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Friday, July 27, 2007

Fifth in a 7-day series

They are an army of angels, wings folded and feet firmly planted on the linoleum floors of damp basements, on the wooden floors of musty old Catholic school classrooms, on the concrete floors of back storage spaces in shabby country churches.

They are the volunteers who work in the warren of dark and shadowy rooms that make up the state’s food pantries, whose shelves are filled with boxes and cans — macaroni and cheese, Alaskan salmon, instant mashed potatoes, more macaroni and cheese, beans, hot dogs, baloney, cereal, corn, raisins, rice, blueberries.

Nancy Marcoux, a brisk and cheerful grandmother of 63, is one of those angels.

Marcoux is sitting in the closet of an office she uses in the Fairfield Interfaith Food Pantry, which she runs. Growing up in Skowhegan in the 1940s and 1950s, she says, “If we were hungry then, we didn’t know it. We all had big gardens, went hunting and fishing, we canned, did more stuff for ourselves.

Now, Marcoux lives in a different world.

It’s a world where parents can’t feed their children, where seniors who have worked all their lives don’t have enough money for groceries, where sudden illness or emergency can take a well-stocked pantry and strip it bare. Where even if you have a job, you aren’t guaranteed enough to eat and where the indignity of asking others to feed you and your family is a constant in far too many people’s lives.

It’s a world that desperately counts on people like Nancy Marcoux.

Now, she spends most of her waking hours helping feed her neighbors who don’t have enough food.

Now, she’s never far from a phone where someone can reach her, either to tell her of another family that needs help, or of an unexpected donation of ice cream, meat or vegetables that must be picked up within two hours or it will be forfeited.

Now, Marcoux says, more and more of the people in the communities around her — people with jobs, with educations, but with diminished opportunities, resources and hope — just can’t make it work.

“They’ll come in and say, ‘I never thought in my life that I’d have to come to a food pantry,’” says Marcoux.

The people she serves are hungry, she says, and their children are hungry. They don’t have the money or the time or even the know-how to feed their families and their pride has turned to shame as they line up for boxes of food at the Fairfield Interfaith Food Pantry that Marcoux runs.

“I tell you, it breaks your heart,”she says. “You can help them so much but you can’t always meet their needs. We do the best we can.”

In Fairfield’s food pantry, that’s meant trying to feed anywhere from 300 to 400 people a month in 2006. Ten years before, in 1996, the pantry fed from 144 people a month up to a maximum of about 300. In the early days of food pantries, the food given out was designed to last one week, under the long-held theory advanced by both federal and state agencies that among wages, food stamps and public assistance, people will only need extra food one week a month. But now, Marcoux says, people have to make that extra food stretch even further — because they’re running out of the food they can afford to pay for earlier.

“We have people saying it’s lasting them two to three weeks,” she says.

“We’ve just kept growing,” says Marcoux. “Oil prices, gas prices, the price of housing, the price of food — I think people have gotten behind on oil or electricity, they don’t know where to turn. One man came in and said, ‘My wife didn’t want me to come. We both have jobs — we just can’t feed our kids.’ ”

A WORK OF LOVE

It would be easy to say that Marcoux is a notable example of the kind of volunteer who works at the state’s growing number of food pantries, because she is. But she’s got a lot of company — they’re all notable, these people who show a fierce and committed drive to feed the hungry strangers they live among. If they were only women, you could call it a maternal imperative — that no child, no one’s child, however old they are, should go without food. But they are women and men, and they are equally determined to see that each person who comes to them has the dignity of enough food in their stomach.

Average age? Late 60s and early 70s. Average wage? Zero. Average motivation? “It’s hard to describe the feeling you get when you give out food,” says one volunteer. “It’s a calling,” says another. “It’s a work of love,” says Nancy Marcoux.

And there are many of them. In a state hungry for good economic news, the ironic fact is that serving food to the hungry is a booming business. As mills close and Maine’s economy shifts from high-paid industrial jobs to lower-paid service sector employment, food pantries are a growing sector with a growing market. They help those who, both out-of-work and working, can’t afford to feed their families.

But like the people they serve, the food pantries are struggling to keep up with a demand that’s impossible to satisfy.

