Five Loaves & Two Fishes: Filling the Hunger Gap

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This season, we're bringing you stories about people finding their professional stride by virtue of who they know, whether it's breathing new life into an age old profession, taking the reins and a family business, forging your own path with a new idea, or landing the perfect job doing something you'd never before even considered. In the deep hills of Appalachia. Linda McKinney has a very important job. She feeds people

in McDowell County, West Virginia. The community has seen its share of hardship and food shortages in the wake of the coal industry drying up over the last thirty years. In the aftermath, Linda works day in and day out to make sure that the people of McDowell are fed while the community perseveres. Producer Otis Gray brings us the story as a beautiful potato you want to fly. It's a chilly, overcast day and I am in McDowell County,

West Virginia, peeling potatoes with Linda McKinney. L I N D A m c K I N N E. Why we're in the warehouse of her food bank called Five Loaves and two Fishes. Linda just got this huge shipment donated to them, which is palettes and palettes of potatoes for a food give out that they have this coming weekend. That they're beautiful. Look at this and it was actually one. I'll picked up. Its shaped like a heart. So that tosion that's meant for me all gets donated here. Yes,

and do you give it away? For free. Yes, this is all free. We don't sell anything here. Linda is a character. She's a short Italian woman with her hair dyed of fiery crimson red, and she runs this food bank with her husband, Bob, in the southernmost part of the state, right in the heart of Appalachia. Bob is still a mind safety and training instructor for the state

mining Department. His income supports the two of them. Linda's full time job is to run the food bank and feed as many people as she possibly can here with whatever donation she receives from nonprofits and religious organizations. So you actually don't know all the time what you're gonna go. No, you don't. You know, we can't buy food. We don't buy food. We barely keep enough in our budget for overhead,

and no one's paid here. No one's paid here. Like many places around here, McDowell has always been a cold town, but in the last few decades more coal has been imported from overseas, devastating economies like this and leaving them with a high unemployment rate, poverty and everything that comes with that. So sometimes people will show up and Linda doesn't have enough. That happened last month, we just didn't

have the food. The third Saturday of every month, Linda and a group of volunteers do this food give out, and even in the coldest of weather, people in mcdowells show up as early as two am to wait in line for the noon distribution, because, for better or worse, let's first come, first serve. You can only feed so many, you know, and and we at one time we fed anyone that came, but the food got short, and h it scares you when you don't see food, and you say, God,

what am I gonna feed these people? There's no food here. This Saturday is the next food give out in McDowell, a rural place where for many the choices can be to leave or to starve. Well, today we followed Lenna McKinney. She stands her ground and prepares to feed whoever she can. I'm a storyteller. I never had anybody played with when I was little, so I just made up stories and lies and played by myself and eat mud and grass

and dirt, had a good old time by myself. I didn't have any cousins around that I could play with, and was raised basically by adults. And so you learn. I'm a storyteller. I've always been. I laugh all the time and never shut up. You know I'm in the building. When you hear I cackle, I'm sorry I cackle. Linda is a good talker. She was even a pastor for three years here in the same church she was born in.

She loves the story of Five Loaves and Two Fishes, which is the story the food Bank is named after. It's the Bible passage in which Jesus takes five loaves of bread and a couple of small fish and breaks them to feed thousands, despite his disciples not thinking they have enough to give. I can just see him pulling that bread and slinging that fish. That's what I would do, you know. Being Italian, we throw a lot of things,

so I just sling it everywhere. But you know, the disciples, which is all in a tissy because there wouldn't any food. But he showed him, didn't he He showed him. Linda was raised an only child, and like a lot of immigrants, her Italian father came to West Virginia to work in the coal fields back in the fifties, and they both lived in a house with her grandmother. My dad was a man of the house. He went to work every day at the mines, and my Norna and I had

hunt a widow. Don't that raised me? Well? First thing they taught me to pull me up to a cook stove and taught me how to cook. She was born and raised to be a caretaker of sorts. So when the man who used to run this food bank was falling ill and asked Linda and her husband to take it over, she eventually accepted. This we call a bug, you guys call a shopping cloth in the warehouse. She pulls out a shopping cart to show me how they

load up food for the families every month. First we look at our food and we count, and we're going to be able to figure up how many families were going to be able to food. This looks to me like we will be able to do anywhere from a hundred thirty five, maybe a hundred and uh maybe a hundred and fifty families. So what we'll do we'll come

down through here and we'll start right here. So in the warehouse there's pallets and boxes neatly packed against the walls, and almost everything here comes from a humanitarian organization called Operation Blessing. If it was not for Operation Blessing, we would not have food. Each month they sent us a

tractor trailer of food in that came mean this Thursday. Still, when there are disasters in other parts of the world, like the recent floods in Puerto Rico, that means that Operation Blessing might send more there and less to McDowell. Right now, they are the pallets of potatoes. There's a lot of canned goods like soups and vegetables and noodles. There's syrup on top of a big pallet of pancake mix. Little Debbie's Cakes is actually a really big donor. And

