Food Pantry Blog – In the Pantry Room on Wednesday Afternoons
We want to prevent waste and build community. Why throw away perfectly good food? There are hungry people who could really use it right now.” – Nancy Hahn
Rich Allen walked to the door of the Woodstock Reformed Church. “Will the first five people in line please come in now?”
For me, this was always a sacramental moment.
I stood at the door to the pantry room. “Is anyone signed in?”
As soon as a person was signed in s/he was invited into the pantry. Shoppers continued to enter the pantry as soon as they were signed in until the room’s total was four shoppers. When this happened, the persons waited in the hallway until a person finished and left the pantry. Then the next person in line was called in. This pace continued nonstop until the pantry closed at 7:00. We kept the room at a maximum of four shoppers all afternoon because there was always a line.
People shopped for the two to three minutes it took to go around the room and then left. In that short time they chose from about thirty different kinds of canned goods and whatever fresh foods were available. We rarely ran out of the fresh foods because we brought as much back from Latham as we could carry.
With four shoppers and one to two volunteers in this small room, there was no room to turn around, back up, or retrace one’s steps. The produce boxes were piled high along the four walls in front of the shelves. They held the bounty from the drive to the Food Banks. The shoppers filed through the pantry very quickly. A slow shopper might even stop the line for a few moments. As the people edged around the room with not even an inch of free space, empty boxes were sailing out of the room to be caught by Tony Cannistra, Bob Otto, or Richard and Robert Allen.
Thanks for reading this blog/book.
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Peace and food for all.
Thurman
Food Pantry Blog: Guidelines for a Successful Pantry Visit
“But the most careful lives can be derailed – by cancer, a huge medical bill, a freak slap of weather, a massive failure of the potato crop. Virtue cannot prevent a “bad hand” from being dealt. And making the poor out to be lazy, or dependent, or stupid, does not make them less poor. It only makes the person saying such a thing feel superior.” – Timothy Egan
Try to arrive an hour or so before the pantry opens. This makes for a long wait but there’s a better selection right when the pantry opens. Also, while you’re waiting in line, you have an opportunity to make new friends and learn a few new survival skills if you’re new to the pantry experience.
Bring your own shopping bags. Some pantries don’t have enough of these necessary items.
Bring some ID. Some pantries require a lot: picture ID, proof of address, proof that other family members exist. This can be a bit of a challenge if you’re homeless. Two things you need to know: No one can ask to see your social security number. Some pantries require no identification.
Be prepared to wait in a line. Use this time to meet your line neighbors. They can be helpful if you’re trying to navigate your way through Department of Social Services, if you’re being foreclosed on, need your car repaired.
As you wait in line, try to learn how the pantry works from those around you in the line. You’ll want to know how long you’ll be in the shopping room, what foods are usually found on the shelves, what other pantries the people shop at, etc.
Don’t be afraid to let people know you’ve never been to a pantry before.
Once you find a pantry you can use, go every time you’re allowed. With luck, you’ll have a pantry in your area allowing weekly visits. Because pantry shopping takes so much time, shoppers sometimes just don’t go if they still have SNAP card money or if they have a few bucks remaining from a paycheck. Your best bet is to visit a pantry as often as you’re allowed. Most pantries have different food every week and you may miss out on some real savings by not shopping regularly.
Pantry shopping requires a totally new approach to cooking. So does cooking with only an electric skillet or microwave. Some pantries have periodic visits from nutritionists. Don’t be shy about asking him/her for any tips you might be able to use to help this adjustment easier for you. The nutritionist knows a lot about the food you are trying to cook with and s/he can answer any questions you have.
You may see fresh fruits and vegetables you don’t recognize. Be open to new taste experiences. Take the food home, find a cookbook at the library or go on the net and learn how to prepare the food. If you take one new food home each week, your kitchen skills will be vastly different in a year from what they are now.
Be open minded about this experience.
You’re going to be interacting with people you never thought in your wildest dreams that you would be around.
Know that most people in pantries, both volunteers and shoppers, are in a reconstructing and healing mode. We may not know it yet, but life is finally getting better for all of us.
