Ask someone to recount their favorite holiday memories, and you’ll likely elicit more than just a passive list of what they ate—the turkey, the mashed potatoes, the pie. What you’ll probably receive instead is a rich descriptive tapestry of family stories, recipes passed down through generations, gatherings of beloved friends passing plates around carefully decorated tables, the sounds of raucous laughter, and the feeling of not just full bellies but full hearts.
Food and culture writer Michael Pollan summed up the inextricable tie between food and human connection this way: “The shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture.”
We all know that what we eat isn’t just about sustenance; it’s a rite of our shared humanity. Which is why, for those stuck in a cycle of food insecurity—or the experience of not knowing where your next meal will come from—the holidays can be painfully isolating.
“If you’re a family that wrestles with food insecurity, with poverty, you want the same things for your family that everyone else does. You want to be able to celebrate the holidays, you want toys for your kids. You want to have a meaningful meal. You want to gather with your neighbors, see your family, build moments,” said Jon West, Vice President of Programs at the Atlanta Community Food Bank (ACFB), one of Emmaus House’s long standing partners.
“It’s not just that you’re hungry when you don’t have food. It’s what else you’re missing,” he said. “You don’t just lose the food; you lose the connecting, the opportunity for joy.”
In Georgia, 1 in 7 people struggle with hunger. That staggering statistic grows even more dire when you zoom in on the youngest and most vulnerable, as 1 in 5 children in Georgia go hungry on a regular basis. This amounts to half a million undernourished children statewide and almost 300,000 in ACFB’s coverage area, according to West.
The 2014 Hunger in America study found that more than 14 percent of people in metro Atlanta and north Georgia turn to food pantries and meal service programs to feed themselves and their families each year.
As a centralized food distribution hub, ACFB routinely serves 29 counties in northwest Georgia, including those in the metro Atlanta area, encompassing approximately 820,000 individuals. In partnership with ACFB and a slew of generous donors, Emmaus House’s Client Choice Food Pantry itself has distributed more than 60,000 pounds of food since 2016.
Out of more than 600 partners across Metro Atlanta and North Georgia, West said, Emmaus House has consistently impressed him because of the intentional relationship-building that lies at its core.
“What makes a program work really well is when we find a partner who has high trust in a community and is known as a place that people can turn to for assistance,” he said. “Emmaus House is a model example of what that looks like for us.”
ACFB staff arrive at Emmaus House twice a week, to make sure that individuals in the neighborhood have access to the benefits already available to them - including community clinics, Medicaid and SNAP. They also work to ensure that no client gets lost navigating the bureaucratic paperwork required to enroll in many of these services.
The Food First Pantry Model launched at Emmaus House three years ago, with an enrollment of about 50 households. Participating families were able to return once every week if needed.
“What a lot of people wrestle with when they’re food insecure is not just the physical reality of not having enough food, but also the mental and emotional anxiety of knowing they’re going to run out – not knowing where the next thing is coming from,” West said.
Taking the problem of “where and how can I get food” off the table, by offering a reliable resource, in other words, may free up just enough mental and emotional bandwidth for a hard-working parent to be able to then attend to just a few more of the other millions of urgent tasks their family needs that week.
Thanks to the partnership with ACFB, Emmaus House, like other partners West works with, has been able to shift its pantry model from a more traditional “prescriptive model” to a “client choice model,” in which families can visit the pantry, select what they want, and even pick up the food items they know their kids will actually eat. (Rather than having to pick up a pre-assigned bag of whatever someone behind a desk in some far-off office somewhere has determined is the bare minimum to feed a family.)
“Shifting the power within that structure gives people a different sense of themselves,” West said.
By expanding hours, selection, and capacity, the food pantry at Emmaus House now feels even more like a supermarket, set up strategically to instill a sense of welcome and respect, and to encourage visitors to actually want to be there.
These days, during the chilly winter months, as utility costs climb higher, West says that ACFB routinely sees families experiencing even more shortages in food as they adjust what they eat to make up the difference.
According to the 2014 Hunger in America study, 76 percent of clients served by ACFB reported having to choose between paying for food and paying for utilities and 73 percent reported choosing between paying for food and paying for medicine/medical care.
The good news is that, at the end of the first year of their revamped food pantry program at Emmaus House, West said, families that were part of that program were 18% less likely to be food insecure than the families that weren’t.
Best of all, West added, participating families also saw a reduction in being forced to make the impossible tradeoff between other necessities and food.
Still, there’s much progress to be made. Some of that forward movement may come simply by continuing to value and prioritize the tenets of dignity and compassion, as we envision and foster the city and community we want to be.
“We aspire to do better than just helping people survive,” West said. “Surviving isn’t thriving. The meals that our partners like Emmaus House work to provide during the holidays and at the end of the year are meeting basic needs. But they’re also providing opportunities to be connected, to be known, to provide moments of celebration for their children.”
To learn about Emmaus House’s food pantry hours and items on the donation wish list, especially during this critical holiday period, please click here.
