South Shore caterer joins Rock and Wrap It Up!

Saul Lerner, the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District’s athletic director, learned recently that Butch Yamali, a Merrick Board of Education trustee and restaurateur, bought the Sands in Lido Beach and the Coral House in Baldwin. Therein, Lerner saw an opportunity to help feed the poor.

Lerner is a 12-year board member of and volunteer for Rock and Wrap It Up!, a Cedarhurst-based nonprofit food-recovery organization that works with more than 70 professional sports franchises, 160 bands and 200 schools to help collect leftover food and deliver it to soup kitchens and homeless shelters across the country.

Rock and Wrap It Up!, founded by former Lawrence School District trustee Syd Mandelbaum in 1994, has served an estimated 1 billion meals. The organization recently began working with the movie and hotel industries to collect not only food, but also toiletries such as shampoo, soap and shaving cream. And it partners with universities such as Columbia and Fordham to collect the mini-refrigerators that many students would otherwise leave in a dumpster when they graduate. Mandelbaum noted that many of the poor have no place to store the food handouts they receive.

“People look to us because we don’t talk. We do,” said Mandelbaum, who gave up his fulltime job as a geneticist and cancer researcher in 2001 to serve as executive director of Rock and Wrap It Up!

Lerner approached Yamali to see whether he was interested in joining the cause. Yamali, who is well-known throughout the Bellmore-Merrick community for his volunteerism, immediately jumped on board. “Without doubt, I’d love to” get involved, he said.

Rock and Wrap It Up! works like this: At any big-name concert or professional sporting event, there are heaping piles of food put out for the performers and athletes that are never eaten, as well as loads of leftovers at the concession stands. In the past, this perfectly good food was thrown away. Rock and Wrap It Up! volunteers now come with refrigerated trucks and haul the food off to the nearest soup kitchen or homeless shelter that partners with the organization. Call it a movable feast for the destitute and the disenfranchised.