Kitty Roberts knows from personal experience that without monthly boxes of Angel Food, some Emporians would go hungry.
Roberts organizes the Angel Food Ministry team at Grace United Methodist Church, 2 S. State St. The church and other churches in the area participate through the First Church of the Nazarene, 2931 W. 24th Ave., which initiated the ministry here and serves as the distribution hub for the churches.
Roberts described an incident that happened a few months ago at Grace.
“Month before last, it was 9 degrees on delivery day, and this little tiny mother walked in — I mean tiny like one of the kids, and she had a 9- or 10-year-old girl with her,” Roberts said in a recent interview.
The woman did not have a paid ticket for a box of food, but the church had several boxes that had been donated. Workers got the box ready and volunteered to carry it to the woman’s car.
“The little girl said, ‘We don’t have a car. We walked,’” Roberts recalled. “(The northeast side) to Grace United in nine degrees. We drove them home, of course. … How they were going to carry it home, I don’t know.
“We just sat there half in tears, realizing we do so little, but to them, it was so much.”
Although Angel Food is available to anyone — from college students to senior citizens — who pays the $30 fee for a box of food, the ministry is able to furnish extra boxes of food to needy people through donations and through a $1 per-box allotment paid back to participating churches by Angel Food headquarters in Good Hope, Ga.
“We voted. We just decided to put every dollar that came back to us right back into buying food,” Roberts said. “We bought 10 boxes in December, five in January, five boxes in February. … We have a farmer who orders a box every month. He also buys a box to give away and doesn’t care who we give it to.”
The boxes are given to families at Riverside Elementary School, whose names are provided through Grace members and Riverside counselor Michelle Sheldon. Roberts lets Sheldon know how many boxes are available, and Sheldon calls the families to come get the food.
One woman picked up a Riverside box and, about 2 1/2 hours later, called the church.
“And she said she just had to take the time to say ‘thank you.’ That’s the only food she had,” Roberts said.
“If you don’t think there’s hungry people in this town, then you’re blind. Times are worse for those who have nothing.”
The Emporia and Americus Presbyterian churches have a similar use for their $1-a-box paybacks and boxes donated by generous participants and supporters.
At the Nazarene church, excess boxes often are given to DCCCA, a child-welfare agency that operates in Lyon and surrounding counties.
On Saturday, the freezing rain and snow didn’t deter the faithful church members from sorting and boxing the March Angel Food distribution, nor did it deter most of the customers from picking up their boxes of food.
The AFM truck traveled north from Texas, through snow and ice storms in Oklahoma and Kansas, and arrived on time at 6 a.m. at the Nazarene Church.
Members of the other churches were there to pick up their share of the shipment and haul the goods back to their own buildings. Representatives of churches and groups from Waverly and Eureka, and Morris, Coffey, Osage and Chase counties also made it to Emporia safely for their boxes.
“They pick it up in bulk and they do their own boxing,” said Andrea Ceretti, who has been in charge of the local AFM since it began at the Nazarene church in 2006.
The boxes are filled with first-quality, name-brand foods and sell for $30 each, tax included, and are valued between $65 and $75 retail.
With the purchase of a regular box, consumers become eligible to buy bonus boxes that contain meats, chicken, fish and seafood, fruits and vegetables. AFM recently began offering a senior citizen box with single, reheatable balanced meals, and this month introduced an allergen-free food box.
The box count for area customers, however, has dropped considerably since the project began.
“When we first started, we were running 500 orders, and it’s just gradually gone down,” Ceretti said.
The Nazarenes needed 86 boxes on Saturday, the Emporia and Americus Presbyterians needed 39 to fill their orders, and the Methodists had 37 boxes to fill.
Despite the dip in participation, workers remain dedicated to providing low-cost, name-brand food to anyone who needs it.
“A professor in our church takes menus up to the college,” Ceretti said. “Sometimes she’ll have a lot of (orders), sometimes she won’t.”
On Saturday, Keith Smulling of Osage City made his usual trip to Lyon County to pick up his sister, Doris Gerstner, and head to the Nazarene church.
The siblings complimented the quality of the food they buy each month.
“I have nothing but good to say about this,” Gerstner said, mentioning that she had opted for the bonus box of fish, too, in addition to the regular box.
“You don’t get nothing bad,” Smulling interjected, before Gerstner added, “It has saved tremendously on my grocery bill.”
Smulling said the Angel Food is a “great thing for retired people.” He believes senior citizens eat better-balanced meals through the assortment of canned and boxed foods, produce and meat that come in the regular monthly boxes. He enjoys the quality, freshness, and taste of the boxes of fruit that often are available.
Gerstner especially likes the recipes that are available monthly online.
“You can go on the computer and they have a recipe for each item that’s in the box,” she said. “They’ve really got some nice recipes.”
She prints them off and uses them regularly, and also checks online to see what types of foods and specialty boxes will be available the following month. Having next month’s menu readily at hand makes it easy for Gerstner and Smulling to plan for other items they will need to buy at the grocery store.
“So I know what I’m going to be ordering when I come out here,” Gerstner said. She picked up her order and paid for the next month’s order at the same time, saving her the time and gas of coming back a couple of weeks later to place the order and pay for it.
The churches accept cash, money orders and Vision cards as payment. No personal checks are allowed.
On Saturday, Ceretti was worried about the Angel Food customers.
“I know there’s going to be people who aren’t going to be able to come,” she said.
If people do not pick up boxes at the time and date specified, the boxes usually are donated to charities, and some of the AFM customers cannot afford to donate anything. The exceptional circumstances caused by the storm prompted Ceretti to say that the workers at the church might need to deliver boxes to some of the consumers.
“If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t have enough money to buy groceries,” Ceretti recalled one woman telling her.
“People need this food.”