Try to volunteer at your pantry. Volunteering at a pantry or soup kitchen offers you an opportunity to give of yourself. Giving away food and sharing smiles with those around you opens up opportunities you never thought possible. Your life is changing, healing. Give yourself the opportunity to go with this journey.
Sometimes people cry in the pantry. Well, it’s okay. Everyone cries at one time or another in the pantry, including me. This tells us all that the pantry is a safe place to be.
Peace and food for all.
Thank you for reading this blog/book.
Please share this post on your preferred social network.
Thurman Greco
Leaving the Past Behind – Karen
Sometimes, leaving the past behind meant leaving the pantry. Karen was a regular volunteer in the pantry.
“Hi. Welcome to the pantry. How’re you doing today? Can you please sign your name here?”
She was always punctual, She was courteous, professional, friendly.
“The line is going fast this afternoon. Also, we’ve got a lot of green beans and organic spinach salad.”
She remembered peoples’ names. In short, Karen was pretty close to being a perfect volunteer. She was a strong supporter of the pantry.
Then, in the fall, I taught a series of Reiki therapy classes to the pantry volunteers. I tried to do this yearly because I felt the Reiki therapy helped the pantry, the volunteers, and me. Besides, I loved teaching Reiki therapy and I loved being with the volunteers as they learned it.
I knew 15 minutes after the Reiki 1 class started that things were going to be dramatically different for her forever.
Everyone who takes a Reiki therapy class experiences a life change. For most Reiki practitioners the change is slow, subtle, gentle. Some aren’t even aware of what’s happening. Karen took the Reiki 1 class. She took the Reiki 2 class. She took the Reiki 3 class. Several months went by and she took one of my advanced classes. Well, Karen could have taught that class hands down. Every subject that I brought up was one that she had experienced.
One afternoon Karen came to say good-bye to the pantry. Her life had been changed by both the pantry and the Reiki therapy. What more could we ask for?
We still occasionally see her. She drops by to volunteer in the pantry when she has a lull in her Reiki therapy sessions with clients.
Thank you Karen for all you give to those around you.
Peace and food for all.
Thank you for reading this blog/book.
Please share this post with your preferred social network.
Thurman Greco
Food Pantry Blog: The Silver Tongued Devil of the Food Pantry
Bob Otto came to volunteering through the back door. He worked as the sexton of the Woodstock Reformed Church, a job he took very seriously. It was, however, a parttime position and he volunteered at the pantry when he wasn’t working in the building.
Bob unloaded food when we had deliveries.
Bob worked to keep the line together in the hallway.
Bob distributed frozen food in the barn.
Bob raised funds for the pantry one summer at the entrance of the Mower’s Meadow Flea Market. He stood there every Saturday and Sunday selling raffle tickets. Singlehandedly, Box raised over $3,000.
Bob worked at our monthly food drives at the Sunflower Natural Foods Market. He stood at the entrance of the Sunflower with a large milk pitcher and asked everyone who came to the door to make a donation. The people loved it. They walked right up to him with their wallets and purses open.
As volunteers we all had our jobs cut out for us. We called Bob our “Silver Tongued Devil.”
Beyond the work we gave, the pantry encouraged us to leave the past behind. Events in the pantry seemed to demand that we interact closely with people we didn’t even know. Further, the pantry activities orchestrated healing on some level. Then, as this happened, this transformation resulted in a new person.
And, for Bob, this was very real. One day we heard an announcement. The building committee members were unhappy with his performance. Nobody ever determined whether he quit or was dismissed. But what we did determine, however, was that his participation in food pantry activities was smack dab in the middle of the event.
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Please share this post, the story of Bob, on your preferred social network.
Thank you.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
No Box Was Too Large. No Line Was Too Long.
Our 99-pound wonder, Leticia, seemed to the casual observer to not be a candidate for heavy lifting. However, she always arrived on Tuesday mornings promptly at 9:00 ready for action.
Leticia knew how to stock a pantry, that’s for sure. She would look around the empty pantry room, figure out what was needed on the shelves and proceed to go back to the storeroom and get it. No case was too heavy. No box was too large. Leticia was a tiny Latina whirlwind who gave energy to all of us. She also had a technique for stacking things on their sides so we could get more food on the shelves. The pantry was so small and the hours available to us were so few that we had to be able to get enough of an item on a shelf to last the two days the pantry was open. Leticia worked frantically in the pantry every Tuesday morning stocking as many of the shelves as possible in preparation for the Anderson guys.
