Help yourself: Pantries offer healthy foods

The COVID-19 pandemic has strained many aspects of our life, including adding difficulty to keeping safe and healthy foods available at home.

If you are skipping meals to make do or if your family is hungry, one of the nearly 1,000 food pantries in the state of Missouri may be able to help.

Swope Health’s registered dietitian Priscilla Perez Schmid, MPH, RDN, LDN, recently had a conversation with Rebecca Collier of Harvesters, a community food network, about how food pantries in our community.  Their conversation answers questions about how food pantries work and how you can find a food pantry near you.

Harvesters has a service locator to help find resources near you and a calendar of public food distribution sites, many operated as drive-thru events.

Swope Health hosts regular food distribution drive-thru events on the first Saturday of each month with support from Sysco Foods, Total Man Community Development Corp. and Rep. Barbara Anne Washington and others. The next event is 9-11 am Saturday, Nov. 7 at Swope Health Central, 3801 Blue Parkway, Kansas City.

In addition, you can locate a nearby Food Pantry at feedingmissouri.org. Feeding Missouri is a coalition of six Missouri food banks working together to distribute foods.  The organization’s groups distribute more than 120 million pounds of food each year through a network of more than 1,500 community feeding programs.

Harvesters is a member of Feeding Missouri and a member of Feeding America, a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks.

You do not need to receive Food Stamp benefits to get help from a food pantry. You’ll be asked for basic information and a few questions about where you live. The pantries exist to provide relief from hunger. In the United States, the government estimates that one of every nine persons struggles with hunger.