Name: Opinion: Oregon Food Bank’s challenge to fill state’s growing hunger
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Opinion: Oregon Food Bank’s challenge to fill state’s growing hunger

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NEW!David SarasohnSarasohn served as an associate editor of The Oregonian from 1985 until 2015 and continued as a columnist until 2018. He lives in Portland.When it all started, Susannah Morgan stuck on her office wall a quote from Mark Twain: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”She thought it would be useful, because what she was feeling was terror.As soon as COVID-19 began shutting down the economy, the head of the Oregon Food Bank knew that her organization would have to feed many more than the 860,000 Northwesterners it fed in 2019. That number was hard enough: This year, Morgan said, the state hunger situation went “from crisis level to unimaginable.”The food bank would have to do it with handicaps not even clear at the time: Food pantry volunteers, largely elderly, would be urged to stay home to prevent possible exposure to the coronavirus. The food bank’s revolving 100 volunteers at its headquarters would be reduced to 15 at a time for social distancing reasons. Two of its sizable sources of food contributions – restaurants and grocery markets – ran thinner; restaurants because they were closed and markets because they were sold out.And national news would soon be full of clips of mile-long lines of cars outside food banks elsewhere in the country.All at a time when, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported, the state’s applications for food stamps had multiplied by 40.Morgan knew what was coming when schools closed. Schools are, of course, vital centers for spreading information on earth sciences, long division and who’s got plans for Saturday night. But from the perspective of the Oregon Food Bank – and several hundred thousand Oregon families – they’re a place where kids can get breakfast and lunch even if their home refrigerator holds mostly fast-food ketchup packets.“It was clear pretty early,” recalls Morgan, “that we would be needed as never before.”And she knew one other thing: “We can’t fail.”Two months in, the Oregon Food Bank hasn’t, which is another way of saying Oregon hasn’t. The state’s food pantries, 1300 of them, remain open and functioning, and Morgan can recall only one time when one of them ran out of food. There are no lines of cars stretching into the next zip code.The feds are supplying more food, although being the feds, there are some bumps. Oregon’s farmers and growers, with the restaurant market shut down, are contributing sizably.Still, the food bank is now spending a million dollars a week on food. Eight million dollars from the state has helped; so have considerable contributions from Oregonians, who seem to have the same objections to each other being hungry that they had before the lockdown.“We are overwhelmed by the generosity of our state,” says Morgan. “Our community has stepped up.”The response has produced not only more money for food, but also enabled the food bank to hire more food truck drivers – useful in a state where hunger can strike deeply in places a long way from OFB’s Northeast Portland headquarters.The support goes beyond money and food. As traditional food pantry volunteers became scarcer, the need only intensified. “Pantries are adapting, people are finding ways to have less contact, which requires a lot more volunteer time,” explains Johnnie Shaver, the food bank’s client engagement director. “There’s been a shift in volunteers, more and more young people who are now out of school.”At a time when Americans have shifted their adoration from shortstops to essential workers, it turns out that some essential workers aren’t even workers: They’re volunteers.And what’s being done has to be done differently. The Clackamas Service Center, out on Southeast 82nd, used to have an open market area where clients would come select their food, and a hot lunch one day a week. Now the market’s closed, and the center delivers 10 days’ worth of food to 30 families a day, and the meals it serves are packaged to go – and come with bags of groceries.There is another difference.“There are just so many new people,” says executive director Deborah Mason. “There are so many who never needed these services before.”This coronavirus shutdown is a hard time, with no vaccine and no reliable drug treatment, no certainty about what our condition is at any given moment. But there is one bit of dependable good news:There is an absolutely reliable treatment for hunger.Learn more about helping the food bank atShare your opinionSubmit your essay of 500-700 words on a highly topical issue or a theme of particular relevance to the Pacific Northwest, Oregon and the Portland area to commentary@oregonian.com. Please include your email and phone number for verification.Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.

NEW!David SarasohnSarasohn served as an associate editor of The Oregonian from 1985 until 2015 and continued as a columnist until 2018. He lives in Portland.When it all started, Susannah Morgan stuck on her office wall a quote from Mark Twain: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”She thought it would be useful, because what she was feeling was terror.As soon as COVID-19 began shutting down the economy, the head of the Oregon Food Bank knew that her organization would have to feed many more than the 860,000 Northwesterners it fed in 2019. That number was hard...

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Opinion: Oregon Food Bank’s challenge to fill state’s growing hunger

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