Mobile Food Banks Roll to Isolated, Rural Poor

On a recent sultry summer afternoon, 81-year-old widow Nellie Allen sat on the porch of her one-story brick home, one in a strip of government-subsidized houses surrounded by fields and country roads. Allen makes do on $900 a month from Social Security. She raised four kids and never worked outside the home. She doesn’t drive, so she can’t get to the nearest grocery store, which is several miles away. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to afford to buy what she needs.The big truck heading her way pulls to the side of a one-lane road to let oncoming cars pass by before it can reach her.The truck is the West Alabama Food Bank’s mobile pantry. Its cargo includes some 5,000 pounds of food — boxes of bread, fruits, vegetables, drinks and pastries that it will deliver to dozens of people in rural Alabama, many of them poor, aging or disabled. All of them, like Allen, need help to make ends meet.Allen pushes her wheelbarrow down a cracked sidewalk to a dead end to receive her groceries. Allen examines the contents of the box: She happily notices the lettuce and other greens she can put into a salad. With ranch dressing.“We don’t get the same stuff every time,” she said. “But I can cook with it.”Food pantries and soup kitchens tend to be in densely populated cities, where they can draw a lot of people. That model doesn’t work in rural counties, where settlement is sparse. Counties with the highest rates of “food insecurity,” where people don’t have enough access to affordable, nutritious food, are disproportionately rural. Rural counties make up 63 percent of U.S. counties but 79 percent of those with the worst food insecurity rates, according to Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks.