When Brady Walker first learned that some people go hungry, without a meal, he was four years old. And unlike most kids his age, he decided to take action.
Brady lives in Mercer County, W.Va., but he had a family friend named Ursula Candasamy, who has since passed away, in South Africa. So Brady began by collecting produce seed packets — some donated, some with his own savings — and he sent 910 packets to Ursula who distributed them to those in need.
Brady, who is now eight years old, said he is motivated to keep sending seeds because, “people won’t be hungry, and I’m helping other people, and I like helping people.”
And so began his “Sowing Seeds of Love” project. For the last four years, Brady has sent hundreds of seeds to South Africa.
He has also passed out a couple hundred seed packets to his neighbors in his own community in southern West Virginia. According to Feeding America, the largest hunger relief organization in the U.S., one in seven West Virginians struggle with hunger.
As the coronavirus pandemic has grown, more West Virginians are trying to grow a garden than in past years. According to the West Virginia University Extension Office, they have seen well over 25,000 participants in their virtual gardening program that includes a free packet of seeds. Typically, they see a few hundred.
So, with the help of his grandmother Debra Williby-Walker, this year, Brady has sent out almost 4,000 seed packets to West Virginians. As a more effective way to distribute the seeds, they sent a decorated shoe box, which Brady and his friends worked on prior to the pandemic, filled with seeds to different counties, which are then set out near places like soup kitchens and food pantries for people to pick out what they want.
“So it’s a pretty massive project,” Debra said. “He started out with just a few seeds in a shoe box and then he just kept sending them, and it started growing from there.”
Brady said he has had a lot of help from people across West Virginia who have donated seeds to his project. Others have even gotten word and donated a few seed packs from places including New York, Florida, California, Virginia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina and Canada.
Brady chose seed packets for his project over other things such as canned goods, because not only are the seeds replenishable, but he said growing one’s own garden is an important skill to learn.
He learned to garden from grandpa, or pawpee,and is growing potatoes and corn this year.
Brady added that he likes to “put my hands in the dirt” and find worms.
He said he plans to continue sending seeds for as long as his supply lasts this year and also in the years to come.
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
This week, we’ve been hearing a series of stories from the Inside Appalachia team about the challenges that some Appalachian families face when trying to eat fresh food. Sometimes it’s the cost, or poor choices. Sometimes it’s limited access because they live in what’s called a food desert.
Seven months ago the Walmart in McDowell County closed, and this was especially difficult for the Five Loaves and Two Fishes food pantry, run by Linda McKinney and her husband Bob. They say the superstore’s closing has actually inspired their family to rethink how they get food for the pantry.
Once a month, the McKinney family, and a small group of volunteers, provide shopping carts full of canned food, oatmeal, and macaroni and cheese.
“I just never want anyone to go hungry, cause I watched as my grandmother provided for the children who lived in out holler that would come in our yard and play. She always had fresh bread, hard salami,” said Linda McKinney.
She and her husband Bob, a retired minister, have been running the food pantry since 2009. She says the need to help hungry people keeps growing in McDowell County.
Last year, the food pantry gave away enough food to feed half the population of McDowell County. Now, Five Loaves doesn’t keep track of customers who return month to month, so it could be a much smaller portion of the population who use the food pantry, but it’s still a lot of food.
Credit Roxy Todd/ WVPB
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Linda McKinney stands outside the Five Loaves Two Fishes Food Pantry, which she runs with her husband Bob
McKinney says she serves laid off miners and their families, as well as grandparents raising grandchildren. She says it’s important to remember that most of us are equally vulnerable.
“You know, you and I are probably just one paycheck away from poverty. I mean it’s not just the mines.”
It’s also now Walmart, she says. The Walmart closure is a double whammy for the food pantry. 140 people were laid off, which means demand might go up at the pantry, but Linda and her family have relied heavily on donations from Walmart. Last year, they received 95,000 pounds of donated food from the company. Walmart delivered the food at least three times a week.
McKinney says when the superstore closed, she almost lost hope.
“I was in the fetal position for two days. I cried, I said ‘what am I gonna do?’ And then I just took a deep breath and I said, God will provide. It does get overwhelming. Especially with the children. It gets overwhelming.”
Some people have stepped up to donate- a group of ATV tourists from North and South Carolina drove up a truckload of canned food for the food pantry.
Credit Roxy Todd/ WVPB
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Linda McKinney cooks her grandmother’s recipe for pasta sauce at the Five Loaves Food Pantry kitchen. She’s using the sauce on spaghetti pizza
Walmart wouldn’t agree to an interview, but their communications director Brian Nick did send us an emailed statement that said the decision to close 154 Walmart stores was based on a variety of factors, including financial performance, but he didn’t provide any specifics about the superstore closure in McDowell County.
West Virginia University Geography professor Bradley Wilson has been paying close attention to the Walmart closings. He says they can be really difficult for communities. That’s especially true for towns where the small local store closed after Walmart first arrived.
“Walmart convinces everyone to put their eggs in one basket. When you’ve got one person holding all the eggs, and they drop them, you don’t eat. So they’re gonna have to find another route to finding food. They’re gonna have to start over again.”
