A band performs on the Elk Stage during the Telluride Bluegrass Festival on June 20, 2024, in Telluride, Colo. Photo by Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun (used with permission)
A band performs on the Elk Stage during the Telluride Bluegrass Festival on June 20, 2024, in Telluride, Colo. Photo by Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun (used with permission)
The annual Telluride Film Festival is a glitzy affair held over a long weekend, featuring international celebrities, parties galore and lavish meals.
The festivities occur at the other end of the spectrum from Telluride’s Angel Baskets food pantry, where workers, older adults and families in need pick up free groceries each Thursday afternoon.
For several years, the gourmet appetites of an expensive resort town and the needs of locals who struggle to cover necessities have been increasingly intersecting. Some of Telluride’s many recurring festivals have become large contributors to Angel Baskets with donations of leftovers from food vendors and chef-catered spreads.
After the most recent Telluride Film Festival, which usually takes place the first weekend in September, two chefs offered Angel Baskets 950 pounds of edible fare from meals for film festival sponsors. The provisions included charcuterie-board cheeses, plant-based burgers, chicken breasts, fresh herbs, savory samosas and containers of green curry.
Angel Baskets founder and director Barb Gross said the film festival leftovers were a big hit. She said Spanish-speaking patrons, who comprise about 40% of Angel Baskets’ customers, particularly enjoyed the spicy curry and samosas.
“People were absolutely ecstatic with the food,” Gross said.
Two weeks later, Angel Baskets received 2,545 pounds of food from the Telluride Blues & Brews music festival. The donation included tortillas, hummus, a mountain of salad greens and 33 pounds of sausage and pepperoni.
Angel Baskets often shares these festivals’ largesse with associated food pantries in Norwood and western Montrose County.
Sue Ellen Rodwick, director of the Food Bank of the Rockies’s Western Slope Distribution Center, said the high-end festival provisions make Telluride’s Angel Baskets stand out among food pantries better known for offering more basic food staples.
Telluride hosts nearly 20 annual festivals, so it has the potential for far more festival food giveaways than other towns. Some of Telluride’s events are relatively small, like the Telluride Yoga Festival and the Plein Air Festival (featuring outdoor painting). The larger gatherings like Blues & Brews and the Bluegrass Festival each pack the town with around 15,000 visitors.
In addition to being entertained, visitors must be fed. Chefs and vendors are given head counts to prepare food, but they must also calculate how much food attendees will eat. Those calculations can be off because of competing schedules, weather events or the vagaries of appetites. Those differences have come to benefit Angel Baskets and community members experiencing food insecurity.
“Hopefully, we can learn from Telluride,” Rodwick said about towns that host large, catered events in locations where food costs are higher than average.
Some other towns have already tapped into large-event leftovers. Harvest for Hunger in the Roaring Fork Valley has been rescuing and handing out leftover food from the FOOD & WINE Classic and the Aspen Ideas Festival for the past two years. Harvest for Hunger Founder Gray “CQ” Warr said that these food donations have included surprises—like when the pantry received 40 boxes of squid ink. It has also brought pallets of fresh juices, bonanzas of frozen seafood, mountains of crackers, liters of cold-brew coffee and a truckload of gourmet ice cream.
Like the donations in Telluride, the Roaring Fork Valley festival giveaways are often too much for the small Harvest for Hunger pantry that is shoehorned into a room at the Snowmass Village Town Hall. Some of the food saved from the large events is trucked to the LiftUp food pantry warehouse in Carbondale, where it is divided up and taken to pantries in towns spread across the valley.
“Everyone is super excited to get the high-end foods,” said Warr, noting that most food rescues from grocery stores, hotels, food distributors and manufacturers are foods that are on the edge of expiration. The festival food, on the other hand, “is super fresh.”
Rodwick said these food donations are welcome but not as easy as conventional food rescues. “You have to have willing chefs or culinary programs to do this, and it can be a lot of extra work,” she said.