next to that there are boxes and boxes of ho hoes. Yeah, we got hos. And somewhere here I thank someone practices. They say these are delicious. Tell me what these are. I don't know. I don't eat sweets. Strawberry shortcake rolls? Yes, did they taste like a strawberry shortcake? I'm told a lot of sodas get donated here too. McDowell has landed in the spotlight before, kind of as a poster child

for a down and out, cold town. What it looks like when Appalachian communities can only afford things like sugary foods. They were even featured on PBS a decade back for what journalists called Mountain do Mouth, where kids had their teeth rotting away from so much sugar. While a lot of this coverage was very graphic and highly polarized poverty porn, the health issues that come with the poverty here are very real. Life expectancy in McDowell is just sixty four years.

The same lifespan is a lot of Third world countries. So Linda goes out of her way to procure the healthiest stuff that she can get. You know, you really need to take the good food you've got beans. I mean, I've come to show if you don't know how to cook beans. Some of the younger generation does not know how to cook beans. I'll show you how to cook the beans. I'll bring a pot of beans and item tasting. Okay,

let me bring it out here. The next thing Linda does is she takes me over to the shelf with these clear plastic bags on it. She calls them school break bags. And what we do when we get food in anything that is small child size, we put them in these bags. Anytime there's no school any children that come here. We'll get a school break bag. For most of the kids around here, the school feeds breakfast when they come in early. They feed school lunch and after

school snack. But on long breaks like Christmas, those three meals aren't there anymore, and the kids go back to homes with pretty empty pantries. I want to try to give a protein. You want to try to give a cereal something they can eat for breakfast. This is all snacks. You've got you some apple sauce, You've got you some juice. So you know, I may even throw some of those strawberry cakes we got, I think we've got I'll see

some cheese. It's over there. Um. So I mean, I know you like you kind of get what you get in terms of donations. Do you ever like worry about it? Does a lot of this stuff have like tons and tons of sugar in it? Well, you know, in my world, some food is better than no food. M It's really hard to understand McDowell and the gravity of hunger here unless you've seen it up close. I'm from a rural place too, in Vermont, where a lot of people depend on food stamps and even hunting to get by, but

this just it felt so different. There are some fast food places here, but even then there's no jobs, there's no money to buy that food. This is a place in a country of abundance where for a lot of people there is no food available. Period. When did the food get shore food got short into in when Walmart closed. That was our perishables. So that's why you would see You see the refrigerators, and you see the freezers, they're empty.

They've been empty since Walmart left, completely empty. Um, I can turn the light on and show you in camp. She walks me to the back of the warehouse to this long row of about ten full sized freezers and fridges. She says, these were full of meats, fruits, eggs, yogurt, produce anything Walmart would give them. Now each one is completely empty. These were full of meat when Walmart was here, full of meat, any kind of meat that Walmart had.

We had it. Each family got approximate three sometimes five big packages of meat. And in the fruits and the vegetables, we would put them in these trays and we would put them outside, and the people were allowed to take what fruits and vegetables they needed. You could pretty much fill these up more or less for free every week. Okay, well yes, and a lot of times if they would redo their meat cases, we would have to open up and give out the meat then because we had too

much for the freezers. You had an excess of food. Ninety pounds is what we lost when they left us a year pounds. We'll get back to the story in a second. First, a word from Express Employment Professionals. A strong work ethic takes pride in a job well done, sweats over the details. This is you. But to get an honest day's work, you need a response, You need a call back, You need a job. Express Employment Professionals can help because we understand what it takes to get

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you a job. At Express, we can put you to work with companies of all sizes and industries, from the production floor to the front office Express Nose Jobs you get to no Express find your location at express pros dot com or on the Express jobs app. And now back to our story. The local Walmart here was the only source of fresh food within driving distance, but no one here had jobs, so Walmart was not generating revenue,

and in January two thousand sixteen, they closed. The day that I heard that Walmart was closing, I didn't believe it. And when they closed, they closed, They shut down and got out of town. After the demise of the mining industry here, Walmart was also the biggest employer. Now the building is just this empty concrete block with weeds growing through the parking lot pavement outside, adding to this feeling you get when you drive through McDowell, like you're in

a ghost town. At one time we were a hundred thousand. We may hit nineteen thousand right now. When were you a hundred When the coal mines was booming in the fifties and the sixties, when I was little and my dad on got paid every Friday, we would go to every store. There were dressed stores, there were hardwares. There was a Kroger, There were grocery stores and restaurants. Home cooks. There's nothing. There's nothing. The entire town ran off of

the profits from the coal mines for decades. A lot of people didn't even bother thinking about college here because they knew that they could go into the mines and get jobs that might pay up to ninety tho dollars a year and support their families. When the mind shut down, those jobs ceased to exist and there wasn't really anything to take its place. Mine runoff and compaction also made most of the soil here infertile and the water bad to drink, so falling back on farming was not an option.

