Food Pantry

I've been working one morning a week at the local food pantry. It operates out of the basement of a Methodist Church in the neighborhood. I spend about 4 hours there, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., or later.




There are seven or eight different jobs you can do there, and when I first started volunteering, I was mostly put on the box brigade. For 4 hours, I cut up food boxes as they were emptied, and stuffed the cut up pieces into another box. When the box is full, it's carried away and another box is begun. Eventually the boxes full of boxes are taken to a recycling point, or just carried out to the trash. It's not exciting work, but it's steady, and it's gratifying to stay caught up.



For the past few weeks I've been rotated around to other jobs. The layout of the pantry is like this: every family unit that comes in the door gets a number, so there's somebody who passes out numbers. I actually did that the first week I volunteered, because they weren't sure I was able to count and wanted to see me in action.

When the person's number is called, they have a sit-down interview with one of two ladies who check their ID, look them up in the card file, and make sure they haven't been at the food pantry before in that calendar month. The ladies fill out a small slip of paper that contains information about the number of people in the family unit, how many children, whether they have cooking facilities, whether they're homeless, etc. It's all material to how much and what kind of food they should be given. The annotation "No Pork" means the family is Muslim. That slip of paper is passed on to the caller.

The food is packed into plastic grocery bags at several work stations behind the caller, and the caller lets each workstation know how many people and how many children are in the next unit to be packed. There is a unit that packs only U.S. Government donated food. There is a unit that packs cereal, spaghettios, canned vegetables, macaroni and cheese, peanut butter and jelly, tuna fish, and whatever other types of "non-perishable" packaged food we have. There's a unit (sometimes it's so big that it's two units) that packs fresh fruits and vegetables, frozen meat, cheese, eggs, and other produce that is donated by local stores (close to expiration date) or purchased from the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

Finally, there's a work station that bags junk food. This is candy that didn't sell and is near its expiration date, or test marketed candy that didn't sell. It's also bottles of "energy drink" (water, sugar, caffeine, artificial flavoring) that didn't sell. People are hungry, so we give them energy drinks. But hey, it's donated by the same people who donate eggplant, tangerines, eggs, and apples, so we say "thank you" and pass them out to the folks.

Lately I've been assigned to the caller job. It's not too far removed from what I did when I started my career with SSA 30-odd years ago. A lot of one-on-one contact with the clients, and it can be funny, heartwarming, depressing, or exasperating, depending on the person you've got in front of you. This week a woman about 40 years old whispered to me, "I'm so nervous. This is the first time I've been here." I'm glad she came.



We have a "remainders" bin on the table I call from, and each person gets to select one additional item from the bin. It's usually full of things like cans of beans, and obscure things that were donated by people who were cleaning their kitchen cabinets. There was a can of artichoke hearts in there this week that I finally talked somebody into taking (to keep from slipping it into my own pocket). Nobody knows about artichoke hearts. I told the lady they went good in a salad.

But the best one this week was a non-English-speaking lady who pulled out a boxed tube of hemorrhoid cream. She made an up-and-down tooth brushing motion with her hand. I shook my head and pointed at my butt. She put it back.

One more thing: people sometimes lean close and ask if we have any toilet paper to pass out. If we don't, they're happy to have paper towels. Suellen and I have made it our mission to make sure there's always a roll of toilet paper for anyone who asks for it.