Almost every Friday afternoon for the first 18 months of the pandemic, I distributed food to dozens of families in Essex County out of the back of a food pantry van.
If you’ve never gotten food from a food pantry, it’s mostly canned or dried goods, fresh fruits and vegetables; occasionally hot or frozen meals. You’ll get fresh bread from the bakery one week and go home with Thomas’s Bagels the next. People schedule their whole week around these distributions.
Then one Friday in late December, as people gathered under a sheet of cold, wet rain — the van didn’t come. The pantry couldn’t make it that week. And a dozen families who had scheduled their time and meals around those two bags of groceries went home cold, wet, and hungry on New Year’s weekend…