of fresh-picked vegetables, in cold side-chapel-refrigerators of meat and cheese... In hundreds of cartons with improbable names of obscure beers on them, donated by the brewers because beer-cartons are particularly sturdy and useful for packing food... In the men and women, employees and trained volunteers, operating the machinery, manning the desks, sorting and packaging the fresh produce, teaching survival skills in the Food Bank classrooms, kitchens, and gardens, driving the trucks that bring food in and the trucks that take food out to where it’s needed. For these towering walls and blocks and reefs of goods — 12 to 18 thousand pounds of food in each bay of the warehouse — will vanish, melt away like sandcastles, tonight or in a few days, to be replaced instantly by the
supply of boxed, canned, glassed, fresh, and frozen food, which in turn will melt away in a day or a week, going where it’s needed. And that is everywhere. The Food Bank distributes in every county of the state of Oregon plus one county of Washington state. They don’t have to look far to find people who need help getting enough to eat. Anywhere kids are, to start with. Many school-age children in our country, towns, and cities don’t get three meals a day, or even two. Many aren’t always sure if they’ll get anything to eat today at all. How many? About a third of them. One child in three. Put it this way: If you or I were a statistic-parent with three statistic-kids in school, one of our three children would be hungry. Malnourished. Spring 2012 31
Hungry in the morning, hungry at night. The kind of hungry that makes a child feel cold all the time. Makes a child stupid. Makes a child sick. Which one of our children...which child...? n Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is the author of the masterpieces The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home, among many other books. She was the University’s Schoenfeldt Series visiting writer in 1990. The University’s students devote thousands of hours annually to helping out at the Oregon Food Bank and Portland’s Blanchet House, which has fed millions of people since it was founded by University alumni in 1952. For information, see oregonfoodbank. com, blanchethouse.org, or the University’s Campaign site, rise.up.edu.