Pantry Duty


You’re not supposed to call it a “Food Bank”. Technically our town has only a “Food Pantry”—Food Banks are bigger and offer more services. Whatever you call it, it does its job. There are a number of people in town who have reason to be glad it’s there.

The Food Pantry is supported through local cash and food donations. It gets some items, like rice, from the regional Food Bank. And it is open several nights a week with volunteer staff. The community service club I joined a while back is one of the Food Pantry’s supporters. So recently I volunteered there for the first time.

The Pantry is located in two rooms in the back of a local church. This church has hosted the Pantry since it first opened in the 1950s. The first room has a row of chairs where clients can sit while waiting, shelves containing donated books and magazines that are free to Food Pantry clients, and a tiny desk where the director sets up a laptop computer for processing. Most of the people who come in on a given evening are already in the system. Anybody who comes as a client has to present a photo ID and a current physical home address. With some clients the addresses changes rather often.

Across the hall is the second room containing the groceries. A block of wooden shelves in the middle of the room holds most of the canned and dry goods. More shelves against the far wall hold jugs of fruit drinks, bottled water, and paper products. There are also two big refrigerators for perishables. There is just enough room to push around a shopping cart.

Little labels on the shelves provide guidelines for what clients are entitled to take, based on family size. A household of 1-2 people may receive:

1 small jar of peanut butter
1 jar of jelly 1 can of tomato sauce
1 package of spaghetti
4 cans of soup
1 can of tuna
6 bottles of water
4 cans of vegetables
1 pound of rice
2 cans of fruit
1 box of crackers
1 bag of dry beans
1 box of instant potatoes
2 cans of beans
1 dozen eggs
1 box of cereal
½ gallon of milk
1 loaf of bread
1 gallon of fruit drink
12 rolls of toilet paper
4 rolls of paper towels
2 pounds of frozen meat

An active individual like me could run through most of that in about two weeks. Clients are allowed to come once a month. Any other needs they have must be handled through Social Security, disability, or any other sources the client can find.

It used to be the case that clients could only obtain aid once every few months. But they have more food available now. Some clients come only once or twice in emergencies. Some use the Pantry regularly. Remarkably enough, given the state of the nation’s economy, use has actually gone down somewhat in recent months.

The evening’s first client was a cheerful-looking older man who was content to sit and let us do the shopping for him. The Pantry’s director showed me where everything was located and filled me in on the guidelines. I gathered up the groceries and wheeled them out to the man’s battered old sedan. The door’s high threshold and the worse-for-wear concrete walk made pushing the cart awkward. I had to pop two wheelies with it to get it back inside.

“I bet this car’s older than you are,” the client observed as I helped him load the goods into the trunk. It was a ’78 model. That put his estimate of my age a good decade off. He made some observations about the weather, the mockingbird in a nearby tree, and the bluebird down the alley. His eyes must still be better than mine, because I could not tell that that was a bluebird.

Meanwhile the director had been helping the second client, a woman who had come on her bicycle. She had to make three round trips to her nearby apartment to haul everything. She recognized me as being from the library. I recognized her too—the year before last we had caught her trying to steal a backpack full of library magazines. We declined to prosecute when the police got involved and she surrendered her loot. She doesn’t come around the library as much any more.

The third client was an elderly man who couldn’t get around very well. He wanted to come around the shelves with me anyway to shop. Clients can do that if they like. There’s enough variety of fruits, soups, etc. that they can exercise some choice. This man was evidently a somewhat picky eater. He declined to take a number of the items he might have taken. He was glad for the canned mixed vegetables. He had gotten a deer during the season a couple of months back and planned to use the canned vegetables with some venison and potatoes to make stew. He made it sound so good I felt like going to eat at his house.

He had come in an old pickup truck. He told me how he had bought it a few years earlier for $200 dollars. It needed a new gas tank and a fuel pump to make it drivable. He had had to try three fuel pumps before finding one that worked. I also learned that he was 74, had survived a narrow escape from an embolism some years earlier, and was widowed in 2003. He obviously wasn’t in any hurry. I didn’t try to rush him. He probably does not get a lot of opportunities to get out and talk to people.

The director had taken care of the fourth client, a woman. After this we visited for a while. I learned a few more things about the Pantry’s operation, about their guidelines for culling questionable merchandise, and about their “watch list”. This had the names of people who try to game the system through such ruses as claiming the same children or submitting multiple claims for one household.

A youngish man came in with no ID. The director politely insisted that he must present some. He went out to get it. While he was gone the director’s husband and two children arrived. I soon learned that he had come from New Mexico, where my mother had grown up. We had a nice little conversation about some of the wonderful sights in “The Land of Enchantment.”

The fifth client came back with his ID. I helped him shop. When I asked him whether he wanted tuna, he let slip that he would get some because his dad liked it. That implied that the household had more people than he had declared. When I rolled the shopping cart out to the car where his mother waited, she took him to task for being lazy and letting me do it for him. He tried to redeem his honor by rolling the cart back inside. The director noted as they left that his mother was the same woman whom she had helped a little earlier. Here was somebody else for the watch list.

A few minutes later closing time arrived. I said goodbye to the director and her family while she closed up. I was ready to go home to my own supper.

The evening had given me some food too—food for thought. We had had five clients. All were obviously needy. Two of the five had tried to take unfair advantage by claiming twice for one household. I wonder whether that’s a normal proportion when it comes to providing aid of this sort. I suppose it’s the price we pay for helping those who truly need it.