At the Food Pantry

Each Friday a multitude of volunteers assemble to shop for others then to bag and distribute groceries, filling orders that have been placed by, or taken on behalf of food pantry guests far and wide. Donations may have been arriving all week long, coming in from food hubs, from markets, from farms and from gardens; donations made by generous people who care.  As contributions were received everything had been weighed, logged, date checked and shelved. Shelves stand at the ready for filling orders that will finally go out for distribution on Fridays.

As orders came in, a shopping list had been tabulated for each guest and placed on a clipboard, ready for the day when volunteer shoppers will roll carts up and down the aisles of the food pantry warehouse, filling them with cans, boxes, bottles and cartons of goods. They’ll be filling shopping carts with paper products, snacks and sundries such as school supplies, selecting frozen fish or frozen meats, and adding dairy products kept within the coolers. 

Next, the carts roll on to the bread aisle for baked goods. Then comes the produce department where fresh vegetables have been waiting and are added to shopping carts before passing on to the bagging tables. Grocery baggers stand at the ready with carefully doubled brown bags, previously packed in milk crates that had been loaded the day before. Here the groceries are bagged and tagged with the name of each guest who will receive their weekly bounty. Bagged and tagged orders are handled into waiting cars for delivery, or shelved for later pick-up by recipients. Grocery deliveries might arrive along with a quick chat, or perhaps a short visit from the volunteer driver who delivers on that day. Some need so much, yet ask for so little. All of this really happens each Friday.

Thursdays are a different scene. Donations may still be coming in and shelves will need to be stocked. But mostly it’s about clearing the decks and making everything ready in preparation for the big day: Friday. Thursday volunteers are also greeted by a Mount Vesuvius of mostly single brown bags, where chaos is slowly being made into order. By carefully placing one brown bag inside of another for extra strength, then folding each doubled bag flat and neatly packing as many as possible into milk crates, the pile gradually whittles down. A chaotic pile of paper becomes transformed into packed and stacked milk crates loaded with shopping bags all set to be filled with groceries and distributed the following day. This too really happens, every week.

But then there was that one Thursday morning, when instead of a pile of bags to be sorted, the double baggers were surprised to find, not a pile of paper, but instead they found a supply of warm, weighty, beautifully hand woven blankets. They mulled over whether shopping orders would be best wrapped over and around, or folded into these blankets, like a taco, before distribution to food pantry guests. With winter coming on, surely the extra warmth of these lovingly handmade blankets would be most welcome. 

While pondering how best to serve our guests, I suddenly awoke from my imagined reverie of tables stacked with cozy blankets, reawakening to tables stocked with a full supply of brown paper bags, ready to be reassembled into something more than just ordinary grocery bags. When packed with orders warmly filled, these grocery bags would become blankets against the cold, soon to be unerringly distributed to the guests of the food pantry. Laughing, and with renewed purpose, folding paper bags into serving as warm blankets against the cold, the double baggers set to their simple task at hand; double bagging. 

C. Peter Erickson 

10/24/’25