AUBURN
When the Bath Daily Times and the Brunswick Record merged and published the first edition of The Times Record on Feb. 6, 1967, the lead story on page 1 read, “Poverty plagues one in four families.”
Now, nearly 48 years later, the problem is far from solved. 
Census Bureau data pegs Maine’s population living in poverty at 13.7 percent in 2013 — or roughly one in seven individuals. It’s slightly better than the national average of 15.4 percent, but that serves as little comfort for those who are struggling to provide for their families.
In addition to housing, food is perhaps the most critical need facing low-income Mainers. Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief charity, estimates there is a 36 million meal gap — or “missing meals” — each year in Maine.
The term “missing meals” refers to meals that are not provided by oneself; public assistance such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as Food Stamps) and Women, Infants and Children; school meals and other programs; or from private sources such as food banks. It is calculated based on the assumption people eat three meals per day. And when resources are not available, those meals are often skipped, or are missing from the daily diet.
Since 1981, Good Shepherd Food-Bank has made it its mission to help “find” those meals.
Clara Whitney, Good Shepherd’s communications and advocacy manager, told The Times Record that through its partner agencies it helped provide 17.5 mil

lion meals in 2014.
“In 2014 we distributed 21 million pounds of food,” she said, noting that was a significant increase in “food out the door” compared to 2013. 
“There is still so much more work to be done,” Whitney said, to curb food insecurity in Maine.
Good Shepherd Food-Bank , the largest hunger relief organization in Maine, partners with about 600 pantries and local groups to provide nutritious food through its locations in Auburn, Biddeford and Brewer. Statewide there are about 60 employees, with about 10-50 volunteers daily, and more than 1,000 unique volunteers a year.
“We have a couple people who are retired who work every day here,” Whitney said during a Jan. 8 tour of the Auburn facility. Others just “come once if there’s a corporate sponsored day. It’s really all over the map.”
Among the volunteer tasks are sorting and processing food donations, and recording inventory.
“Retailers donate nonperishable goods, and every item is inspected for safety,” Whitney said.  
In one room of the cavernous facility, against a backdrop of hundreds of Chiquita banana boxes, volunteers manually inspect every item, examining expiration dates and looking for serious dents and cuts that could have compromised the contents. 
Items deemed unsafe are not discarded quite yet, however. A number of items may still be valuable for local pig farmers, for example, so they are separated out to be given away. Those donations help keep Good Shepherd’s disposal costs down, thus allowing the food bank to devote more resources to helping feed the hungry.
Items that do pass inspection are placed onto a conveyor belt and travel into an adjoining room, Whitney explained, where they are looked over once again before being sorted into boxes. There are about 50 categories of items, such as vegetables, snack foods, pasta, and many more. Items are logged into the computerized inventory, and pallets of similar items are built.

Time to shop

There are several ways that local food pantries can get items from Good Shepherd. 
Larger pantries, like Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program in Brunswick and others that serve hundreds of families each month, can order cases of items online and have pallets ready for pickup at specific time.
Most pantries are much smaller, however, and Whitney said representatives will come by and shop on site at one of its three main locations. 
“Smaller agencies pick through to shop,” she said. “They don’t need the volume and are more in touch with what specific clients need.” 
An example would be families with some special dietary needs, or a particularly large family, which could use a large family pack portion of meat.
In Northern Maine, Good Shepherd partners with Catholic Charities to drop off Aroostook County orders in centralized locations. The volunteers from small pantries scattered throughout the county are then able to replenish their shelves without driving many hours to Brewer and back.
While many pantries have restrictions on who can be served, the Good Shepherd Mobile Pantry Program generally is open to anybody, regardless of economic need or residency.
The mobile food truck, which costs about $1,200 to dispatch, is loaded with 7,000 pounds of Maine-grown produce, meat, dairy, breads, canned fruits and vegetables, pastas and sauces, canned soups and stews, and a variety of snacks.
According to the Good Shepherd website, www.gsfb.org, the truck “allows us to expand our outreach to Maine’s neediest and most underserved families. Designed to be a barrier-free distribution, our mobile pantry visits communities whose demand for emergency and supplemental food has outgrown the capacity of local food pantries.”
The truck, which is specially designed to deliver a mix of frozen, refrigerated and dry grocery goods great distances at safe temperatures, made 120 trips in 2013 and delivered 670,000 pounds of food. 
“It allows us to set up temporary pantries anywhere in the state, and distribute food straight from the truck to the hands of those experiencing food insecurity,” the website explained. 
In 2014, Whitney said, the truck was on the road four or five times a week — every week — visiting partner agencies or other sponsoring community groups.
“Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program and Bath have funds to bring the truck each month,” Whitney explained, “but others apply for grants to get the food mobile.”
Good Shepherd pursues many grants to help fund programs like the food mobile. The $1,200 covers the cost of food as well as the transportation. The truck carries enough food to assist between 200 and 250 families.
MCHPP generally hosts the mobile pantry from 2-4 p.m. on the third Thursday of the month at 84A Union St. in Brunswick. In Bath, the truck is generally available from 2-4 p.m. the last Tuesday of the month at Grace Episcopal Church at 1100 Washington St.   

