How feeding the hungry has moved from dented cans to organic farms

Cheryl Reining has a lot of peanut butter. Jars of it. Boxes of jars. Cases of boxes of jars. No jelly.

As the food pantry coordinator at Resurrection Catholic Church in Wayne, that's a special kind of problem. It's great she has peanut butter to feed the hungry. But how do you sell the idea of all that peanut butter to the 430 hungry families the pantry serves twice a month?

Reining isn't only a food pantry coordinator. She's also a clinical dietitian. And that doubles the problem by injecting a sense of nutritional duty into the equation. It's not just getting the hungry to eat peanut butter. It's getting those families to eat peanut butter and everything else the pantry has to offer, in a healthy way.

"It is very hard for some people to come into a food pantry," Reining said. "We want to protect their dignity. But we also want to protect their health. I only want to give them what I would eat."

Reining is part of an evolution in food pantry and food bank thought. Feeding the hungry isn't about sticking an armload of dented cans in a box anymore. It's not enough to feed someone if the food you supply leads to obesity, diabetes and other health problems.

Reining, and the Geneva-based Northern Illinois Food Bank that helps stock her shelves, are all working to solve that problem with new partnerships that fill hungry stomachs with an increasing amount of fruits, vegetables and healthy protein.

Eating healthy

Food bank officials acknowledged the issue of keeping the hungry healthy when they moved from St. Charles into a larger facility in Geneva in 2011.

The food bank distributed about 35 million pounds of food a year as it moved into that new facility. This year, it will distribute about twice that amount. The goal is for 25 percent of that 70 million pounds to be fresh produce.

So, yes, the new food bank has the huge warehouse of packaged food anyone would expect to see. But there's also a chef on staff who is in charge of a children's nutrition program. That demonstration kitchen helps train the hungry and food pantry coordinators how to use the food donations to prepare the kind of meals that will build big, strong kids.

"What we've found is if kids help make the food or snack, then they will eat it," said the food bank's Gina Gramarosso.

All the dairy, fruit and veggies the food bank receives go from the cow and the ground to the table of local hungry people within two days. To make that happen, and make sure there is an increasing amount of produce, the food bank has some atypical partners.

Continental Envelope has a sprawling commercial envelope manufacturing facility about a half-mile down the road from the Northern Illinois Food Bank. But that's not what owners Fred and Trisha Margulies were smiling about on one of the first 90-degree days of the year. They weren't inside that air-conditioned facility. They were outside on land that used to be home to a commercial corn crop.

In 2007, at the urging of their children, the Margulieses decided to go organic. When the commercial farmer didn't want to come with, they transformed the land into a garden for their employees.

It wasn't long before the rest of the community, including the Northern Illinois Food Bank, wanted in. Now Pushing the Envelope Farm makes about 1,000 pounds of fresh, organic produce for the food bank each season.

"We see this as a model for other commercial businesses," Fred Margulies said.

Educating, too

The farm, just like other community garden projects, works with the food bank to also educate youths and the hungry. The idea is for them to make better decisions with the little money they may have to go to a grocery store or when selecting and preparing the food they receive from a local pantry.

Learning how to make a buck create the most beneficial, nutritional meal possible means getting those hungry people to get their hands dirty and grow some of their own food.

"We know the cheapest food isn't always the healthiest food," said Shelbi Ball, the food bank's community garden coordinator. "We want to get food pantry clients into these gardens. It's kind of the teach-a-man-to-fish program. We really want to get produce into their fridge, into their pantries and into their body."

The food bank works with Continental Envelope and other community gardens, through grants and donations, to get hungry people involved at no cost to their already lean budgets.

Fresh produce is gold for Cheryl Reining. She receives vegetables and herbs from a community garden at St. Isidore Catholic Church in Bloomingdale. She gets organic tomatoes from the food bank, which gets them from MightyVine, a hydroponic farm in Rochelle.

And all that produce goes into soups, stews and other healthy recipes that she concocts for each day her food pantry is open.

As for the peanut butter? It'll go a long way for a hungry family if spread on a multigrain cracker with a little low-sugar cranberry sauce.

"We don't know what people are going through when they come to us," Reining said. "You could see someone come in here tomorrow with a Rolex. We don't judge. We just feed."