Paterson food pantry lets clients shop around

PATERSON — Strolling down the produce aisle, LaToya Smith bypassed the Brussels sprouts and reached for a package of cauliflower.

“I have to make sure I get what the kids will eat,” said the mother of two.

Smith had loaded her shopping cart with groceries: frozen salmon and lamb, cereal, walnuts, green grapes and many other items. But she didn’t need to worry about the length of the checkout line.

Smith on Tuesday was among the people participating in the new food distribution system at the CUMAC pantry on Ellison Street. Instead of handing out prepacked bags of food, Passaic County’s largest pantry has begun allowing clients to pick their own items in a room set up like a miniature grocery store.

“This is so much better,” asserted Smith, who says she has been getting food from the CUMAC pantry for about four years. “It feels like I’m really at a supermarket. It doesn’t feel like I’m needy.”

The new arrangement started last week and has won praised from clients, staff and volunteers at agency that has been in operation almost three decades.

“It’s not so much that we have these pretty shelves of food,” said CUMAC employee Kayann Foster. “It’s about the fact that we’re giving people a choice.”

“In the whole poverty system,” added Foster, who was a client at CUMAC in 2016 before she landed a job at the agency, “there’s so many people out there who think they know what poor people need. But nobody asks you. Just because I’m poor doesn’t mean my family doesn’t have likes and dislikes. We might not like carrots.”

As clients walked up and down the grocery aisles on Tuesday, they were accompanied by CUMAC staff members or volunteers who guided them as to what food they could get. For example, a family of two could take four packages of meat, one bag of rice and one box of cereal, while a family of five could get eight meat packages, three bags of rice and three cereals.

“Oranges?” offered volunteer Kathy Brackett of Wyckoff.

“How many can I have?” asked the client, Dorothy Robinson of Paterson.

“You can fill the bag,” Brackett responded.

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Robinson said she has been getting food from CUMAC for several years. Under the old system, Robinson said, she often gave neighbors the canned foods that came in her pre-sorted bags because she likes to cook fresh food. On Tuesday, she simply opted not to take the canned items.

“There’s less waste this way,” Robinson said.

Jeni Mastrangelo, CUMAC’s pantry assistant, described the old distribution system as almost an assembly line.

“Next, next, next,” Mastrangelo recalled of handing out the pre-sorted bags of food. “Everybody was just in and out. You didn’t really get to know the people. Now they’re more comfortable. They feel more welcome. You get to chat with them.”

Last year, CUMAC distributed 1.9 million pounds of food, and in a normal month, the organization said, it has about 2,500 unduplicated food clients. CUMAC gets its groceries from private donations, government programs and “rescue food” provided by supermarkets, farms and big box stores.

The switch in the pantry's food distribution system is part of the “beyond hunger” initiative being pushed at CUMAC by the agency’s executive director, Mark Dinglasan, who relocated from the Chicago area to take the job in Paterson two years ago.

Dinglasan said CUMAC staff visited several community centers — including one in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and another in Hartford, Connecticut — that used the grocery shopping approach to food distribution, before making the change in Paterson.

In May 2018, Dinglasan relaunched CUMAC’s job training program, and he has set up partnerships with organizations that he said provide legal services, child care, medical services and youth programs, an effort to make the pantry a “one-stop access point for support services.”

“Ending hunger has nothing to do with giving people food,” Dinglasan said of the holistic approach to helping impoverished families.

Some clients said they expected more people would use CUMAC’s pantry after word spread about the new shopping approach.

“We’re ready for them,” proclaimed Mastrangelo.

Email: editor@patersonpress.com