According to the Good Shepherd Food Bank, which is the Auburn charity that buys or collects and then distributes reduced-cost food to hundreds of state food pantries, the number of food banks in Maine has grown from 430 in 2005 to 600 now, a 40 percent increase. In 2002, Good Shepherd distributed 8.4 million pounds of food; this year, they project they’ll distribute 10 million pounds, which is an almost 20 percent increase.

Loaves and Fishes, the food pantry in Albion, is one of the new operations. The idea for it took hold when Myrna and Russell Hamm, members of the Albion Christian Church, visited a nearby food pantry.

“It was a big eye-opener,” says Russell Hamm. “It’s hard to understand that there’s a problem, even though it’s right in front of you. I used to go to my credit union in Waterville and stand there in line and see the box with the label ‘End hunger in Maine.’ It never really registers how important that is.”

It didn’t register for the Hamms that when the label said, “End hunger in Maine,” it really meant “End hunger in your own backyard.” That’s because the Hamms didn’t realize that right in their town, right under their own noses, their own neighbors were hungry.

That changed, dramatically, when the Hamms went to the China Food Pantry. That’s when “End hunger in Maine” turned personal because standing in line at the China Food Pantry were a lot of Albion residents.

“In our own home town there was upwards of 80 people being served by another town’s food pantry,” says Russell, shaking his head.

“That wasn’t right.”

Russell Hamm is no stranger to hunger in his own life.

“I was hungry as a kid,” he says. “You don’t think of it at the time, those memories are way back, but I went to school without any food.”

So the Hamms, working with Pastor Tim Murdock and a number of volunteers from the church, got the Albion pantry up and running in late January of this year. There were more surprises in store for them.

EVEN WORKING PEOPLE

“We get retirees, veterans, people who thought they’d done it right,” says Russell Hamm. “We gets heads of household who are the working poor.”

Those people include one family that lives far down a dirt road in Albion. On the Thursday before Easter, the Hamms told their food pantry clients that they had extra boxes of food for the holiday. But a snowstorm made it impossible for that particular family to get out to pick up the food.

“She couldn’t get off of her road,” says Myrna Hamm. So the Hamms delivered the box instead. “We have an old plastic toboggan,” says Myrna, “we put the box on the plastic toboggan, their kids each grabbed a string and down the road they went.”

What the Hamms relate anecdotally about the characteristics of their clients is borne out by the results of a national survey on hunger conducted by America’s Second Harvest, the national food bank network, in 2006. They found that 36 percent of the households getting food from pantries and soup kitchens have at least one member who is working. And while two-thirds of the families have incomes below the official federal poverty level, one-third earned above that level.

For many people who come to the Albion food pantry, the fact that they’re working and still can’t afford to feed their families adequately is humiliating, says Russell Hamm. “The men will sit in the car,” he says, “and they would send their wives in to get food. If you’re a woman, you’ll do anything to get your kids food.”

And while food pantries are supposed to determine income levels and what food benefits you already get when you apply for their assistance, lots of them find those rules hard to enforce.

“They don’t have to prove what they make,” says Marcoux. “It’s between them and God. We’re not asking a lot of questions; it’s hard enough to come in here without getting the third degree.”

While the demand is growing for Maine’s food pantries — in Wilton, the local food pantry served 13 percent more people last year than the year before — the supply is not keeping pace.

LESS SURPLUS FOOD

The federal government has cut back the amount of food it supplies to the state’s pantries and soup kitchens. Despite significantly growing demand, in 2006 Maine got a little more than half of the emergency food assistance from the feds that it got in 2004. That concerns Randy Mraz, a soft-spoken, middle-aged state employee who distributes the federal emergency food provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Mraz works out of a large warehouse-like building on the eastern side of the Kennebec River in Augusta, where the shelves that are supposed to be filled with surplus food are unsettlingly bare.

“They just cancelled another order,” says Mraz, grimly, leaning back in his desk chair. “The USDA bears some responsibility as far as lack of food. The USDA has had a pretty good level of support. Then, they pulled the rug out from under us.”

In the last five years, says Mraz, the value of the USDA food sent to Maine for the hungry dropped from $2.39 million to $1.16 million.

Quietly, Mraz says, “There’s really never enough.”