Pantries must be prepared to accept much more food than they might need. That is a large part of why the Western Slope Food Bank of the Rockies doesn’t do festival food rescues directly. The food bank tried partnering with the Bluegrass Festival in 2019, but there was so much leftover food that it had to be trucked to the Grand Junction warehouse, nearly three hours away.
Rodwick said pulling off what Angel Baskets and Harvest for Hunger do with festivals also requires a large cadre of dedicated volunteers to pick up food and follow all safety-preservation guidelines. For example, pantries cannot accept prepared food if it has been placed out on tables or buffet lines. It must have remained in refrigerators or freezers at the events.
In the case of the samosas and curries, Gross said those foods weren’t on serving tables. The chefs had simply prepared for more attendees than those who came, so a lot of food stayed in coolers.
The I-70 resort corridor towns have a unique food rescue operation that has found a way to accept prepared foods. CAFE Food Rescue, based in Breckenridge, picks up leftovers from large conventions held at Vail hotels. The cafe can accept the prepared foods because it has a commercial kitchen where items like chafing dishes of macaroni and cheese or lasagna can be stored and divided into smaller portions. Foods from CAFE Food Rescue are then shared with pantries throughout Summit County.
Food pantry operators say patrons in resort towns have learned to look forward to higher-end foods following festivals. That is when they can add fresh mozzarella balls, pesto, fancy breads, jarred hot peppers, pomegranate seeds and more to their usual groceries.
Gross said a truckload of waffle fries donated to Angel Baskets this summer was probably the most popular item with patrons this year. That was a good thing—there were so many bags of fries that they filled the pantry’s freezers and some had to be stored at a nearby school kitchen and in the home freezers of some of the 100 Angel Baskets volunteers.
The idea of festival-food donations was sparked in Telluride nearly a decade ago when volunteers with an environmental program, EcoAction Partners, began looking at ways to eliminate waste in mountain towns with limited landfill space. As part of its sustainability and environmental programs, EcoAction Partners began working with festivals to require composting of all organic waste.
Telluride’s festival-food rescues started with Gross simply picking up food in her vehicle from the Telluride Film Festival via word-of-mouth connections with chefs. The more organized food donations began with the Bluegrass Festival.
The crush of attendees produced massive waste in the form of plastic dishes, silverware, Styrofoam containers and discarded food. Planet Bluegrass, the festival organizer, and EcoAction Partners decided to reduce waste through recycling, composting and food rescue.
Volunteers were recruited to show festivalgoers how to sort and place their waste in the proper receptacles. EcoAction Founder Tyler Simmons added the food rescue component when he realized it was mutually beneficial to both the food pantry and the festival because the food purveyors weren’t left to dispose of unused food.
“I was surprised they hadn’t done it before. It was such a win-win for everybody,” Simmons said. “The caterers sometimes way over-order and they are grateful that we can take it.”
Gross said the donated foods in Telluride now also come from conferences and parties. Many chefs who cater those events know they can contact Angel Baskets with leftovers.
Angel Baskets also draws some unusual food donations on a much smaller scale. One food bank patron bakes pies every week that are sliced and distributed. One volunteer regularly donates cases of spaghetti sauce. A late supporter of Angel Baskets recently specified that all the food in his freezer be donated to the pantry after his death. That meant a bounty of frozen chicken, burritos and healthy single-portion meals.
Like EcoAction Partners, Angel Baskets does its part to reduce waste when there are more donations than it can handle. It is now a zero-waste pantry—what can’t be donated to other pantries goes to chickens, goats, horses and pigs raised on the mesas outside Telluride.
Simmons, who patronizes Angel Baskets himself and encourages friends to go there when needed, said food rescue is about keeping waste from landfills and feeding people in need. He has spent more than a decade on recycling and reclaiming everything from electronics to paper from businesses and festivals. Still, he said food rescue is “the most tangible of all the waste [rescue] I do.”
Warr of Harvest for Hunger agrees.
“There is food that sustains,” he said of basic canned and boxed staples that all food pantries offer. “But the food from festivals is prime. It’s fresh. It is food that elevates.”
