In Greenwich, a food bank offers residents in need a way to buy fresh food. Can the rest of the state replicate this?
Molly Ingram of WSHU spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman about her article “In Greenwich, a gold-standard food bank. But others are struggling” as part of the joint podcast Long Story Short. You can read her story here.
WSHU: Your story is about the Neighbor-to-Neighbor food bank in Greenwich. How did you find this bank and what makes it so interesting?
LT: Yes, I was interested in the issue of food insecurity. It’s one of the issues in my new social services portfolio, and I was talking to somebody in Stamford who told me if you’re looking for a kind of gold standard for food distribution sites in Connecticut, you should look at Greenwich. That’s what led me there. As most of us know, Greenwich is a very affluent area. It has tremendous resources, and there are a lot of local people who support this distribution site. You know, some people asked me when I was covering this story whether Greenwich even needs a food distribution site. But, you know, the cost of living in Greenwich is incredibly high, so a lot of the people who could work for wealthier families in the community are working in restaurants, jobs where they’re not making those hedge fund salaries. They’re also trying to survive in Greenwich, a lot of them because they want their kids to go to the excellent public schools in Greenwich.
The cost of living is very high and it pushes people to the limits of their budget and beyond. So what’s been remarkable is that Greenwich has really stepped up to support this pantry, and it’s been through volunteerism. There are high school students who volunteer for the pantry, but also corporate people, retirees, and just a broad segment of the community.
And then there are people who fundraise. Some have made it a point to donate a special item every month. So someone might say, “I’m going to fund a brand new backpack for every kid going back to school, or I’m going to fund every household to buy a new set of bedding this month.” So it’s very impressive how the community has come together for this pantry, and they also do a lot of things that other pantries strive to do, like trying to provide as much fresh food as possible.
A lot of food pantries, I think, envision canned food. We go to church or synagogue, go to schools when they’re collecting food, and donate a can of soup or a box of pasta or something like that. But today’s food pantries really strive to give people the healthiest, freshest food they can get. And in Greenwich, they’re trying to even increase that percentage to 100%, meaning a family can, if they want, take home 100% fresh food and no canned food at all. That’s pretty extraordinary. When I told other food pantries about that percentage, they were pretty impressed.
WSHU: And they were amazed. Do they think this can be replicated? Is this something that other food banks across the state can actually do?
LT: I think a lot of them are actually working to get more fresh food. And particularly in the summer, other pantries I’ve talked to have over 50% of that percentage. In some cases, they can get people 60% or even 75% of fresh food, but to be able to do that as consistently as Greenwich, I’m working on a solution story where I’ll go into a little more detail about how Greenwich has managed to keep that part of the problem, which is the fresh food supply. But I think there are some interesting things going on with the pantries right now. There’s a greater awareness that food waste is a problem that supermarkets need to solve, restaurants need to solve in terms of climate change, because we don’t want all of this food that could feed people just rotting in dumpsters and landfills. So there’s really an effort to get all of that fresh food into the pantries before it spoils.
And I think there’s something else in Greenwich: There’s a kind of grocery store-like shopping experience. You go in, you have a cart, aisles, a refrigerated section, and a produce section, and you have choices. So you don’t have to get chickpeas if you eat black beans in your household. You can choose chicken instead of pork. You can choose dairy substitute instead of whole milk, things like that. That’s something I’ve seen in a number of pantries that I’ve visited: A lot of them are trying to create a kind of shopping experience that they call a dignified shopping experience, where you’re not forced to just grab a bag of whatever the pantry has designated for the family that week, when some of those foods may not be culturally appropriate and may not be on the family’s menu. That’s one of the things you see in Greenwich that’s happening elsewhere.
I think Greenwich is just one of many of those ways that goes a step further. And they go a step further because, frankly, it’s about money. You know, there’s just so much that other pantries can do with their budgets, and they work hard to partner with local grocery stores or restaurants or food rescue, which is another group that brings food to the pantries, and they work with community gardens to get fresh food. There are a lot of efforts in different places to make these things happen, but I think part of the difference is that Greenwich has a budget. If they run out of money, if those resources aren’t enough, they can always just buy more, and most pantries can only afford so much.
WSHU: On the topic of money, you mentioned in your story that Connecticut doesn’t contribute as much to its food spending as neighboring states. What have you found there? Why is that?
LT: I think part of what happened is that during COVID-19, there was this huge flood of free food that came from the federal government. So Connecticut’s food supply received tens of millions of pounds of food from the federal government to distribute in 2021; that was kind of the peak of those numbers. And then when the pandemic was over, that food disappeared. But the numbers have stayed pretty much the same in terms of demand and the number of people using those resources. And so New Jersey, for example, has stepped in and said, we’re going to fill that gap. We’re going to use our state budget. They’re giving $85 million, you know, to supplement what those pantries can do without that money to make up for the fact that that federal food is no longer available.
Connecticut doesn’t do nearly as much. Connecticut’s food bank gets $850,000, which is 1% of what New Jersey gives. New Jersey has three times the population of Connecticut, but not 100 times the population of Connecticut. So that’s a big difference. And when I visited some of these pantries, in Bridgeport or Hartford, for example, I asked them what would enable them to help people more and more often. Many places can only be visited once a month, while neighbors in Greenwich can come weekly. That was pretty much the answer. They’re doing everything they can to raise funds, work with grocery stores and food rescue services, but if the state did more to support Connecticut’s food bank and provide more food, then they would be able to help people better.