When Leticia finished packing a shelf, we couldn’t even get a paperclip in the extra space. Go Leticia!
Thanks for reading this post. Tomorrow you’ll get to know Bad Back Bob.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock
Grocers, & Manufacturers Can Get By With A Lot Fewer Dumpsters If They Donate The Food And Let The Food Bank Truck Come By And Pick It Up.
All these donations going to food pantries, shelters, etc., are a real two-way street. Donating food is a break-even proposition for manufacturers.
To my way of thinking, it’s more advantageous for a farmer, grocer, or food manufacturer to donate the food to a Food Bank. All the food coming into the Food Bank has been diverted from a landfll. One advantage (or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it) to donating the food is that there are fewer dumpsters for people to dive in.
Some months I’d be lucky and get maybe 80% of what I needed. Other months I would get next to nothing that I needed. When that happened, I thought ahead and got what was available. Hands down, the most challenging month to get food was August because the food drives and food donations are seasonal. I finally decided that food donations are down in the late summer because nobody thinks of Food Banks and Pantries when they’re on vacation. One August, I bought 25 cases of water because I could get them and everything else was either scarce or nonexistent. That water came in very handy after Hurricane Sandy visited.
The Food Banks send out refrigerated trucks to pick up the excess. They get it to the warehouse where volunteers sort it and make it available to agencies as quickly as possible. The goal is to feed the hungry with the excess.
The second most challenging month is December. The first two Decembers I was the coordinator were dismal in the pantry because I hadn’t yet learned how to stockpile the food in advance. I was unprepared for this because, for one thing, I didn’t even have a storeroom to put the food in.
When the months were lean at the pantry, I made extra trips to Latham and returned with fresh produce. Fresh fruits and vegetables covered “a lot of ills” in the pantry because the shoppers didn’t have the money to buy fresh foods and they were always hungry for something fresh.
Thanks so much for reading about the food pantry.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
The Food Coming to Our Pantry from the Food Bank Has Been Diverted From a Landfill
There’s absolutely no excuse for anyone in our great country to go hungry.
The third category was Donated Food. This was usually canned or boxed food in really good condition which manufacturers couldn’t sell or supermarkets had overstocked.
All the cans had labels in good condition and none of the cans were dented.
Popular donated items included Barilla Pasta, Breyer’s Ice Cream, Cheez-It Crackers, Chobani Yogurt, Hellman’s Mayonnaise, Hunt’s Products, Kellogg’s Cereals, Lipton Teas, Nestea, Pepsi products, Progresso Soup, Suave Shampoos, Tide soap, Triscuit Crackers, V-8 Juices.
Co-op was the fourth category. The food in this category was offered at more or less grocery store prices. Coop food supplements the donated food inventory. The Coop food enables the Food Bank to have an inventory which meets the needs of the agencies. Except for toilet paper and eggs, I rarely bought from this category because our pantry simply couldn’t afford the costs. Even so, the eggs were a few cents cheaper than anywhere else and the toilet paper was important to the households with no funds.
Eggs were always a challenge. They’re only available through the pantry in the Co-op section of the catalogue. They were rarely in the refrigerator case at the Food Bank when we went for produce and dairy products weekly. Purchasing the eggs locally was hard because we needed about 150-200 dozen eggs at a time. My main source when we couldn’t connect with the food bank was Aldi. They were about the only store that really didn’t care how many dozen eggs we bought. Price Chopper in Saugerties was a real lifesaver a couple of times also.
One winter I was having a really tough time getting soup. Then, Progresso donated a large load of soup to the Food Bank. Hurrah! After hurricane Sandy, ConAgra sent a generous load of canned goods to the food bank. To this day, two favorite words in my vocabulary are Progresso and ConAgra.