In western Maine’s food pantries, administrators and volunteers say they’re now getting much less of the federal food they used to get five years ago. The number of cases of surplus commodity food delivered from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to Franklin County fell from 15,544 in 2004 to 5,935 in 2006.

And what food pantries are getting and giving out isn’t as good or nutritious as it has been in the past.

“We’re getting zero percent of the meat we used to get,” says Johnnie Buchanan, who coordinates the area food pantries’ administration through the Western Mountain Community Action agency in Farmington. That’s the case over at the food pantry and soup kitchen operated in Brunswick by Midcoast Hunger Prevention, too. Coordinator Terry Howell walks through the back storage rooms of her long, low building in downtown Brunswick, surveying the shelves.

“Six years ago,” she says, “you got cheese, even peanut butter, chicken, frozen meats. The protein isn’t there like it used to be. Instead, it’s blueberries, cranberry sauce. That’s not a meal, though we’re glad to have it.”

That reflects a national trend: The surplus food program distributes commodities that the federal government buys when their price falls too low for farmers to make it. But lately, commodity prices have been high, and thus they have sold on the open market and appear on supermarket shelves instead of in food pantries. In a document leaked by concerned Department of Agriculture employees, they detailed how the surplus food program distributed nationally $240 million worth of commodities in 2004 — and only $77 million worth in 2006.

Supermarkets were formerly a major and consistent source of surplus food donations to food pantries. But as computerized inventory control systems have gotten more efficient, those amounts are projected to diminish significantly, if they haven’t already.

“We’ve been told we will be getting less and less surplus food,” says Rick Small, director of Auburn’s Good Shepherd Food Bank. “What’s good business for them is terrible for us ... more and more we will have to buy food.”

Good Shepherd is already buying more cut-rate surplus food through food brokers than they have in the past, as well as relying on more donation drives than ever before.

In Portland, the charity Preble Street operates the largest food pantry and soup kitchen in the state and has been hit hard by the growing demand for food coupled with a diminishing supply, says Elena Schmidt, head of the food pantry.

In the old days, says Schmidt, supermarkets were much more likely to order more food than they could sell — and then donate what they couldn’t sell. That’s not the case any longer.

“They’re not buying anything they don’t need now,” she says.

Coupled with the loss of a significant amount of federal food, that means bare cupboards, says Schmidt. “We used to be able to walk into our food pantry and see stacks and stacks of USDA food. Last year, we looked at our food pantry shelves and they were empty, empty!”

And as local food processors have shut down, the donations they once made to the hungry have ceased. No more sardine canneries, no more corn shops, not as many local bakeries — all of which, on a Friday afternoon, used to set out their damaged or broken goods for the taking.

So where do food pantries get their food? And where will they get it in the future if the demand keeps growing and the traditional sources diminish?

At Portland’s Preble Street, they used to do food drives once a year; now they do them every month. At Fairfield’s food pantry and many others in the state, they get the majority of their food for 16 cents a pound from the Good Shepherd Food Bank, but also from “kids, churches, mail carriers” and a variety of other food drives, says Nancy Marcoux.

“We’re going to the well over and over again,” says Preble Street’s Mark Swann.

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED

Finally, there’s a looming shortage of another kind for the state’s food pantries: volunteers. The national food bank network America’s Second Harvest issued a comprehensive survey of U.S. food pantries in 2006. In it, they estimated that 66 percent of food pantry programs rely entirely on volunteers.

The Fairfield Interfaith Food Pantry has 70 volunteers, says head Nancy Marcoux, who herself serves unpaid.

“And I’m young for this,” says Marcoux. “I’m 63. A lot of them are in their 70s.”

The food pantries try to recruit new and younger volunteers, but they’re not signing up. That threatens the food pantries’ viability.

“So many well-meaning groups, almost always churches, start up in rural areas,” says Preble Street’s director Mark Swann. “They’re usually an older group that can’t sustain themselves. It’s hard work to keep these kinds of programs going.”

Which leads to the question: Who will feed the state’s hungry when this generation of food pantry volunteers moves on? What will they feed them? And these two crucial questions beg the more fundamental question: Should this country and this state rely on charity to put food in the mouths of Maine’s families?

Tomorrow: Can’t afford green peppers.

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