On a mission for nutrition

Tara Hatala, nutrition director of the Greater Boston Food Bank, insists on supplying smart calories. (Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff)

Before she tries to explain the challenge of her job, Tara Hatala has to show you the warehouse at the Greater Boston Food Bank. She pushes open the door and stops a few feet inside the 60,000 square-foot warehouse. The grind of forklifts and beeping trucks make it difficult to talk, but that's no matter. You just need to see it if you're going to get your mind around the immensity of her task.

The Greater Boston Food Bank supplies 30 million pounds of food a year to more than 600 hunger-relief agencies throughout Eastern Massachusetts. That food will reach the mouths of 320,000 people each year, and Hatala, who is the nutrition director for the food bank, naturally wants it to be healthy and nutritious.

But as the trucks come in and out of the loading docks, the big catch to her job is apparent: She can't control the donations that come in, and she can't control what gets served by the soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and food pantries that do their shopping at the food bank.

It wasn't very long ago that this didn't exist as a problem: "It used to be, just get the hungry people some calories in their belly," Hatala said. But studies have shown that so-called "food insecure households" are lacking in such things as vitamins, iron, protein, and calcium. Hatala thinks they need to have it both ways - not just calories but smart calories. And she's succeeding with an approach that is the opposite of tradition.

"We could have tried something like teaching an eight-week course on healthy eating at one of the food pantries and then hoping people would change their diet," she said, fingers crossed, face not buying it. "But I like our approach, which was to change the environment and the system."

Quite simply, she decided the best way she could improve her clients' nutrition was by decreasing the bad choices available to them. She did this by maximizing the nutrition in the food they can choose (through the US Department of Agriculture and the Massachusetts Emergency Food Assistance Program) and keeping a close eye on the donated food, which includes occasionally doing something seemingly unthinkable - saying no to some unhealthy donations.

Two years ago, Hatala, working with nutritionists at other food banks, created a system to rank all the foods that come in the door of their sprawling South End warehouse. It's time-intensive, she admits, and any such food ranking system will never be perfect, but it allowed them, for the first time, to get a handle on just what they were serving their clients. And with that ability, it allowed the company to set itself the goal that 65 percent of the food leaving its facility would rank in the top two of five nutritional categories. They blew past it.

This year, they've bumped that goal up to 72 percent.

Hatala's work has "had a ripple effect across the country," said Kim Prendergast, the former nutrition manager for America's Second Harvest, the national organization for all food banks in the country. "Other food banks are paying attention."

Hatala actually began her post-college career in public relations and discovered that she loved the science behind food (thanks to becoming a vegetarian) and didn't love being a "spin doctor" at about the same time. She enrolled in graduate school to study nutrition, and soon found that her communications background actually came in handy, because her field is as much about knowing as it is communicating that knowledge. "When I give talks, I always say that there are only two things we need to do to survive: breath and eat. Breathing is involuntary, so we might as well put some time and thought into what we're putting into our bodies."

As she made her way recently on one of her regular rounds through the endless sea of pallets, Hatala, who has jet-black hair and a runner's physique, occasionally stopped talking nutrition to perform the other half of her job, "the food safety police."

"It's the lonely half of my job," she said as she dug into a case of juice boxes to find a fruit-fly friendly leak. That means she sometimes needs to refuse, or dump, entire truckloads that are on the safety borderline. "The last thing we want to do when we feed the hungry is make them sick."

There are foods that would be fine for her to eat, but she's a healthy 38-year-old. Before a shipment leaves the warehouse, she has another test for it.

"I think, 'What would this food do to my 2-year-old daughter, or my grandmother?' "

Hometown: Troy, N.Y.; lives in Charlestown.

Education: Graduated from the College of New Rochelle in 1991 with a bachelor's in communications; got her master's degree in nutrition from Syracuse in 1997.

Family: Husband, Paul, is a chemist; they have a 2-year-old daughter, Maura, a dog, and two cats.

Hobbies: Hatala is interested in genealogy and enjoys running, baking, and knitting.