by Chris Jay
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Martha Marak buys groceries at a different scale than you or I.
“Today, we bought a tractor-trailer filled with oatmeal,” she told me during a recent phone interview. “We’re purchasing more food than we ever have in the history of our organization.”
Marak is executive director of the Food Bank of Northwest Louisiana, one of the state’s five regional food banks. The Food Bank of Northwest Louisiana serves a seven-parish region that stretches from the Texas border to Arcadia and south to Mansfield and Coushatta.
Marak said that Northwest Louisiana has seen a steady rise in need for food assistance, and that COVID-19 has worsened the situation in every conceivable way.
“We distributed about one million pounds of food in all of 1997 combined,” Marak said. “That was our first year. We distributed 1.8 million pounds of food in October of 2020 alone.”
In most disaster scenarios, America’s network of 200 regional food banks can turn to one another for support. Areas unaffected by a hurricane, for example, send support to hard-hit neighboring communities. But the COVID-19 pandemic is happening everywhere at once.
“When there’s a pandemic, and every food bank is looking for food, it’s very tricky,” Marak said. “It was a little scary there for a while.”
Another challenge presented by the COVID-19 pandemic has been the loss of food pantry volunteers. Typically, food banks provide food to pantries that are run by nonprofits and churches. Volunteers at those pantries, many of whom are retired seniors, do much of the work of packaging and distributing food. Food pantries across the U.S. paused operations during COVID-19, their usual army of volunteers unable to safely carry out their duties.
“It was our job to take on that work,” Marak said. “The Food Bank staff and the community really stepped up. We’d find a big area, like a vacant parking lot, and have our trucks go there with food. We’d notify our clients in the area, and say: ‘Instead of going to your church, come to Fairgrounds Field.’
“We partnered with the mayors of every community that we could get ahold of, from Springhill to Blanchard, for mobile food distributions,” Marak said.
The mobile food distribution program is still underway.
Marak credits the federal government for quick action in the area of emergency food assistance, citing the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP), a provision of the CARES Act.
“That initial CARES Act funding really helped,” she said. “If you recall seeing produce being plowed under by farmers, early in the pandemic—the CARES Act made it possible for food banks to buy that produce.”
Thanks to its enormous bulk buying power, the Food Bank is able to purchase ten dollars’ worth of food for every dollar donated by a supporter. That’s why Marak encourages anyone who wishes to support the Food Bank of Northwest Louisiana to consider donating cash instead of food. Here’s the site to donate.
If you’d prefer to donate food items, the Food Bank of Northwest Louisiana welcomes donations of fresh produce and non-perishable food items Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., at 2307 Texas Avenue, Shreveport.
Unfortunately, it’s harder to locate information on how to receive emergency food assistance than it is to locate a link to donate. Because many Northwest Louisiana residents are requiring food assistance for the first time due to COVID-19, I’d like to include information on to how to go about receiving food assistance, but perhaps the best that I can do is encourage you to call (318) 675-2400.
As we wrapped up our conversation, I thanked Marak for the long hours that she and her team are putting in.
“I work with some incredible people, who have the heart for this work and are very mission-driven,” she said. “Which is good, because we’re just gearing up. This will be with us for a while.”
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