Peter and Pat Meoli, listed here in the order they retired, have been volunteering at the food pantry in Accord for the last 15 years, from the time when it still operated out of the fire station.
“We started doing the pickups from the food bank in Kingston,” Pat recalled.
Twice a month, the Food Bank of Northeastern New York drives a trailer of foodstuffs to the city of Kingston, using the parking lot at Hannaford as a distribution point for all local food pantry operations.
“We borrowed a truck from A & G’s Furniture, over on the 209,” Peter adds, “which was very generous of them. But we used to pick up, estimated, 2,500, maybe 3,000 pounds of food a month.”
Before they retired, the two were educators. Peter, as a physical ed instructor, would have been called coach. Pat, as an English teacher, would have been Mrs. Meoli. But that wasn’t her last name when she began teaching.
“Fifty-four years ago we met,” Pat recalls. “I was substituting. He was teaching down at the elementary. He snuck up and he said, ‘Hey.’”
Other volunteers have since taken over the food pickups, but the Meolis agree that over the time they’ve spent volunteering for the food pantry, the need for what they provide has only grown.
“Since the pandemic,” says Pat, “it’s just increased and increased and increased.”
Whence the food comes
The Meolis and other volunteers operate the food pantry, located next to the Harold Lipton Community Center since 2020, every Wednesday from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. and every Friday from 10 a.m. to noon. A free produce market is also held every Saturday from 9 to 10:30 a.m.
“We operate for the purpose of distributing three days’ worth of food twice a month to a hungry child, adult, family and/or senior,” says Board Chair of the Rochester Food Pantry, June Atherton. Like the Meolis, she started with the food pantry as what’s known as a “bagpacker.” Because of her Liverpool accent, she’s a favorite quote for the volunteers. Atherton estimates that food pantry volunteers picked up just over 5,000 pounds of food from the food bank in June.
“Over the past 12 months we’ve served approximately 2,723 individuals,” says Atherton, “which would be enough food for 24,500 meals.”
Atherton says 27 percent of clients fed by the food pantry were children.
“We had about 15 families today,” Meoli confirmed on Friday, Sept. 5. “Some of them, six in a family—two adults, four kids.”
While the food bank benefits from occasional grants, such as those from the Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program (HPNAP) or the Regional Food Bank’s Gratitude Grant, it also relies on monetary donations from private individuals and direct food donations from two farms: the Tributary Farm, a co-op in High Falls, and a prison farm in Wawarsing. These contributions help insulate the food bank from relying solely on federal support.
“I think we’re in pretty good shape right now, mainly due to the local farms and local businesses,” Atherton says. “But you never know. With what’s going on right now with the cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). We won’t see the effects until after the midterm elections, right? So we may see an increase of people coming to the food pantry then.”
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal spending bill passed on July 4 will cut $187 billion from SNAP benefits through 2034—the largest cut to the program since its inception.
Additionally, $1 billion in funding cuts from the federal budget—$500 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) monies has been discontinued from the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program, and $500 million more cut from the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP)—will affect the food distribution operations and grantmaking abilities of the food banks themselves, which provide for emergency feeding programs by buying food from local farmers and distributors.
“We’ll just have to see how it goes,” says Atherton.
The Tributary Farm in High Falls, one of the two farms donating to the Rochester Food Pantry, is in the middle of its eighth growing season. Started by farmer Jesse Goldfarb, the portion of the produce available through a community supported agriculture model (CSA) is so popular that shares to purchase are sometimes exhausted. Which is a good thing. Demand is meeting supply.
“But there comes a time when there’s too much food and our markets can’t handle it, whether that’s our CSA or wholesale, and we have leftovers,” Goldfarb says.
With CSA pickups on Wednesday and Saturday, Goldfarb explains some produce can get carried over and some stuff can’t.
“When we know we have plenty of something, we know we can give out certain things to the pantries. Last month it was a lot of tomatoes—heirloom tomatoes, plum tomatoes, cherry tomatoes—but also parsley, Swiss chard, different types of peppers, jalapenos, hornito peppers, sweet peppers.”
Goldfarb says members over the years have been happy to pick up the surplus and distribute it among pantries and free fridges in Ulster County.
“The main food banks that we’re donating to, as far as I can tell, are Rochester Food Pantry, the Rondout Food Pantry—which is in Stone Ridge—and the Ulster Immigrant Defense Network in Kingston. Those are the main ones this year because the volunteers that pick up have good relationships with those places.”
