A food bank netted a huge haul of 13,000 fresh salmon. The catch? The fish were still alive

abcnews.go.com:

An upstate New York food bank was offered more than 40,000 pounds of coho salmon — a bountiful feast

AUBURN, N.Y. — A New York food bank was offered a huge donation of fresh fish this month — but it came with a catch.

LocalCoho, a soon-to-close salmon farm in the small upstate city of Auburn, wanted to give 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) of coho salmon to the Food Bank of Central New York, a mother lode of high-quality protein that could feed thousands of families.

But the fish were still alive and swimming in the farm’s giant indoor tanks. The organizations would need to figure out how to get some 13,000 salmon from the water and then have them processed into frozen fillets for distribution to regional food pantries.

And they’d need to do it fast, before the business closed for good. LocalCoho is ceasing operations this Friday.

Thanks to dozens of food pantry volunteers willing to help staffers scoop up the salmon, the team was able to empty the tanks in a matter of weeks and cold pack tons of fish for shipment to a processor.

“The fact that we only had weeks to execute this really ratcheted up the intensity and the anxiety a little bit,” said Brian McManus, the food bank’s chief operations officer. “I knew that we had the will. I knew we had the expertise.”

Tackling food waste has been a daunting challenge for years both in the U.S. and around the world. More than one-third of the food produced in the U.S. is never eaten and much of it ends up in landfills.

On a recent day, workers waded through knee-deep water teeming with salmon to fill their nets. Christina Hudson Kohler was among the volunteers who donned waterproof overalls and gloves to grab the fish-laden nets and empty their contents into cold storage