by Janet Hurley     photo by Matt Rose

Kitty Schaller has spent her life thinking about food. A Midwesterner whose father managed sales for Kraft’s Natural Cheese division, Schaller graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in food science. She presumed that she, too, would work in the food industry. But she had no idea that, rather than producing food, she would spend years thinking about how to effectively distribute it—and how to change public policy to end hunger in the United States and, ultimately, around the globe. Growing up, she believed food was what held the world together. “If you want people to come, bring cookies,” she says. “It’s the way we get to know each other.” But in her senior year of college, a community nutrition course opened her eyes to the critical role food really plays. “I worked with the visiting nurses in Des Moines and visited families that had nothing—nothing,” she says. “I’d read about that, but I didn’t know what that was like. It was a really profound experience.” 

Today, Schaller is executive director of the Asheville-based Manna FoodBank, the largest anti-hunger agency in the region, with more than 1,000 volunteers, 35 full-time employees and strategic partnerships with state and federal governments, community organizations and large-scale food donors such as Ingles, Kraft, Kellogg and Procter & Gamble. Manna distributes some six million pounds of food each year to 331 agencies in 16 Western North Carolina counties. It also provides training and support to those agencies. While Manna relies on generous donations of food, money and volunteer time, it has also developed a unique income-producing, job-creating grocery inventory reclamation program through a contract with Ingles Markets. Schaller, who took the director job in 2004, never intended to work for a food bank when she and her husband moved to Asheville in 1999. “That chapter was closed,” Schaller says. She had traveled to India and Bangladesh to study hunger and then spent 17 years developing strategic partnerships for a food bank in New Jersey. But Manna needed someone in 1999 to develop a comprehensive fundraising strategy, and Schaller was up to the challenge. 

Now, food banks like Manna face a perfect storm of pressures: more efficient computerized systems in the food industry mean less overstock to donate; and as food prices skyrocket, money doesn’t go as far toward buying needed supplies. Despite the strain, Schaller says Western North Carolina community groups donated a record amount of food in 2008—371,834 pounds of it, compared to 253,000 pounds in 2007. While people donated slightly lower average cash amounts to Manna during the 2008 holiday season compared to 2007, the total number of donors was up by 26%, an increase of more than 1,000 people. “Everybody wants to do something, even if they can’t do very much,” she says. “There is a community feeling to everything that happens in Asheville, and that makes all the difference to me.”

I saw that you worked on the 2008 Farm Bill. Tell me about the public policy aspect of your job. When I became executive director of Manna four years ago, we dabbled a little bit in trying to get people to write letters to lawmakers. People said to me, this is not what you do. You distribute food. And I said, no, we involve, educate and unite people in the work of ending hunger. I should point out that our mission statement was very strenuously carved out about 12 years ago. That “work of ending hunger” thing was a way of saying the end goal is not just ending hunger alone. I mean, it’s hard to talk about hunger and separate it from poverty. People need to understand that. I do think we could end hunger in this country. I think things like food stamps, which seem like a Band-Aid, are critical. If the food-stamp program is really working, it’s a way to stabilize a family. It enables people to get their lives together. 

Through our outreach program, we know that food stamps are vastly underused. We did a briefing in October last year to educate our legislators. We had a spreadsheet that indicated what we have to gain in WNC if everyone who is eligible for food stamps actually received them and used them. It’s a $94 million-dollar-a-year economic impact in this 16-county area—that’s dollars in the grocery store that get re-spent as dollars at a craft gallery and so on. It really matters to all of us. Those are our tax dollars. If we don’t use them, they’re simply unspent.  

Were you satisfied with the new Farm Bill, specifically with $250 million for the Emergency Food Assistance Program in 2009? Do you feel like it’s really going to address what needs to be addressed? This nation isn’t organized to make giant leaps. We take baby steps, but they are important, they’re going to make a difference. But the Farm Bill is a federal program that is administered by the states. In North Carolina, that means it’s actually administered by the counties. And every county is entirely different because that’s the way we’re set up. Manna has 16 different offices we relate to. There are states where you can sign up for food stamps online, where they have kiosks in public places where you can pre-screen yourself. And that small step could improve people’s access to this program and eventually take a load off of caseworkers in DSS offices. One of the things that the Farm Bill did was put $50 million to work immediately, but then after the bill was signed, they cut back the admin money…to keep the trucks on the road and so on. So the admin money didn’t go up, but the amount of food did, which means the food banks are doing more with less.

How will the huge bailouts in Washington affect food banks and hunger issues? You can’t spend $700 billion dollars and not have it negatively affect other things. I think things are going to be a lot worse before they get better. But I had a friend who used to say one in eight people is hungry in New Jersey—here in the mountains it’s one in five. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are four people who can help. There is a lot to be said for that attitude. 

Do most Americans see food and hunger as separate issues? It is a multilayered thing. Most people look at hungry people and don’t see hungry people. They’re seeing people who are overweight. One of the biggest problems we’ve got in this nation is that we are driven by price and we are providing cheap food that is not nutritious. Therefore, the people who have the least capacity to buy are buying the absolute worst food. They are consuming empty calories and they are packing on the pounds and we are developing a nation with all manner of diet-related diseases.

Do you think we need to grow more of our own food? I do, partly because it is sustainable. Trying to teach gardening to children is the most important sort of thing. Being connected to food is something that we’re really losing. Food is a connector—it is in social ways, it is in nutritional ways. This is very, very basic. We can change the world with food. We can. We’ve got too many toys in this country and not enough food culture.  

We’ve talked about all the factors that have contributed to the horrible situation for food banks trying to serve the hungry.  What are you hoping will happen in 2009? I don’t think it’s going to be some sort of cataclysmic change. The crisis that we face right now is drawing to light a problem that has been basically true all along. So when we have this opportunity, we need to make sure that we are paying attention to it. And using it to awaken people. We’ll be doing a hunger study in the spring because if we can’t prove hunger, it doesn’t exist. This study will help us prove what we found in a study four years ago: 115,000 people in these counties that we serve receive food assistance from food pantries or kitchens or shelters. It’s the political will that will change the face of hunger in this country. It’s about people believing that these are not ‘other’ people, that they are part of us.  

Manna FoodBank 

Donate to Manna or find out more about its programs, including volunteer opportunities,  at mannafoodbank.org. Make checks payable to Manna FoodBank at 627 Swannanoa River Road, Asheville, NC 28805. For every $10 you donate, Manna can provide enough food for 25 meals. For other information, call 828-299-3663.