Second Harvest Food Bank has a lot on its plate

Hunger gets a lot of attention around the holiday season; “summer hunger” is a less talked about yet just as real problem for struggling families.

“Kids being out of school puts an extra strain on household budgets,” said Jessica Vaughan, community development coordinator with Second Harvest Food Bank​ of San Joaquin & Stanislaus Counties.

To help solve the problem, Tenet Healthcare Corp., which owns Doctors Medical Center of Modesto, Doctors Hospital of Manteca and Emanuel Medical Center in Turlock, just held a breakfast cereal drive for Second Harvest. Boxes of healthy cereals, collected June 1-5, went to the new Boys & Girls Clubs program at the King-Kennedy Memorial Center in Modesto and to French Camp Elementary in the Manteca Unified School District.

Through Wednesday, Save Mart Supermarkets is holding an in-store drive, called Peanut Butter With a Purpose, to benefit food banks including Second Harvest. Last year, the drive collected more than 16 tons of peanut butter, according to Save Mart.

Families also benefit from a program launched in February by Second Harvest, called Mobile Fresh. The food bank kicked off the pilot program in Manteca, then expanded to Lathrop and Tracy. The goal is to take Mobile Fresh throughout Second Harvest’s service area, which includes Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Merced and five Mother Lode counties.

Mobile Fresh was created to help solve the problem of families not getting a healthy mix of foods on their tables and the resulting conditions of obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes, Vaughan said. “All of our programs have produce built into them, but we wanted a program specifically to get produce to people.”

The pilot program was made possible by a $25,000 grant from Sutter Tracy Community Hospital and the Tracy Hospital Foundation. There are three distribution sites: Sequoia Heights Baptist Church in Manteca, Grace Community Church in Lathrop and Tracy Housing Authority.

The grant money was to provide 100 20-pound bags at each site twice a month, said Kirsten Salas, Second Harvest’s grant specialist, “but we’re finding we can do more than that because we’re getting good prices. ... We have delivered 40,000 pounds of produce” since February.

Second Harvest buys the bulk of its produce from the Farm to Family program of the California Association of Food Banks, but some of it is donated by grocery stores, factories and farmers outside the program, Vaughan said.

On Monday morning, volunteers from the community, the Dairy Farmers Association and Oak Valley Community Bank were at Second Harvest’s headquarters on Industrial Park Drive in Manteca to sort through big bins of produce, discarding what was damaged and putting the rest into bags and crates for Mobile Fresh and other programs.

For Mobile Fresh, 20-pound bags held oranges, cabbage, carrots, potatoes and cauliflower. Two hundred bags were filled for distribution in Manteca.

Being in the communities when residents are picking up the food is a great experience, Vaughan said. People in different cultures use produce in a variety of ways others might not think of, she said, so the exchange of recipes and ideas is interesting and fun to observe.

Second Harvest understands that to help people change eating habits, it’s not enough to hand out food, Vaughan said. So the food bank couples distribution with some light educational information, such as the value of drinking water and milk rather than juices and even diet sodas, and the importance of physical activity.

Second Harvest also knows that having food to give means nothing without having people to sort, package and deliver it, Vaughan said. The food bank needs volunteer at its headquarters and at distribution sites. One way to help is at the monthly Super Saturdays at the Industrial Park Drive facility. The next Super Saturdays are July 11, Aug. 15 and Sept. 19, from 9 a.m. to noon.

About distribution sites, Vaughan said, “To be out there and talk with people and see the expressions on their faces, how grateful they are, it’s special.”

Drivers will give pieces of fruit to kids, whose eyes get wide with excitement. “You’d think, ‘It’s produce, no big deal; we live in the Valley and you can get it anywhere,’” she said, “but that’s not the case for a lot of people.”

Second Harvest works with dozens of food pantries in Modesto, Turlock, Oakdale, Riverbank, Waterford, Ceres, Empire, Hickman, Keyes, Newman and Patterson.

To donate to Second Harvest or learn how to become a volunteer, call Vaughan or Salas at (209) 239-2091.

This story was originally published June 16, 2015 at 11:49 AM with the headline "Second Harvest Food Bank has a lot on its plate."