When Briana became a single mom, working nights and struggling to pay her bills, she found renewed strength from her love of cooking. She also found a connection at the Share Food Share Love food pantry.
The pantry offers a familiar grocery store environment. A place where visitors can choose the food they need, while engaging socially with pantry volunteers, and where conversations often turn to recipe sharing and a shared love of food.
“This is like a pantry I’ve never seen before,” Briana says. “It just builds relationships. It feels like home. I can make up different types of meals, healthy meals with fresh produce. It’s given me that peace and comfort.”
A new section of the pantry, called The Spice Rack, reinforces this connection with visitors. Here, visitors are offered a wide selection of spices and spice mixes, and a growing set of take-home printed recipe cards based on pantry inventories. The Spice Rack encourages nutritional meal planning without the usual diet-lecturing. Other pantry services include a resource advisory center called The Resource Hub, and a section called Families First, whose inventory is tailored to the needs of women and the mothers of young children. But it’s the food-sharing environment that especially connects people.
“I think cooking is another expression of love,” Briana reflects. “It just brings us together, coming to a dinner table. When you are cooking, it’s just a love that you get.”
Putting food on the table during the holidays means taking a break from daily worries to enjoy the comforts of grander meals and feelings of togetherness. But it’s hard to do if you are a single mom working full-time, a retired veteran with PTSD, or you are among the many other food-insecure neighbors who live in our region.
Due to cuts in federal funding to food banks, our food pantry is facing a shortage in food supply this holiday season. As if high inflation and unaffordable living costs were not hardships enough, thousands of our food-insecure neighbors are also facing reduced federal support for SNAP, Medicaid, and proposed cuts to other federal safety-net programs. Yet as a local community, we are not about to stand idly by. This time of year and any time of the year, putting food on the table is a basic human right. And as a visiting neighbor recently told us, “I think cooking is another expression of love. Putting food on the table is a form of saying, I got you, everything is going to be okay. It just brings us together, coming to a dinner table.”
We’re determined to help our visiting neighbors put food on the table this holiday season. Your donation will help make sure they get the whole turkeys and other traditional foods they deserve, ahead of a more hopeful new year.
Learn more. Donate now.