Thanks for reading these Food Bank posts. I hope they’re answering questions for you. Tomorrow’s post will begin with a discussion of dumpster diving and months when we had almost nothing.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
In The Food Pantry Blog, It’s All About Respect
“In the new millennium, our world requires us more than ever to accept the oneness of humanity.” – His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Different religions approach hunger and feeding the hungry in different ways. Christians cannot have pantries without invoking the name of Jesus.
For the Jewish pantry worker, feeding the hungry is more about doing good works…doing good for its own sake. Jews, of course, aren’t concerned with communion. There’s no reward or paying back.
The Woodstock Jewish Congregation took its turn in the pantry twice yearly. At first, when we were struggling with getting cars to caravan the monthly shipment over from Kingston, congregation members formed a caravan of cars and SUVs to bring the food over. Congregation members volunteered to work in the pantry during the month.
One month, Richard Spool simply showed up with lumber and all the tools needed to build foundation platforms for our shelving in the storeroom. He came into the storeroom, did all the work necessary to build absolutely perfect platforms and then left, personifying the feeling I got from the congregation members that their job at the pantry was to do what needed to be done and then, at the end of the month, melt away into the community and remain anonymous until their next turn. There was no quibbling about the pantry serving the unworthy hungry. None of the volunteers even seemed to be on the lookout for the unworthy hungry.
Richard must have liked being in the pantry because, several months later, he joined our board and became the treasurer.
Many of the volunteers left checks in my hand as they went out the door for the last time at the end of their “tour”. They were gracious, cheerful, smart, capable, wonderful. I could not have asked for a better group of volunteers. As a group, I adore Jewish Women. I’m convinced that, as a group, there’s nothing they cannot do.
Thank you for reading this post.
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Food Pantry Blog: The Church in the Basement
“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” – Matthew 25:35
Every week the pantry attracted several hundred people to the basement of the Woodstock Reformed Church. People experienced community, gratitude, healing and shared food. The isolation often felt by the hungry and homeless was diminished somewhat in the pantry. In fact, the pantry changed all of us for the better. For me, that was church. It was the best attended service in that building each week. In the basement, no less.
This basement pantry opened every Tuesday morning as we prepared and delivered the take outs, and Wednesday and Thursday afternoons when we served groceries to shoppers lined up in the hallway and outside the building. We found ceremony hidden in the way we processed the shoppers through the rooms.
An Episcopalian Priest once told me that the only thing we really know about Jesus was that He fed the hungry. He fed the hungry and then He said to those around him “Now you feed them.”
And, to my mind, that’s what communion is all about: serving everyone who comes.
And, of course, that brings up a whole other issue. As people go down the path to the pantry, they begin to lose things. Life becomes less complicated. One of the downsides of this newfound simplicity is that people become isolated and somewhat cutoff from their communities. As the money goes, many activities go also, one of them being the weekly visit to a church or synagogue. Church/synagogue becomes too expensive, not only for the tithing but also for the other things needed: clothes to wear to the services and other activities, money for the collection plate, things to donate to projects, fellowship activities.
Circumstances encourage congregations to discourage families and individual members at the moment they need it the most. As people no longer fit in, their presence is discouraged. It appears the congregations don’t want anyone to disrupt the ceremony and spiritual solitude in any way.
The closest many shoppers ever got to a church or synagogue service was the pantry line in the basement of the Woodstock Reformed Church. There was a very definite hunger for spiritual connection.
A food pantry is another way of having a religious service. The sharing of the food is the prayer. The distribution of food in the pantry was a spiritual transaction.
Each week I opened the pantry when I unlocked the outside door with a key. The building, housing a beautiful, empty sanctuary was kept locked. The sanctuary was kept locked also. As a pantry volunteer, we were allowed only in the part of the hallway where the pantry and storeroom were located.
In this part of the hallway, shoppers waited for over an hour sometimes in a cramped space to sign their name so they could enter into an even more crowded room to select a 3-day supply of food which they had to make last 7 days.
More than once I heard people ask if they could sit in the sanctuary for a moment. “Sorry. The sanctuary is locked.” I always replied.
Sadly, more than once I heard people in the hallway discussing the beautiful sanctuary, the historical church building. When this happened I always heard the comment: “I hear very few people come to this church anymore.”
Peace and food for all.
Thurman Greco
Woodstock, NY
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