PODCAST: In CT, a Greenwich food pantry sets the bar high

In Greenwich, a community food pantry offers residents in need the opportunity to “shop” for fresh food. Can the rest of the state replicate it?

WSHU’s Molly Ingram spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman to discuss her article, “In Greenwich, a gold-standard food pantry. But others struggle,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read her story here .

WSHU: Your story focuses on the Neighbor to Neighbor food pantry in Greenwich. How did you find this pantry, and what makes it interesting?

LT: Yeah, so I was interested in the issue of food insecurity. It’s one of the issues on my new human services beat, and I spoke with someone in Stamford who told me, you know, if you’re looking for kind of the gold standard of food pantries in Connecticut, I would look at Greenwich. So that’s what led me there. As most of us know, Greenwich is a very wealthy area. It has a tremendous amount of resources, and there are a lot of people locally who are supporting this pantry. You know, some people, as I was reporting this story, kind of asked me if Greenwich even needs a food pantry. But, you know, the cost of living in Greenwich is incredibly high, so a lot of the people who might work for wealthier families in the community work at restaurants, jobs where they’re not earning those hedge fund kind of salaries. They are also trying to survive in Greenwich, many of them because they want their kids to attend the excellent public schools in Greenwich.

The cost of living is very high, and it’s pushing people to the edge of their budgets and beyond. So one of the things that was remarkable was just to see that Greenwich has kind of really rallied around this pantry, and that takes the form of volunteerism. There are high school students volunteering at the pantry, as well as people from corporations who come in, retirees, and just a very wide swath of the community.

And then there are people fundraising. Some people have taken it upon themselves to even donate their special item each month. So one person might say, I’m going to fund every kid who’s going back to school to get a brand new backpack, or I’m going to fund every household to get a new set of sheets this month. So there’s just a very impressive way that the community has kind of stepped up for this pantry, and they’re also doing a lot of things that other pantries are striving to do like they’re striving to serve as much fresh food as possible.

A lot of pantries, I think the image that many of us might have in our minds of a food pantry is canned goods. It’s going to your church or your synagogue, going to your school when they have a food drive, and donating a can of soup or a box of pasta or something like that. But food pantries today are really striving to serve people, you know, the healthy, freshest food that they can. And in Greenwich, they’re trying to even get that to 100%, meaning that a family could come in and take home 100% fresh food and no canned food at all, if they want to. That’s pretty extraordinary. When I told other pantries about that percentage, they were kind of in awe of that.

WSHU: And so they were in awe, is this something they think they can replicate? Is this something that other food pantries across the state may be able to actually do?

LT: I think that a lot of them are actually working to get more fresh food. And in the summer, in particular, some of the percentages that other pantries that I talked to, you know, it’s beyond 50% in some cases, they’re able to supply people 60% fresh food, or even 75% fresh food, on occasion, but to be able to do it consistently as Greenwich does; I’m working on a solution story where I’m going to go a little bit more into you know, how Greenwich has been able to do that particular piece of it, keep fresh food coming. But I think that there are some interesting things happening with food pantries right now. In terms of, you know, there’s more awareness that food waste is a problem that supermarkets need to solve, restaurants need to solve in terms of climate change that we don’t want all of this food just rotting in dumpsters and landfills that could be feeding people. So there, there is a real effort to get all that fresh food to pantries before it goes bad.

And I think another thing that happens at Greenwich is that there’s sort of a grocery store-style shopping experience. So you go in, you have a cart, aisles, a refrigerated section and a produce section, and you have a choice. So you don’t have to take garbanzo beans if you eat black beans in your household. You can choose the chicken instead of the pork. You can choose non-dairy milk instead of dairy milk, things like that. So that is something that I saw at a number of pantries that I visited, that a lot of them are striving to create kind of more of a what they refer to as a dignified shopping experience, that where someone is not being compelled to just take a bag of whatever the pantry has decided that their family is going to eat that week, when some of those foods, and it might not be culturally appropriate, might not be things that are in their diet. That is one of the things that you see in Greenwich that is happening in other places.

I think Greenwich is just a lot of these things that are going one step further. And they’re going one step further because, frankly, money. You know, there, there’s just so much that other pantries can do with the budgets that they have, and they’re working hard to collaborate with local grocery stores or restaurants or food rescue, which is another group that gets food to pantries to, you know, 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 with Greenwich has budget. If they run out, if those resources aren’t enough, they can always just buy more, and most pantries can only kind of afford so much.

WSHU: On the money piece, in your story, you mentioned that Connecticut doesn’t contribute as much to its food pantries as neighboring states. What did you find 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 share was receiving tens of millions of pounds of food from the federal government to distribute in 2021; that was kind of the height of these numbers. And then once the pandemic ended, that food went away. But the numbers have stayed nearly as high in terms of the demand and the number of people who are using these resources. And so New Jersey, for example, has stepped up 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 these pantries are able to do without that money to make up for the fact that this federal food is no longer available.

Connecticut is not doing anywhere near that. Connecticut’s food share gets $850,000, which is 1% of what New Jersey is giving. New Jersey has three times the population of Connecticut, but it doesn’t have 100 times the population of Connecticut. So it is a big difference. And when I visited some of these pantries, like in Bridgeport or Hartford, I kind of asked them, what would be the thing that would allow you to serve people more, serve people more often? A lot of places can only let people visit once a month, whereas neighbor-to-neighbor in Greenwich allows people to visit weekly. That was kind of the answer. You know, they’re doing all that they can to fundraise, to collaborate with grocery stores and food rescue, but if the state did more to help Connecticut food share, provide more food, then they’d be able to serve people better.