In McDowell County, there are locally owned grocery store chains – Goodson’s in Welch and Grants in War. But these aren’t big enough stores to supply the food pantry.
So McKinney has had to seriously rethink how she is going to continue feeding people in need.
“My philosophy is, you better learn to grow your own food, cause if something happens to McDowell County, and you would wake up and you’re the only person in McDowell County, you better learn to grow your own.”
Credit Roxy Todd/ WVPB
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The McKinneys are starting to grow food in the parking lot outside their food pantry. Here is a high tunnel, under construction, where Linda’s son Joel plans to grow vegetables year round.
Desperate times call for creative solutions, and McKinney is hopeful as she heads back to work. Lately, she’s had a lot of sleepless nights, but the anxiety doesn’t seem to slow her down. Feeding people is a job that’s never over.
The summer break from school can be really tough for some children whose parents can’t always afford to buy food. Summer lunch programs across the country try to help feed those children- but lots of children still go without because they can’t get to the school to eat.
Renieca Harris is the head cook at AB Combs Elementary School in Hazard Kentucky. This year her local school district has sent its summer lunch program on the road. Every week day, Harris loads hundreds of meals into a bright van and delivers the food to low income children throughout Perry County.
It’s midday at the community park in Hazard,Kentucky. Kids are splashing in the pool. Others are waiting at the side of the parking lot. A truck comes down the road- it’s shaped like an ice cream truck, except colorful illustrations of fruits and vegetables decorate the sides. Within minutes, Renieca Harris is leaning out of the food truck with a glowing smile, handing out lunch to four children.
Perry County’s Summer Feeding Van
“We come over here and let them play and get some food. It helps. I watch three different kids every day, so any little bit helps,” said Christy Tolson, whose son David is getting lunch. Tolson says she’s recently started bringing him here every day for lunch, along with three of her nieces and nephews.
David is noticeably excited to find a red apple in his lunch sack today. The program tries to include fresh produce in each meal. Schools here would like to buy more local vegetables and fruit to serve the kids, but the season doesn’t really pick up for farmers here until the middle of the summer.
They’re hoping to purchase local watermelon and tomatoes to feed the children sometime in the next few weeks. Today, they’re serving a hotdog, and Chips, cookie, grapes, apple and orange.
Renieca Harris is the head cook at one of the local elementary schools in Hazard. Most of the kids recognize her from school, so they call her the lunch lady. “One kids says, ‘It’s the bite bite truck.’ When they see us coming he says it’s the bite bite truck. So that makes you feel good. They know when you come they’re gonna get something to eat, something good,” said Harris.
Harris worked most of her life in the sewing industry until the local factory she worked at here closed down a few years ago. She loves her job now working in the local schools, even though there is one thing that never gets easy for her: “When you work with the school system and you see the kids all year long, and you worry. You make sure that everybody’s being fed. And so I worry, even on weekends I worry.”
Summer lunch programs aren’t anything new- they’ve been around since the late 60s They’re funded by the USDA, but at most of them children go to a community center or a school to eat. But one of the main struggles for many Appalachian children is they live in more remote areas, usually without public transportation. So their parents have a more difficult time getting them to schools so they can have their free meal.
But in recent years, more and more summer school districts and community centers across the country have been doing mobile meal programs. This June, Jefferson County in West Virginia has begun delivering summer meals with school buses.
And this summer, Perry County schools in Kentucky were able to purchase a truck so they could deliver those meals in neighborhoods and parks to children who otherwise might not have enough to eat. The truck delivers meals to at least 160 children a day.
After the Hazard park, Harris’ next stop is a low income housing development called Cherokee Hills. Harris drives the truck across a misty four lane road, and along a hillside draped thick with kudzu. Actually, the food truck already made one stop at Cherokee Hills today, but Harris said they were flooded with 75 children, and ran out of lunches. So they went back to the school to restock.
Each weekday the Perry County Summer Feeding Van gives away at least 160 meals to children.
At the Cherokee Hills neighborhood, five kids run out of their apartments. Kayla Chandler’s two children wave excitedly at Harris’s van. “The kids loved it. I loved seeing the smile on their face when it pulls up. They wait for it every morning. They’ve got it down pat when it comes and they know. They watch for it,” said Chandler.
“There’s just so many little kids around here, a lot of them doesn’t get fed like they need to be fed, and if it wasn’t for the truck they’d go hungry.”
Maryann Pheldner lives in a nearby apartment and her grandson eats from the food truck every day. “They really enjoy it. They really do. The little young’ns really need that. It’s pitiful. You know I thank God for that woman, bringing that food, I really do.”
Pheldner is sitting in a living room decorated with dried flowers. Burgundy shades cast the room in a warm glow. Phelder has an oxygen tank to help her breathe. She’s raising her fifteen year old grandson, Jared, who sits across from us on the couch.
“Well we get low on the end of the month, you know? I guess everybody does,” said Pheldner. “We’re on low income. And it helps a big lot here. It really does. And I really appreciate all they do for us. It really does warm my heart. People really do care for you, you know? But every day gets a little harder for us, don’t it.”
