Hunger in Lamoille County: a growing concern

Donated food at the Woodbury Food Shelf for the month of April

(photo courtesy of http://couponsforcharitynews.blogspot.com)

Vermont is ranked as the ninth hungriest state in America, with one in seven Vermonters describing themselves as living in food insecure homes, according to U.S. Census figures for 2006-2008, in Lamoille County, one in five children is food insecure and 12,290 kids state-wide rely on food shelves.

Deb Krempecke is the manager of Lamoille Community Food Share, a Morrisville-based food shelf that served an average of 326 families in 2010, and serves an average of 15 to 30 people a day. She says that the troubled economy has caused food shelf reliance to skyrocket.

“Our numbers have almost doubled since 2007, we certainly see more people that are not accustomed to using the system,” Krempecke said. “There are some people that are lower income that we’re used to seeing more frequently. Now we’re seeing people who have been out of work that thought they would find jobs but haven’t. That has forced them to look for help, apply for food stamps, go to food shelves.”

However, the food shelf system alone isn’t enough to provide for families in need. One of the greatest challenges food insecure families face is providing healthy meals for children. In the early 90’s, a non-profit organization, The Vermont Campaign to End Childhood Hunger was created to develop programs to help these gaps, including expanding state school breakfast participation from 17 to 97 percent to date. In January the organization changed its name to Hunger Free Vermont to reflect its widened focus on hunger overall.

““Since 2000, we’ve seen a steady increase in hunger in Vermont…” said Dorigan Keeney, program director of Hunger Free Vermont. “Typically, as families go from food secure to food insecure, the first thing that changes is the quality of the food: more ramen noodles, more cheap stuff. Then, the adults go without to protect the kids. When things are really bad, the kids start to go without.”

Hunger Free Vermont is also working on providing summer food options for food insecure houses. Last year, they maintained 13 sites throughout Eden, Cambridge, Johnson, Waterville, Wolcott, Craftsbury, Greensboro and Hardwick, that served some combination of breakfasts, lunches, suppers and snacks over the summer. For the upcoming summer, services are being extended to Morrisville and Stannard.

“As middle class people, we think of summer as a nice time, where you get to go to camp or go out and play,” Keeney said. “The reality for a lot of these lower class kids is that they’re locked in for summer because their parents have to go to work, they can’t afford camp and some of the programs that are available are half-day or a couple of hours long … So they lock them in and the TV is really the babysitter. It’s a time when kids actually gain weight in a non-healthy way, suffer more poor nutrition and fall behind academically. It’s a very vulnerable time.”

The Hunger Council of Lamoille Valley, a 33 member group co-chaired by Senator Susan Bartlett and Scott Johnson, executive director of the Lamoille Family Center, was formed last September with their stated mission, “To understand what barriers local citizens face when trying to provide for themselves and their families, what programs or policies need to be created or improved, and how we can all work together to make these changes happen.”

To those ends, the council discussed further improvements to the school meal system at their last meeting on March 30, specifically the need to have more affordable healthy meals available for food insecure children.

The same problem of eating healthy when relying on food stamps or food shelves affects the parent as well, in an attempt to improve the quality of food provided, in 2008 the Vermont Food Bank expanded to include a gleaning program led by Theresa Snow. Snow, who officially organized the program in 2005 with Jen O’Donnell, saw over 88,000 pounds gleaned from Lamoille Valley farms under the sponsorship of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont before joining the Vermont Foodbank as director of agricultural resources

“We were lucky that [Snow] started it right in this area, so we’ve been tapping into it for five or six years,” Krempecke said. “It gives us a variety of vegetables, Pete’s Greens was the place that started donating, so we can offer things literally year round. During the summer we can get some more exotic things, people have learned what kale is, for example, which is great. If you don’t know what it is, you’re not going to buy it when you’re on a limited income.”

Currently, Vermont’s food share system is run through a main hub, The Vermont Food Bank, which distributes food to local food shelves, which also rely on donations from the community. The food bank runs a number of programs, including classes intended to raise awareness of community hunger. Despite this, ignorance about food insecurity continues to be a concern.

According to the food bank’s Director of Communications and Public Affairs Judy Stermer, some Vermonters “want to put people who are accessing our service in a box. It seems that we want to say that people are hungry because they made bad decisions, or because they have a lack of education... [When actually] it’s because the cost of living is exorbitant in Vermont and because we do have a lack of livable wage jobs, and we don’t have universal health care. I think this idea that people are hungry because of poverty is a hard one to educate people about.”

With hunger on the rise across the state, supporting local food programs becomes more and more important. One way the stigma of receiving food aid is being countered are “community meals,” typically suppers that are open to the public, where the food insecure can eat and socialize with other community members in a friendly, relaxed environment. Johnson State College has taken its community meal program a step further by starting a culinary training program along with the Vermont Agency of Human Resources and the Creative Workforce Solutions Group.

The eight week program, headed by JSC Food Service Assistant Director James Consentino, will teach unemployed trainees cooking skills and provide Serve Safe certification, which many restaurants require employees to have. The trainees will also help prepare community meals and upon graduating the program will either be offered kitchen jobs at Johnson State College or other local restaurants.

While supporting programs are being developed, the Lamoille Community Food Share is still able to handle the influx of needy families.

“It’s challenging, but we are fortunate to have good support,” said Krempecke. “Right before the economy went bad we had a lot of support, so we had a cushion and that has enabled us to keep up with demand. Last year we consistently saw 300 families or more a month, yesterday we saw 32 families and as quickly as we could restock the shelves, another group of people would come in and empty them. Fortunately we can keep restocking.”