de:		U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders <Info_Sanders@sanders.senate.gov>

Helping Provide Food to Vermonters with John Gorton

Helping Provide Food to Vermonters with John Gorton  Dear Fellow Vermonter, As we all know, good quality food is essential to a healthy life. Unfortunately, given high prices at the grocery store, too many Vermonters are unable to purchase the kinds of food they need for themselves and their kids. Few people understand that reality better than Vermonter John Gorton. John served in the Navy before becoming a farmer. These days you can find John and a team of other dedicated volunteers running the Sheldon Food Shelf, which distributes 30,000 pounds of food and serves 450 Vermont families each month. For decades, they have provided high-quality, nutritious food to the Franklin County community by sourcing food from grocery stores and local farms. The Sheldon Food Shelf goes beyond providing basic necessities such as canned goods and non-perishables. They also provide fresh produce and meat products from our Vermont farmers, and even offer recipes on how to best use that local food. This spring, the Bernie Buzz team visited the Sheldon Food Shelf to see what a day of distributing food looks like. Please read the conversation with John below. If you would like to learn more about the Sheldon Food Shelf, click here. To learn more about food shelves and nutrition resources in your area or around the state, you can visit the Vermont Department of Health, Vermont Foodbank or Hunger Free Vermont. You can also call Vermont 2-1-1. Sincerely,   (This interview has been edited for clarity and length) Q: Please tell us a bit about yourself, John.   I was born here in Sheldon. I lived here until I moved to Maine in the seventh grade. My dad worked in the paper mill down here in Sheldon Springs, and then he moved to a paper mill in Maine. I went to the Naval Academy after high school and then went into the Navy [onboard] nuclear submarines. After nine years of active duty, while I was still in the Navy, we had the opportunity to buy this small farm just outside the village here. We bought that farm, and I decided that I was ready to leave active duty and start trying to farm.  Q: How have you seen the Sheldon Food Shelf evolve over the years?  Back in those early days, in the 1990s and even the early 2000s, we called ourselves an emergency food shelf, because people came to us when they had an emergency. The dryer broke, the car broke down, they had a medical emergency with their kid, they lost their job or something happened that kind of disrupted their week-to-week financial routine and they needed some food support. Starting back in about 2010 or so, we shifted, and we started saying, we’re not an emergency food shelf anymore. We’re an alternative grocery store for families who don’t have the financial wherewithal to go buy everything that they need in the grocery store. And that has made the job very challenging to try and make sure we maintain a broad selection of food — as broad a selection as we can. We can’t match the grocery store, but we have food that’s high quality, and food that we know people will use.  When we started the food shelf, we went down to the food bank, we brought 1,000 pounds of food back and made up 24 boxes with about 45 pounds of food in each box. It was mostly all dry goods and canned goods. It took me three months to give away 24 boxes of food. Last night, we served 30 families. Saturday, we served 40 families. We give away about 30,000 pounds of food a month now, serving about 450 families. And that doesn’t include some of our other special programs, like the Summer Meals Program. I’m the one that does a lot of the coordinating here, but we have a lot of other volunteers who take on other specific responsibilities. Q: What are the challenges of sourcing quality food?   We get a lot of our food through the Vermont Foodbank. We have what they call rescue food, where we go to the Hannaford’s — we go to Hannaford’s in Milton, we go to Hannaford’s in Enosburg, we go to Costco — and bring back food. And most of our volunteers are people who are food conscious. So sometimes you get things like the fruits or vegetables, and you look and you start to say, okay, this one’s going back. It is kind of a constant process of looking particularly at the fresh produce. All the canned goods are pretty simple. They all have expiration dates on them, and most canned goods are good for several years beyond their date. Unless the can is damaged, generally it’s pretty easy to maintain quality. The fresh produce — and handling the fresh produce — has been challenging. Probably close to 30% of what we hand out now is fresh produce. We have a grant from the Vermont Foodbank, which is called Vermonters Feeding Vermonters, and it is a grant that we use to buy food from local farms. A lot of it is Hartmann’s farm stand, but we have a couple of other local farmers here that we buy from.  Q: Why is it important to go through the effort of sourcing local fresh food?  You want to give people the most nutritious food. So we’re careful when we try to source food. We try to source food that is nutritious, food that we know people will eat. We try to get our hands on frozen meat, because meat is very, very expensive. We try to get our hands on things like eggs, butter, cheese, cottage cheese — you can see all that cream cheese we got. That was a donation from Enosburg. We’re very fortunate because we have this large cooler and large freezer, so we can handle a large volume of food that a lot of the food shelves in the area don’t have. They don’t have much storage, so they can’t handle very much food.  Q: What is something that you wish more people knew about the Sheldon Food Shelf? Lots of times people will call me up, or people will say, well, I’m out of food. They’ll call me at, like, two o’clock in the afternoon, and they’ll say, well, I’m out of food, can I get some food at the food shelf? And we try to tell people, number one, don’t wait until your cupboards are empty. If you know you’re going to be short food, we’re open four days a week. Get here. And the other thing we tell people, particularly people that have SNAP benefits, WIC benefits or are on an EBT card — don’t go spend all your EBT card and then when you run out of food, come to the food shelf. Come to the food shelf, get what we have, because we are limited. We can only get the foods that we can source because we’re dependent almost entirely on charity. So come and get what I have, then go use your EBT card to buy the things that we don’t have so that you can make meals. And we also try to encourage people in how to use those foodstuffs in making meals, because that’s the cheapest way to feed your family. You make a meal, you’ve got leftovers for a couple more meals. Q: In what ways does the Sheldon Food Shelf encourage people to utilize the fresh produce you provide? I’m not a particularly good cook, but a lot of our volunteers are really good cooks, and they can talk to people. “Oh, this is how you use this.” We put recipes together for people. People will come in and they’ll say, I don’t know how to use that, or I don’t think my kids will eat it. We talk to them about, well, okay, how do you disguise it, get your kids to eat it. How do you make meals? In many ways, just as important as actually having the food, is making sure we try to help families maximize the food value of what we have. Having volunteers that have that food preparation knowledge is really important. Q: What feedback do you get from the community when they stop by the Food Shelf?   People sometimes just say “thank you very much.” Other times, they literally say, “I don’t know how I would feed my family if it weren’t for what I get here.” And there’s no better feeling than that, that you’re really making a difference in people’s lives. Because my goal, even back when we started, one of my goals was, if you have to come to my food shelf, if I can give you enough food so that you can maybe fill in a few things and feed your family for a week, I freed up that paycheck that week to fix the car or fix the dryer or fix the washer or get the medicine that you need for your kids. I’ve done something to change your life. And that’s our goal, to make sure what we’re doing is something that really changes people’s lives and improves people’s lives. And there’s nothing better than that. How Can We Help? My Vermont offices have experienced caseworkers on staff who help Vermonters navigate federal agencies every day. If you think my office can help, please do not hesitate to call 1-800-339-9834 or click here.  If you would like to share your thoughts on pending legislation, or if you have an idea that we could address through new legislation, click here.  Receiving this email as a forward? Click here to sign up for the Bernie Buzz. Office Locations Washington D.C. U.S. Senate 332 Dirksen Building Washington, DC 20510 tel (202) 224-5141 fax (202) 228-0776 Burlington 1 Church St., Suite 300 Burlington, VT 05401 tel (802) 862-0697 tel (800) 339-9834 fax (802) 860-6370 Unsubscribe Click here to forward this email