Parents have been forced to travel to nearby cities like Charleston defined work, leaving their kids to be raised by the grandparents, and a lot of these families move in together to save money, sometimes five families in one home, so grandma or Grandpa's such a security or pension is supporting those individuals in the house. That's not a good thing.

A dollar only goes so far. These are the folks that will show up to Linda's food bank on Saturday knowing that they might not get what they came for. So hearing this story, you kind of have to wonder why stay. Um, it's just home, and it's it's like you're gonna sleep on somebody's couch or you're gonna sleep in the floor on a mattres. You just you pull your resources and you do what you have to do

to feed your family. As positive as Linda is, you can tell that this work doesn't come without at all. I mean, Lord, sometimes you want to go home and curl up and cry. What comes on this? Especially with the children, Um, brace my heart. I mean they don't have beds to sleep in there. Some of them sleep on the floor, some of them sleep on the couch. Right now, we've got a sleeping bag drive going. Sleeping bags are awesome for children. They can get down in

them and snuggle nowhere, no matter where. So we've got uh, we're collecting sleeping bags right now. Um. You know, if I see a need, I try to supply that need. How does it make you feel when you don't have enough? Well, you know, it's it's not my fault. I know that, but I feel like it's my fault. You know. I can go back to my days of my Norna. Never did anyone leave our house without food. My Noorna always

made sure that the children were fed. There was never a day we had a gate and had a big old cow bill on it, and when I'd come through that gate, my Noorna knew I was home because that that cow bell we're boom boom, And as soon as I go up on the porch, my plate was on the table. I've ate every day. Every day. I do the best that I can do for my family and the best that I can do here for this county. There's been times that we've been really scared because there's

no money in the bank, and then the food. Sometimes the food is not what we think we should get. But I always feel that it's not what we want, it's what God knows we need. And my husband and I are people faith um. We totally believe that when God does not want us here anymore, the lights will go off and the food will dry up and we'll

go somewhere else, or we'll wake up dead. It's like that picture of that cat you're just hanging on, you know, Have you ever seen that cat just hanging onto the branch. It's what you do. You hang on. Every day, you hang on, you hang on. That's Saturday, the Gibbout was about to start. They're almost a hundred fifty families waiting on the lot for food. A group of volunteers showed up to help Lenda distribute, and just before noon she gathered all the volunteers around and started off the day

with a prayer. All right, let's go to the Lord in prayer, and you've got to promise me you're gonna do everything orderly today. It makes it go a lot sweeter for all of us. Right, okay, Heavenly Father, we thank you Lord for this group that's come today. Lord. We asked that you just be with us, be among us. Lord, just take over today and let everything be done in

a calm and mannerly way. We asked Lord that you spread this food as far as we can spread it, because you know we did go over in our numbers this morning. We asked that you be with us, that you give us peace Lord today. Lord's in your heavenly holy now that we priday this morning. By the end of the day, the food bank served a hundred forty seven families, almost five hundred people, and they even had

enough food to spare for the next give out. Everything's good and we thank God, Miss Nondon, everybody doing for the county on maccal May God please every one of them. May haven't smiled upon me since I first started covering Linda's story. She's seen plenty of hardship, but she's also had a lot of winds. Arl alright, let's get you straight. In two thousand eighteen, Anthony Bourdain traveled to West Virginia

for an episode of his show Parts Unknown. They contacted Linda, who made him a family dinner in her home and shared stories about the wonderful, tough people of McDowell. It was one of the last shows he recorded before he passed away. All Right name Shop. In this same year, television personality Micro organized the entire McDowell community to surprise Linda on his show Returning the Favor. It's a show that features extraordinary people that make a difference in the community.

He organized a massive donation of food and fixed the food Bank's roof, which was in long need of repair. He liked her so much that they saved Linda for the season finale. Scottie, how did you laugh? Laugh? Scotty, that's too Hotty, Scotty in the hollar. Even with all the press that the Food Bank has gotten, Linda still wakes up every day and works tirelessly to secure donations

and to feed the people of McDowell. She's just one of many people here who are using their circumstances and their hunger to make real changes, to choose to stay, to find creative ways to thrive when many others would throw in the towel. Okay, you don't need this. As long as she got. Ever since I've known her, Linda keeps telling me that Italians don't get sick, they just wake up dead. And she says that's probably the only thing that will stop her from doing what she does.

But anyone who knows or might tell you that that might not be enough to stop Linda. McKinney Rocko see you next night. To see pictures of the Food Bank and of Linda, and to donate to their cause, you can go find them on Facebook under five Loaves and two Fishes food Bank Inc. We'll have a link on our website Express Pros dot com slash podcast that's also where you can see her videos with Anthony Bourdain and Mike Rowe as well for on the job. I'm otus Gray,

Thanks for listening. To On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at Express pros dot com. This season of On the Job is produced by Audiation and dread Seat Ventures. Our executive producer is Sandy Smallens. Our producer is Otis Gray. The show is mixed by Matt Noble at The Loft in Bronxville, New York. Find us on I Heart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating or reviewing

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