Making ends meet

ROYAL CITY — The Royal City Food Bank operates like a well-oiled machine.

Every Tuesday, between 120 and 200 cars line up in the alley behind the food bank, most of them farm workers, Director Mary McKinney said. The food bank is only open for distribution from 12:30 to 3 p.m. on Tuesdays, so volunteers have to be efficient.

“It depends on what time (clients) get out of the fields and orchards,” McKinney said. “Last week, they were down Balsam Street lined up. Now it’s one o'clock, it's 80 degrees, so they're just now getting back to their vehicles and into town. I expect between 170 and 200 today. it's going up a little bit, and with the cost of living going up a lot more, we seem to have a trend going that way.”

The food bank is well-stocked, McKinney said. There’s a dry storage trailer for canned and packaged goods, and another refrigerated trailer for produce, and a third, smaller one, that serves as a walk-in freezer. Most of the food given out comes from Second Harvest in Spokane, Northwest Harvest Yakima and the Moses Lake Food Bank, McKinney said, but Harvest Foods in Royal City kicks in some as well, and local farmers also sometimes donate produce when it’s in season.

“We get like watermelons and cantaloupe from the farm east of town, that type of thing,” she said. “Peaches from the peach orchard, peppers, et cetera, depending on who has bulk and excess and whatever. We take whatever we can get.”

The food bank just finished distributing six pallets of emergency rescue boxes, food packages that were made up to tide folks over during the pandemic. This week, the packages include dried beans, rice, milk in no-refrigeration-needed cartons, a loaf of whole-grain bread, soups, canned salmon, a couple pounds of ground beef and a bag of Cheetos, among other things. Every household gets the same box regardless of family size, McKinney said, so it goes farther for some families than others.

During summer vacation, kids are more likely to be at home alone, and the food bank tries to orient its offerings toward them.

“It's harder to feed your children in the summertime when the prices of food are going up and school is out,” McKinney said. “We do chicken noodle soup and macaroni and cheese and different things in our boxes - children-oriented that they like to eat. Hot dogs if we have ’em.”

The food bank is staffed by anywhere from 20 to 26 volunteers, McKinney said. Sharon Chesterman is the assistant director, she said, and Maggie Nielsen is the food bank’s treasurer. There are also some young people who got started through a school project months ago and just kept coming back, she added.

Besides food donations, the food bank can really use boxes and bags, McKinney said.

“We're using banana boxes and bought plastic bags to insert in them so we could save the boxes, just take the bag out and put it in their vehicle. We save as many boxes as we can to use on the line. If we buy bags to insert and then pull out, they're 60 cents apiece and cardboard boxes are a buck apiece. And our free supply ran out.”

Joel Martin can be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.

Royal City Food Bank

229 Balsam Street NW

Royal City, WA 99357

509-346-2679

Distribution: 12:30-3 p.m., Tues.