More bang for the buck

Most pantries receive donations of food throughout the year as a result of food drives. And while those are helpful, the best way to help a local pantry feed the most people is to give cash.
According to Kimberly Gates, executive director of the Bath Food Bank, the biggest need her organization and others have is monetary. 
“Food drives are great,” she said, “but for every dollar donated I can buy $7 worth of food” at Good Shepherd.
Whitney said that pantries spend about $7 million dollars shopping. Good Shepherd also receives food donations valued at about $22 million. 
The organization receives no state funds, and only a small amount to administer a federal feeding program for 3,000 senior citizens. Generally, the organization operates on gifts from individual and corporate donors.   
Pantries are allowed to shop twice a week, but there are sometimes limits set on purchases such as meat, depending on supply.

Buying local

In the past couple of years, Good Shepherd has made a real push to buy as many local goods as possible, cultivating a network of farmers to help ensure that not only will hungry Mainers get food assistance, but that it will be nutritious as well.
“We partner with farmers around the state,” Whitney said. “We want people to eat nutritious food or there are other consequences.”
Independent studies have indicated that a poor diet can contribute to increased health care costs and co-morbidities such as diabetes.
“We purchase from Maine farmers and they donate as well,” she said. “We support the local agricultural economy. In 2014 we bought 1 million pounds of food and farmers donated 1 million more.”
Good Shepherd has been buying local since 2010, and by 2013 was purchasing about 600,000 pounds from farmers.
“Farmers appreciate that we come as guaranteed customers,” Whitney said. She explained that retailers have higher standards, so if the carrots don’t look quite right, those stores might turn to another supplier because they need to have carrots. But Good Shepherd will buy carrots that might be a little too crooked, or just ugly. They taste the same and are still nutritious.
One other benefit to farmers is that the food bank will work with them when a crop fails, or under-performs. If there are no carrots, they might swap for another crop that came in. 
“We just need produce,” Whitney said. “Local and nutritious is what we look for.”

Keeping it cool

The typical food pantry is no longer just a bunch of dented cans on shelves to pick through. 
“We get perishable food from retailers, too,” said Whitney. “We’re moving to where we get more and more perishable food.”
Good Shepherd has a giant freezer and cooler that can accommodate 450 and 160 pallets, respectively. Depending on the product, a pallet could weigh between 1,000 and 3,000 pounds.
Meats are generally frozen when donated by retail grocers such as Hannaford and Shaw’s, so those are stored in the freezer until local pantries purchase them. 
Produce and dairy products are kept in the cooler, and pantry shoppers will walk through selecting the items they need. The freezer is for staff only, so items can be requested from the inventory list.
“We need more freezer and fridge space here and at food pantries,” Whitney said. 
Often times, pantries are limited as to what they can offer by the number of refrigerators and freezers. 
Bath Food Pantry has 14 refrigerators and freezers, for example, but it doesn’t take long to empty them when it serves dozens of families twice a week. Other groups like Mid Coast Hunger Prevention and Freeport Community Services have large walk-in units, but they too are seeing a double-digit increase in visits to the pantry each year.
This fall the organization was able to secure funding to offer grants to pantries to buy cold storage units. 
“We try to find grant funds to build up agency capacity,” Whitney said.  
They do so much more
In addition to supplying food pantries, Good Shepherd also offers a BackPack Program to feed at-risk children on the weekend, school pantries and kids café, and summer feeding programs for youths. 
They also offer Cooking Matters Maine, an educational program that provides low-income people at risk of hunger with hands-on cooking and nutrition classes led by volunteer professional chefs and nutritionists.   
The Cupboard Collective is a cooperative food transportation program. 
The Commodity Supplemental Food Program — known as Senior Brown Bags — works to improve the health of low-income elderly people at least 60 years of age by supplementing their diets with bags of nutritious USDA commodity foods. CSFP food packages do not provide a complete diet, but rather are good sources of the nutrients typically lacking in the diets of the target population.
As families see food stamp benefits shrink, and the cost of food continue to rise, it will likely mean a steady increase in visits to local food pantries and other hunger relief programs. To be part of the solution in Maine, contact your local food pantry or Good Shepherd to ask about volunteer opportunities or how to make a monetary donation that will translate to $7 of food for every dollar. 

dmadore@timesrecord.com

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