Pheldner says at first she wasn’t sure how she felt about letting her grandson take the free food. She says it was Harris’ warm personality that made her feel comfortable with the idea.
“But she makes us feel real welcome about it.”
Harris tells people like Pheldner there’s no shame in asking for help if it helps your child get the food they need.
“Everybody needs help. So don’t be ashamed, just come get it. Hey, I’m a parent. I raised kids. So I wish I knew this when mine were little,” said Harris.
Harris’ son Brandon is now an adult and works as a sub cook at the school. This summer, he’s working with his mother as she makes her deliveries to neighborhoods throughout Perry County.
The phrase “food-desert” might sound like a landscape of sagebrush and armadillos, but it’s really a place where SlimJims, chicken nuggets and Slurpies count as dinner. A food desert can happen anywhere- we’ve all seen them. People who live in a food desert may be surrounded by food—fast food or convenient store hotdogs, instead of fresh, healthy food.
Even in rural West Virginia, where small farms still dot the roadside, fresh food isn’t available to all people. In some places it can take over an hour just to reach the next grocery store. Reawakening some of the old, small farm traditions– and bringing a new local food movement to West Virginia– is the work of five non-profits that were highlighted by the James Beard Foundation. Groups were chosen based on their work to bring healthy, local food to more people.
“We focus on helping people connect with each other so they can educate each other and be stronger together,” said Spellman.
The coalition trains farmers and advocates for statewide policies that help nurture small farmers.
Spellman says that because West Virginia has the highest number of small farms per capita in the country, there is a unique opportunity here to help transform the local food economy.
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Children with a YMCA camp helping find harlequin beetles in the West Side Community Garden Project in Charleston
“Yeah, and we’re uniquely positioned to show what a small farm state can do because we don’t really have that many large farms. We’re mostly small farms. And people relying on each other and working together.”
Tom Toliver has seen people with children who are hungry, searching for food in dumpsters in the alleys of Charleston. And he isn’t the only one. At the Union Mission where Toliver has been donating fresh vegetables, the president and CEO Rex Whiteman says hunger is on the rise throughout the state, and in Appalachia.
“Yes, we see people that are hungry, people that have not eaten for several days, and will come in our doors saying, ‘can you help me?’. And that is overwhelming, in a society and in a world of abundance, that we have people that are literally starving to death. With the mines closing down, and many of them closing in recent months, that’s just created a new wave of hunger and new people that are in the pipeline, asking for help,” Whiteman said.
And these new people mean that new food is needed all the time. Healthy food, like the type of produce Toliver has been growing in his garden. And this week, staff at the YMCA were inspired by Toliver’s vision and brought 22 kids from summer camp to help him harvest vegetables and deliver them to the Union Mission.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Credit Roxy Todd
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Harvesting bush beans
Before the YMCA youths arrived to help, one of Toliver’s gardens was about to become overwhelmed by harlequin stink bugs.
“We’re drowning the bugs, and we’re harvesting all the beans and the plants that are ready to be harvested,” said 11-year-old Hannah McCune. She was dressed in a brightly painted hanker-chief, green socks, and pink tennis shoes. She was also wearing garden gloves for what is sometimes a dirty job—finding and killing stink bugs.
It’s not a pretty job, but it’s a necessary one because the volunteer gardeners are committed to using no pesticides on the food they grow. It takes a lot of time to pick out the orange and black bugs by hand.
Stephanie Hysmith is the master gardener supervising the volunteers. She’s had experience with harlequin stink bugs and squash bugs, which can devastate vegetable gardens if ignored. “Last year I started with my zucchini going out and looking under the leaves. And I discovered [squash bug] eggs that were underneath the leaves.”
Hysmith is one of the volunteers most involved with Toliver’s gardens this year. On Tuesday, she taught the children from the YMCA summer camp about the various plants that grow throughout the garden.
One of the children asked her, “what do you do to the plants in the winter?”
“Well in the wintertime the plants go dormant. These are called annuals because they bloom once and then they die. You can save the seed from the fruit, and grow the same plant next year,” Hysmith explained.
Excitement erupted nearby when a blue tailed skink emerged from one of the raised beds and dove back beneath the beans.
Credit Roxy Todd
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Credit Roxy Todd
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In one morning, they harvest about 25 pounds of chard, collards, cucumbers, green beans and zucchini, which they deliver to the Union Mission the next day.
There, they learned about the somber realities of hunger in West Virginia.
And Tom Toliver was visibly moved from the response he’s received in the last week. His project has gotten a number of calls from people, wanting to support his community gardens.
“My big thought, my big vision, is to rub out hunger, totally, through community gardening. And that’s my strategy—is to start in Charleston, Kanawha County, West Virginia, America—encouraging people to live off the land. And you have seen yourself how easy it’s been to grow food,” Toliver said.
The vegetables that the YMCA kids harvested will be served or given away to families in need who come to Union Mission hungry. Some of these people will not have eaten for days.
The first part of this story about Tom Toliver’s West Side Gardens can be found here.
