the Food Depository was a food cooperative called Feed the Hungry, Inc. that distributed excess produce to low-income individuals for a nominal fee. The co-op, founded in 1970, included more than 20 pickup locations at churches and community centers. Mr. Strube had sketched out ideas for a distribution system as early as 1968.
“You might have your house all paid for, but you still have your taxes,” Mr. Strube said in 1979. “And you’ve got your heat and your electricity and your water bill. You have all these bills to pay and they’re all higher and they have to be paid. The only thing you can cut back on is food.”
The six Food Depository founders—Ann Connors, Father Philip Marquard, Tom O’Connell, Gertrude Snodgrass, Ed Sunshine and Mr. Strube—came together in the basement of a Loop church to discuss the creation of a food bank modeled after St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix. The Food Depository distributed 471,000 pounds in its first year and has distributed more than 750 million pounds of food in its history.
“The only thing that makes any difference at all, while you and I are here in this town, is what you and I do in this town,” Mr. Strube wrote in 1979. “We make the difference while we’re here. The issue is today—what you or I do today that makes a difference in this world. You have to give.”
Memorials may be made to The Bob and Helen Strube Freedom from Hunger Fund.
