Spaghetti, Spaghetti, You're Wonderful Stuff!

This morning we reported to duty at the food co-op. The food co-op spun off from the Crossroads Urban Center several years ago. Families can buy a share or shares, and the co-op purchases food on their behalf from local and regional growers, bakers, and farmers. The food is distributed from the co-op to neighborhood sites around the city. Saturday is food distribution day, and we will help with that. Today, though, we were helping get ready for Saturday. Frozen meat can be sorted in advance and counted for each distribution site. The kids in the freezer were helping with that. (We had been asked to bring parkas and mittens, and they needed them!) Others of us did some office work, collating and counting fliers and order slips.




Then, after eating our brown bag lunches at the food co-op, we drove up the road to the Utah Food Bank. It is just two blocks away. The food bank is the central location for food donations in the city. They get donations from local food drives by local groups, from local businesses, from grocery stores, and the government. Then they distribute the food among local food pantries, including Crossroads, where we worked yesterday. Food pantries may also sponsor their own food drives, especially in recent months, as demand has increased. No family or individual collects their food from the food bank directly.

It was very interesting to learn about the entire food distribution system, from the food bank to the food pantry and the food co-op, which is another opportunity for individuals and families to get food at a very low price. Also, the food bank sponsors hot meals for kids after school and a "backpack" program in which kids were receive free lunches are given food to take home with them for the weekend (in a backpack). We were all impressed with the creative ways that these caring people are trying to meet the needs of the hungry in the community.

The food back is a huge operation. We did our small part by helping weigh and bag spaghetti--hundreds of pounds of it--that had been donated in bulk and needed to be broken down into family-size portions (two pounds). We worked with a youth group from Arvada on this project. Later we helped a girls' group from a local church sort canned and boxed goods. The quanity of food we handled seemed overwhelming, and yet we know that it only meets a few families' needs for a few days. We got a good idea of the scale on which this kind of assistance needs to take place.


Tomorrow we will visit the UMCOR depot, which is right beside the food co-op. We will deliver our school kits, donated by St. Paul's, and we will also do more work at the food co-op, possibly in the freezer again. In the evening we will have a workshop about living in poverty, which should help us understand better the needs of the people these agencies serve. We are learning so much here.

--Rebecca