Last month a friend of mine sent me a picture of miles and miles of cars lined up waiting for food that was being distributed by the National Guard here in Vermont. Nineteen hundred cars. I’d never seen anything like it, and it took me a minute to even believe it. And when I told a friend about it…a perfectly smart and thoughtful friend…he said,  “Well, they probably don’t really need it. I mean, those are pretty nice cars…”

It turns out there are lot of ways to be food insecure, and they’re all invisible, and they’re growing all the time. I went and talked with some people working on the front lines of hunger about this big federal food distribution program that’s all over the news, and we talked about the chronic problem of stigmatizing people who don’t have to enough to eat.

((Check out a gallery of pictures from this event below…))

In this show

Robert Ostermeyer, Director of Franklin/Grand Isle Community Action at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity

Nicole Whalen, Vermont Foodbank

Faye Longo, Vermont Foodbank

Music

Brian Clark, Calais, Vermont

Links to Information about Food

How to find your local Foodbank

Vermont Foodbank

How to find your local food pantry

The following pictures were taken by Terry J. Allen of East Montpelier, Vermont, at the Newport food distribution event in June, 2020. She’s great, and you can see more of her work here.

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