LeslieMladinich.com

One thing that’s different from volunteering at the Food Bank during the day like I did in the summer and now in the evening during the holiday season is the number of children scurrying about.

Parents getting off of work and hurrying to the only evening service the Food Bank has bring their kids in tow. Baby Björns or towel slings, Cadillac model strollers and others with barely aligned wheels, and vows to hold hands the entire time make these kids the Food Bank’s second client base.

“Are you going to help your Mommy pick out the food?” one of the check-in volunteers who verifies families’ income status asked what looked to be a 5-year-old. She was sitting on her mother’s lap.

“Yes,” she smiled shyly.

“Good, or she might make a mistake,” the volunteer said.

The client laughed and hugged her daughter tight, planting three kisses on her curl-ringed brown head.

From Sesame Street to ConAgra Foods, the latest estimate is nearly 17 million, or almost 1 in 4, American children are at risk of hunger. But when kids come to the Food Bank, the ordeal seems not to be any understanding of the sad statistic they fall into, but one of patience while their parents wait for their numbers to be called to get food. A range of actions and emotions take place during this wait – scolding, doting, laughter, tears, mistaken gender identity.

“Hi sweet girl,” said the Program Manager to a pink puffy-vested, hat-clad toddler who stumbled by.

“He’s a boy,” said the parent.

There are also accidents. A Play Corner for kids, probably no bigger than 5 by 5 feet, is set off by a foam rug. It’s stocked with books, toys with wheels, puzzles and other gizmos I can’t categorize accurately because I am not a parent myself.

One is a three-dimensional standing puzzle that kind of looks like a hamster house. Kids can arrange mini-blocks and discs to make designs, practice counting, and generally make a small but satisfying amount of noise. One little girl was being encouraged to sort the mini-blocks into like colors by her mother when her exuberance caused the puzzle to move two inches off the rug and crash into an oncoming food cart.

Falling parts, a shriek.

Some volunteers are in tune that some children are hungry when they come in. For that, they get a banana. But even though these children are less fortunate than the volunteers’ own, discipline is doled out accordingly.

For example, there are a lot of announcements during the holidays – rules on Safeway cash cards, turkey give-aways, Toys-For-Tots registration. Children are oblivious, happy to be free from their parents who have to focus or miss a perk. But when their cumulative enthusiasm drowns out the Program Manager’s voice, all volunteers have to do is glance over to kids, shoot a certain look, and they are shushed.

Besides emitting a lot of noise, kids play many roles at the Food Bank. Teens help translate the complexity of staying activated in the Food Bank’s system, preteens let parents know how many items they can have on the produce line, and elementary-school aged ones decide between blueberry or strawberry flavored yogurt.

Knowing the statistics, it’s hard for me not to look at these kids with sympathy. But instead, there are adorable distractions that make me focus on their other characteristics, such as how they try to commandeer food carts or wear the latest fashions. I see black toe nail polish showing bare through flip-flops or faux Ugg boots paired with leggings or boot-cut jeans studded with rhinestones. I also find myself impressed with their smarts.

The 5-year-old who promised to help her mother pick out food wanted to expedite the check-in process.

“I want to read the computer, Mommy!” she said.

“That’s her job,” the client said. “When you can read more, you can read a computer at your job.”

Not to be dissuaded, the child overheard the volunteer counting under her breath and landing on the number 16.

“Then it’s 17, then 18, then 19, 20……” the child recited.

“Oh you are so smart,” the mother said squeezing her child tight around her stomach.

“I want to still be with you when I am 20”

“No you won’t. But I will miss you.”

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“Hey, did you get lost and just stumble in here?” the general manager said as I sat at the desk near the heavy trailer door where vans backed their deliveries of bread, 20 pound bags of rice, and other commodities for the Food Bank.

It had been nearly three months since my last shift on August 31. I had chosen to return on Tuesdays for the holiday season when one of my two part-time jobs offered a hiatus as the Food Bank opened an hour early in the evening because of the holidays.

For my first day back I was told that I’d be a runner. This meant taking clients’ lottery numbers, grabbing the correct family box and packing proteins and hauling frozen turkeys from one of the six refrigerators. I was nervous to have a new duty when there were 60 to 90 families in three hours to serve, so I was relieved when the program manager had me working the line with a volunteer whom I will call G.

When I introduced myself to G, he was stuffing his face with some of the holiday treats left behind from bagging for the treat box– Fleur de Sel caramels. As he chewed two in his mouth at a time, he bragged about having a dentist friend who made molds of his teeth.

“These caramels are doing the same,” he laughed, his moustache dancing as he chewed.

When I told him we’d be working together, he walked me through the amount of items clients could take, pointing out a strict line of demarcation for better efficiency.

“I will do all the breads, cakes and veggies, you do the fruit and dairy. We have plenty of apples, so they can have three. ” “Over here, he continued, “they can have one or one,” bending his wrist and waving his hand over two boxes of strawberries, grapes or blueberries. On he went with the oranges, bananas, kiwis, persimmons.

