Drive to end hunger

Food bank director says rural New Mexico is facing a "perfect storm."

Roadrunner Food Bank's upcoming Mobile Food Pantry will focus on staples such as bread, eggs and milk as well as fresh produce. (Illustration By H. Wren)

ALBUQUERQUE -- Perhaps you're one of the many New Mexicans taking fewer trips to the grocery store because the price of gas is, as of Thursday, up to an average of $3.73. And once you get there, food prices seem higher than ever. Now imagine you must drive more than 100 miles to even get to a grocer.

That's not so far-fetched in New Mexico, where many rural communities have no grocery store. In fact one of the startling facts to come out of a hunger report is that New Mexico has, on average, one grocery store for every several hundred square miles.

That's a primary reason Roadrunner Food Bank is launching the state's first-ever Mobile Food Pantry June 18.

"We've known for a long time about the need to take food into the countryside," Melody Wattenbarger, executive director of Roadrunner, told the New Mexico Independent. "There are lots of communities where we haven't been able to distribute much food, or any food," she said.

 
With few metropolitan areas, the scenario for much of the state's population is that "the closest source of food may be a convenience store or mini-mart, where there's no fresh produce," said Art Fine, who, as director of programs at Roadrunner, will head up the mobile pantry. "You can find a Twinkie. . . ."

The Mobile Food Pantry "is an effort on our part to get nutritious food to people," Fine said.

Mobile pantries are springing up all over the United States, "modeled after a very successful one in Michigan," Wattenbarger said. "Of course the cost of fuel is one of the reasons this is more needed than ever. People really struggling with budgets can't afford to get in the car and go, or travel very far."

Wattenbarger blames what she calls a "perfect storm" -- inflation in food and fuel costs, along with stagnant wages -- for sending more New Mexicans, many for the first time, to seek help from food pantries. It's making the work of the pantries very challenging.

In a recent newsletter to donors, Wattenbarger said, "Our shelves are emptier than they have been for as long as I can remember." Staples like eggs, milk, wheat and flour have all increased in price, the newsletter reported, with egg prices 37 percent higher and milk 29 percent higher. Wages have not kept pace, and those with fixed incomes are particularly hard hit.

Roadrunner's Letter Carrier food drive on Saturday brought in 121,798 pounds of food, a decrease of about 6 percent from the previous year's drive, Roadrunner's Sonya Warwick told NMI.

But Wattenbarger attributed the drop in poundage to the fact that there was no paper bag insert in the newspaper this year. Compared to other years with no bag, the donations were actually an increase of 20 or 30 percent.

"The public realized the increased need, I think, and contributed generously," Wattenbarger said. "We were concerned that since the price of food has gone up so much that people would give less, and that hasn't been the case."

The focus of the Letter Carrier drive was nonperishable items, which were picked up by postal employees. The drive is held in anticipation of summer months, when donations fall off and children are especially vulnerable to going hungry, as school is out and they lose access to subsidized or free lunch and breakfast. 

The focus of the Mobile Food Pantry will be perishable goods like produce, dairy products and eggs -- items that are hardest to get in rural communities. A new tractor truck and three trailers of various sizes -- all secured with donations -- will fan out across the nine counties served by Roadrunner over distances of hundreds of miles. The destination list is just being developed.

 
"We've increased our budget this year so we can buy more fresh produce," Wattenbarger said.

 
Fine said Roadrunner picks up produce from "virtually every supermarket in Albuquerque every day," plus receives donations from wholesalers and from America's Second Harvest.

 
Roadrunner will need help carrying out the rural distribution from the communities themselves. Fine is seeking businesses, civic groups, churches, senior centers or other organizations in each of the mobile pantry's destinations, which will be charged with securing a drop-off point and provide volunteers to take the food off the trucks and display it on tables for locals to pick up.

 
It sounds like a growers market set-up, and Wattenbarger said, "It'll have that same kind of feel. But of course we'll be going to communities where there is no growers market, or even much growing going on."

 
Eventually trucks will be on the road five or six days a week, she said. "We're going to try to be smart about it, to where we can combine multiple trips in the same day."

 
They're also hoping local communities will be able to raise funds to offset some of the cost. Fine said the volunteer groups that organize distribution in each community must be willing to pay a small fee for the delivery stop -- essentially 4 cents per pound of food, which Fine said "doesn't even begin to cover the cost of fuel, the driver and the food. With diesel at $4 a gallon, 4 cents doesn't come close."

 
"What we really need right now are contributions, because all of that inflation affects us adversely as well," Wattenbarger said. "Roadrunner and our sister food banks around the state are finding it difficult to keep up."

 
Roadrunner serves Bernalillo, Valencia, Eddy, Chaves, Lincoln, Catron, Torrance, Sandoval and Socorro counties -- a vast geographic region. Five other regional food banks get food from Roadrunner, "so every county in New Mexico is served," Fine said.

 
Roadrunner will be contacting 350 affiliate food pantries and doing public service announcements to encourage local groups to serve as distribution partners throughout the state. Groups interested should contact Fine at (505) 349-8845 or by e-mail at art@rrfb.org to fill out an application and informational questionnaire.

 
Roadrunner has also launched a multi-media campaign to raise awareness of hunger in New Mexico, called "Stick a Fork in Hunger," which includes TV spots, billboards and a Web site, all of which can viewed at StickaForkInHunger.com.

 
"Hunger is getting worse, and it's getting worse because so many of the people who are already having issues with food are families with low wages or low or fixed incomes, and inflation in the basic necessities is causing them to fall farther and farther behind," Wattenbarger told NMI. "They were barely able to make ends meet before, and now it's even harder."

 
It's not a matter of layoffs, she added, so much as wages and income not going up "anywhere near fast enough to compensate for the increases in costs."

 
"Hunger in New Mexico is really epidemic. And in spite of our best efforts, there are still New Mexicans who go hungry every night," Fine said.

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