Even grocery stores themselves, like Hannaford and Tops, have been contributing to the food pantries.
Produce managers often set overly cautious sell-by dates, motivated more by concerns about appearance than actual food safety, they admit. A wilted summer squash or slightly limp kale may not look appealing, but it’s still perfectly edible. Since different vegetables remain safe to eat for varying lengths of time despite cosmetic flaws, food banks benefit from the selectiveness of image-conscious consumers.
Produce managers tend to impose overconservative sell-by dates on their vegetables, more out of concern for the aesthetic viability of any given product selling, they will admit, than for the actual health risks of selling a sad-looking summer squash or some newly wilting kale. Different vegetables have varying windows of time where they are still safely edible despite their failing good looks. Thus do food banks benefit from overpicky consumers.
But it’s not just produce. Chicken nuggets. Ground turkey. Meatballs.
“Tops [Friendly Markets] just started donating from Ellenville. They gave us like 285 pounds of food. Pre-packaged, sometimes pre-cooked.”
“One of the volunteers, Carol,” says Peter, “goes up at the end of each month and gets Bread Alone and donates bread. There’s a deep freezer full.”
New Paltz pantry
On the east side of the Shawangunk Ridge, at the Family of New Paltz food pantry—open eight hours a day, where about 430 families a month come through—Assistant Program Director Icilma Lewis suspects that food insecurity in the county is growing out of the sight of citified municipal centers, moving essentially to the south and west of the county or even out of the county, as residents are priced out by the ever-increasing cost of rental markets.
“Most of the families with children are on the outskirts of New Paltz because New Paltz is very expensive to live,” Lewis says. “And the costs have driven a lot of our families with children out of the area because they can’t afford to live here. They’re going out to other places. You have Modena. You have Plattekill. You have Clintondale. You’re seeing more families in need of assistance out that way than Family can offer.”
As an extension of the Family nonprofit, which began in Woodstock 55 years ago, with walk-in centers in Woodstock, New Paltz and Ellenville, Family is well-placed to triangulate and observe food insecurity trends across the county.
“We do the entire southern tier of Ulster County, Port Ewen all the way out to Wallkill, all the towns in between.”
A map provided by UlsterCorps, “Food Pantries and Meal Programs,” identifies 30 food pantries operating across the county, not counting free food fridges, along with a number of other organizations—churches, soup kitchens, delivery—whom all presumably provide free food to the food insecure, all accessible by bus. But great swaths in the south and west of the county remain inaccessible to public transit.
To fill the gaps left by federal and state funding cuts and combat rising food insecurity, self-motivated nonprofits like UlsterCorps—and countless individuals like the Meolis—have long stepped up, using whatever resources are available.
Regionally, there is the Hudson Valley Farm Fresh Food Grant Program, which aims to provide multiyear grant funds to organizations or individuals who are “working to increase access to local, farm-fresh food for individuals who are considered food insecure.”
At the county level, just last month, an Oct. 15 deadline was announced for proposals that seek to address food insecurity in Ulster County, after $410,000 in grant monies were made available by the Ulster County Legislature for the second round of the Ulster County Food Security Grant Program.
“At a time when the administration in Washington has made massive cuts to support for food banks and SNAP,” Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger noted after the passage of the bipartisan resolution to provide grant monies, “we are stepping up our support as a county to help local families.”
Metzger also noted that one in six children in Ulster County are food insecure, a statistic that didn’t sit right with Goldfarb.
“It’s surprising, it’s upsetting,” he said, “and it shouldn’t be the case.”
Lewis agrees.
“We have to help each other,” says Lewis. “That’s what it’s all about. I encourage people to do any little thing they can do in their neighborhoods, with your neighbors or anything like that. Knock on doors, especially where seniors are located, and say, ‘Hey, are you okay? Can I help with anything?’ Or leave a bag of groceries at their door someday, anything. You never know.”
With the holidays approaching along with the winter weather, the food pantries rely especially on those able to contribute.
“Three times a year we provide holiday baskets,” says Pat. “Sixty Thanksgiving baskets, 60 Christmas baskets, 60 Easter baskets… It could be a whole turkey dinner. Usually it’s with ham. For the first 60 to sign up, that’s how we give it out.”
“For Christmastime, we like to get a little gift too,” says Atherton. “If they have young children. And that’s from donations from our residents. Without them, we’d be out of business.”
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