The gusto in which he chewed his caramels was the same in which he treated his produce boxes and clients. He fanned the kale’s leaves tall to make them sell and lined cabbage heads up as systematically as shiny bowling balls shooting out of a machine. Admiring his reverence for the bounty, I hoped to impress him with my food knowledge when I asked if the tangerines – leaves withered and yellowed but proud- had been gleaned.

“Yes, these are off a donor’s tree,” he said.

In between telling me how he roasted a chicken and sautéed mushrooms last night and couldn’t wait to take his 20-year-old daughter who was afraid of driving on freeway on a lesson the next day, he engaged the clients picking their produce as if he was their link to a special holiday meal.

“Take the kale leaves, snap them off and drop them into a stir fry! And I have baby eggplants – a little cross burn on the outside, but on the inside they are fine!”

He was a dynamo, running to Spanish-speaking clients filling out English forms, and then running back to help ones who were already in the snaking line.

“Usted puede tener un gran tomate o dos o tres pequeños tomates.”

“And next, the lovely Leslie will help you with fruit!,” he’d joke, slipping me a caramel.

He winked at two boys hovering by the box of bananas, escaping their Mom’s scolding for squirming in their chairs while they waited for their turn.

“You have kids? I love kids!” I love Christmas too!  I am driving my wife crazy, serenading her with Perry Como.”

G started volunteering at the Food Bank because he lives right across the street.

“I work here during the day, and then I go work my regular job. I work nights.”

“What is your job?”

“I am the supervisory night stocker at Whole Foods.”

I wasn’t surprised.

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Day 11 and 12- South American Peanut Butter

The Family Box of food made for six bulged the fattest with three boxes of cereal jutting high above cardboard walls that cradled a five-day supply of groceries.

Squinting at the 3-point type on the cereal boxes’ sides, I often felt like a food inspector during my Food Bank shifts. While the other volunteers gossiped about their problem grandchildren or latest trip to Tahoe, I’d ask multiple questions about how to cook Asian vegetables or where the frozen chicken parts we were tearing and bagging came from.

I admit the reason I started volunteering at the Food Bank wasn’t only to have something to make myself feel better after a challenging corporate writing job and an interminable commute. Yes, I wanted to feel needed and do something significant by helping feed the poor, but I also chose the Food Bank because I have developed a more than zealous curiosity about where food comes from, who doesn’t have it, and how it’s routed to them.

Working at the Food Bank hasn’t answered all those questions, but it’s given me invaluable glimpses.

For example, the boxes of cereal in the Family Box for six turned out to be from transnational and global sources.

• Kix, with its familiar goldenrod and blue colored box, was from the behemoth General Mills of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
• Coco Crazy, an ersatz Coco Puffs if you will, had a picture of a shy-bordering-on-smart alecky cartoon bear juggling (or was he kicking?) huge brown balls. It appeared to be from a budget food company out of DePew, New York
• Corn Flakes (no Michael Phelps mug here) was from a food brand called Pampa, a product of Argentina.

Argentina? I blinked as I looked at the label.

Eating local has been all a buzz, and even the Food Bank I work at brags about a gleaning program where fruit and vegetables harvested in residents’ backyards go directly to clients. In fact, more than 300 pounds have been donated to us from local trees and gardens since the Spring.

So to discover that Pampa, with its middle man a food distributor in Miami, Florida, also supplied peanut butter to us raised my eyebrows even higher.

Wasn’t there enough Skippy in the United States to go round?

The Food Bank has several programs to procure commodities so the food that makes them up mirrors our nation’s diverse supply, along with its import and export policies. A USDA program gives families with super low incomes even more cans of vegetables and bags of beans to supplement their Family Boxes, and it buys other perishables and non-perishables from the larger county food bank. Where the county buys food that isn’t donated I don’t know.

But when your client base has risen by 50 percent since 2008, it doesn’t matter where the food comes from – as long as it’s safe. There are sheets upon sheets of plastic-tubbed tangerine nibs drowning in syrup from China, and on the special Saturday shelf (where clients can choose exotics because, after all, it was the weekend) I spied stuffed peppers with rice from Bulgaria.

Discovering the Pampa peanut butter tapped my memory of my childhood best friend’s thrifty mother reveling in Lucky’s grocery store’s short stint with generic brands in the late 1970s. The Carter administration brought gas lines and being cheap was cool – although that wouldn’t last long.

At my house we got brand name Coca-Cola, but I was intrigued by the novelty of the Harris’s generics – not necessarily because of the taste. The products were wrapped in bumble bee yellow packaging with at least 18 point type bold black lettering, taking all the commerciality out of peanut butter, hot chocolate and tuna out, but lending some frugal sexiness, at least in my 9-year-old mind.

The next day at the Food Bank, as I grabbed a dust pan from an abandoned corner, I did discover some Skippy waiting to be put into the Family Boxes. I swept up with a little more faith in the United States of America.

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