Patch Editors "Give 5" at Maryland Food Bank

How much food would an editor pack if an editor could pack food?

A lot, as it turns out, but not nearly as much as the U.S. Coast Guard, which set a food-packing record at Maryland Food Bank on Feb. 2 with 34,454 pounds of food in six hours.

Thursday morning, a group of Patch editors volunteered at MFB, located on the 2200-block of Halethorpe Farms Road. We packed 9,705 pounds of food, which equates to 7,826 meals. What we lacked in military precision we more than made up with enthusiasm and proper grammar.

Through about 600 member organizations – soup kitchens, mobile pantries, emergency food centers – every year MFB distributes more than 18 million pounds of food to nearly 450,000 people in Maryland.

None of it could happen without volunteers.

According to Nancy Smith, MFB’s director of government relations, last year 3,783 people volunteered to sort and package food like we did, performing almost 21,000 hours of work that represents about $450,000 worth of labor.

“We could not survive without volunteers,” Smith says. “We could not hire enough workers to do that work. We could not sustain ourselves.”

Volunteering along with us were about a dozen members of Local 24 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. As a stream of boxes, cans and bottles flowed down a conveyor belt, people pulled off items and sorted them into categories: canned fruit, canned vegetables, personal care products.

“I’ve never actually volunteered before,” says Sarah Khalife, a freshman computer engineering student at UMBC who has been spending Thursday mornings at MFB since the beginning of the year.

“I get to meet random people,” she says. “It’s fun.”

“You always wonder what you can do to help people out, and then you hear about this, and it feels good,” says Michael Taylor of Dundalk, a member of Local 24 who is unemployed. “It’s good to help people out.”

“It gets you down to the real experience of what people endure,” says Local 24 member Russell Rouse, of South Baltimore, who volunteered at MFB along with his wife, Kimberly.  ‘It makes you appreciate what you got, that’s for sure.”

Mostly, it makes you think that the food you’re sorting may end up helping one of our friends or neighbors. Like millions of Americans, any one of us could be on the receiving end – thrown into turmoil by a medical bill or unanticipated crisis, a paycheck or two away from homelessness.

MFB doesn’t just serve the destitute and homeless. In this depressed economy, MFB’s clientele is increasingly the working poor and middle-class families making above the federally defined level of poverty.

“A lot of them are working families that just aren’t making it,” says Smith. “They’re people who just need a little help to get by.”

“We had a 27 percent increase in demand last year,” says salvage coordinator Steve Brown. “We’re helping middle-class families. It just isn’t the homeless.”

This week, MFB is holding its annual food drive. The U.S. Postal Service will pick up boxes of food from your home, or donations can be dropped off at Safeway and other participating business partners.

The time we Patch editors spent at MFB didn’t feel like work. It actually felt more like fun. We left with a sense of satisfaction with our small contribution, and this reporter can’t wait to go back again.

If you’d like to volunteer at MFB – as an individual or in a group – visit mdfoodbank.org or call 410-737-8282.