When food banks need bread, 900 home bakers answer the call

 On a recent Saturday near Seattle, Cheryl Ewaldsen pulled three golden loaves of wheat bread out of her kitchen oven.

The fragrant, oat-topped bread was destined not for her table, but for a local food bank, to be distributed to families increasingly struggling with hunger and the high cost of groceries.

"I just get really excited about it knowing that it's going to someone and they're going to make, like, 10 sandwiches," said Ewaldsen, 75, a retired university human resources director.

Ewaldsen is a volunteer with Community Loaves, a Seattle-area nonprofit that started pairing home bakers with food pantries during the COVID-19 pandemic - and hasn't stopped.

Cheryl Ewaldsen bakes bread.

Since 2020, the organization headed by Katherine Kehrli, the former dean of a culinary school, has donated more than 200,000 loaves of fresh bread and some 220,000 energy cookies to food banks. They come from a network of nearly 900 bakers in four states - Washington, Oregon, California and Idaho - and represent one of the largest such efforts in the country.

Now, amid rising grocery prices and federal cuts to food aid for low-income people, demand for the group's donations of nutritious baked goods is greater than ever, Kehrli said.

"Most of our food banks do not get any kind of whole-grain sandwich bread donation," she said. "When we ask what we could do better, they just say, 'Bring us more.'"

Ewaldsen's bread goes to the nearby Edmonds Food Bank, where the client list has swelled from 350 households to nearly 1,000 in the past three years, according to program manager Lester Almanza.

Volunteers slicing bread. Photos: AP

Nationwide, more than 50 million people a year receive charitable food assistance, according to Feeding America, a hunger relief organization.

Anti-hunger experts say they expect the need to rise as recent federal legislation sharply cutting food aid to poor people takes effect. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the tax and spending cuts bill Republicans muscled through Congress in July means 3 million people would not qualify for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits.

Gauging the impact, however, could soon be more difficult after the U.S. Agriculture Department recently said it would halt an annual report on hunger in America, saying it was redundant, costly and politicized "subjective liberal fodder." After 30 years, the 2024 report, to be released on Oct. 22, will be the last, the agency said.

"Ending data collection will not end hunger, it will only make it a hidden crisis that is easier to ignore and more difficult to address," Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center, an advocacy group, said in a statement.

Almanza said federal funding for his food bank has dropped at least 10% this year, meaning that every donation helps.

"It's something that a lot of people rely on," he said.

That includes people like Chris Redfearn, 42, and his wife, Melanie Rodriguez-Redfearn, 43, who turned to a food bank in Everett, Washington, last spring after moving to the area to find work. They had to stretch their savings until she began a new position this month teaching history at a local college. Chris Redfearn, who has worked for decades in business, is still looking.

"The food pantry assists with anywhere from $40 to $80 worth of savings weekly," he said. "We've been able to keep ourselves afloat."

Finding homemade bread from Community Loaves at a food pantry was a surprise, the couple said. Often, surplus bread sent by grocery stores includes highly processed white breads or sweets donated near their expiration or sell-by dates.

The breads come in three varieties - honey oat, whole wheat and sunflower rye - all made with whole grains and minimally processed ingredients.

"They make it really wholesome and fibrous," Chris Redfearn said. "It mimics most of the health-conscious breads that are out there."

The notion of donating home-baked bread came to Kehrli, 61, during the pandemic, when she was displaced from her job at the busy Seattle Culinary Academy.

"I love to bake and just an idea sparked: Would it be possible for us to help from our home and get important valuable nutrition to our food banks?" she recalled.

Many food pantries don't accept or distribute donations of homemade baked goods. Feeding America warns individual bakers against the practice, saying "since food banks can't confirm how your baked goods were made or their ingredients, they can't be donated."

But health department rules vary by state, Kehrli learned. In Washington and the other three states where Community Loaves now operates, bread is one of the few foods allowed to be donated from a home kitchen through a program like theirs.

"We wouldn't be able to donate custard pies. We wouldn't be able to donate lasagna," Kehrli said. "But bread is deemed safe. Anything that is fully baked and does not require refrigeration."

Still, Community Loaves bakers must follow approved recipes for the bread and two types of energy cookies. They obtain flour from common sources, and bake and deliver on a shared schedule twice a month.

The bakers buy their own supplies, donating the cost of the ingredients as well as their time. Most make a few loaves per baking session before delivering them to local "hubs," where other volunteers collect the bread and transport it to the food banks.

Bakers range from former professionals to beginners. A robust website with recipes and how-to videos backstops every step, Kehrli said.

Baking the bread is satisfying on several levels, said Ewaldsen, who has donated nearly 800 loaves in less than two years. Part of it is addressing the physical need for food, but part is also addressing the spiritual hunger for connection with neighbors.

"It's the opportunity for me to bake something and to share something with others in the community, where they don't necessarily need to know who I am, but they know that there's a community that loves and cares for them," she said.

While such sentiments are sincere and admirable, anti-hunger experts stress that individual donations can't take the place of adequately funded government services for struggling Americans.

"It's beautiful that our communities act this way," said Gina Plata-Nino of the Food Research & Action Center. "But it is a loaf of bread. That is going to feed one person - and there are millions in line."

Associated Press