By JONEL ALECCIA from AP (thanks to Pam P.)
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.
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.’”
Anti-hunger experts expect to see more need
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.
Nationwide, more than 50 million people a year receive charitable food assistance, according to Feeding America, a hunger relief organization. (see Page 2 or here)