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May 29, 2019 - Sean Hannity Show
22:51
On The Job Podcast: Five Loaves & Two Fishes: Filling the Hunger Gap
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Music.
Welcome to On the Job.
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 in 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 30 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.
That is a beautiful potato.
You want a slice?
Yeah.
Oh, I need some raw potatoes.
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 Y. 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 pallets and pallets of potatoes for a food give out that they have this coming weekend.
They're beautiful.
Look at this.
And there was actually one I picked up, it's shaped like a heart, so that tells you that's meant for me.
And 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 mine 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 donations she receives from nonprofits and religious organizations.
So you actually don't know all the time what you're gonna get.
No.
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 coal 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.
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 McDowell show up as early as 2 a.m. to wait in line for the noon distribution.
Because for better or worse, it'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 uh 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.
Today, we follow Linda McKinney as she stands her ground and prepares to feed whoever she can.
I'm a storyteller.
I never had anybody to play 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.
Uh didn't have any cousins around that I could play with and was raised basically by adults.
And uh so you learn and 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's 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 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 at 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 were just all in a tissue because there wasn't any food.
But he showed them, didn't he?
He showed them.
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 50s.
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 Nona and I had a aunt, a widowed aunt, that raised me.
Well, first thing they taught me to do, they 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 buggy, you guys call a shopping cart.
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 gonna be able to figure up how many families we're going to be able to food feed.
This looks to me like we will be able to do anywhere from 135, 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 most 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 send us a tractor trailer of food, and that came in 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, there 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 hojos.
Yeah, we got ho hoes.
And somewhere here, I think someone cracked the case and they say these are delicious.
Tell me what these are.
I don't know.
I don't eat sweets.
Okay.
Strawberry shortcake rolls.
Yes, 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 coal 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 Dew 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 64 years, the same lifespan as 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'm gonna 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 let them taste it.
Six or seven different.
Okay, we have this.
Let me bring it over 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, but any children that come here will 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 an 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 um a cereal something they can eat for breakfast.
This is all snacks.
You've got you some applesauce, 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 cheeses over there.
Um, I mean, I know you like you kind of get what you get in terms of donations.
Do you ever uh like worry about 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.
Mm-hmm.
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 short?
Uh food got short in in when Walmart closed.
That was our perishables.
So that's why you would see uh 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 where you can camping.
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 approximately three, sometimes five big packages of meat.
And then 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.
Oh, they yes.
And a lot of times, if they were 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.
90,000 pounds is what we lost when they left us a year.
90,000 pounds.
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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 of 2016, 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 100,000.
We may hit 19,000 right now.
When were you 100,000?
When the coal mines was booming in the 50s and the 60s.
When I was little and my dad got paid every Friday, we would go to every store.
There were dress stores.
There were hardwares.
There was a Kroger.
There were grocery stores, any restaurants, home cookies.
There's nothing.
It'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 $90,000 a year and support their families.
When the mine 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 to find 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 social 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?
It's just home, and it's like you're going to sleep on somebody's couch or you're going to sleep on the floor on a mattress.
You pool 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 a toll.
I mean, Lord, sometimes you want to go home and curl up and cry what comes on this porch, especially with the children.
Breaks my heart.
I mean, that they don't have beds to sleep in.
They 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 matter where you.
So we've got uh uh we're we're collecting sleeping bags right now.
Um, you know, if I see a need, I try to supply that need.
How does that make you feel when you don't have enough?
Well, you know, it 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 nonna.
Never did anyone leave our house without food.
My non always made sure that the children were fed.
There was never a day we had a gate, it had a big old cowbill on it.
And when I'd come through that gate, my nonna knew I was home because that that cowbell would boom boom, and soon as I'd go up on the porch, my plate was on the table.
I 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 uh, my husband and I are people of 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 on to the branch?
It's what You do.
You hang on every day.
You hang on, you hang on.
That Saturday, the give out was about to start.
There were almost 150 families waiting on the lot for food.
A group of volunteers showed up to help Linda 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 gotta promise me you're gonna do everything orderly today.
It makes it go a lot sweeter for all of us, right?
Yes, okay.
Heavenly Father, we thank you, Lord, for this group that's come today, Lord.
We ask 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 ask, 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 ask that you be with us, that you give us peace, Lord, today.
Lord, it's in your heavenly holy name that we pray this morning.
Amen.
We don't need to have no more candy.
Okay, cheers.
By the end of the day, the food bank served 147 families, almost 500 people, and they even had enough food to spare for the next give out.
Everything's good, and we thank God for what Ms. London and everybody doing for the county on MacDow.
Since I first started covering Linda's story, she's seen plenty of hardship, but she's also had a lot of wins.
There you go, Darlene.
All right, let's get you straightened up, sir.
In 2018, 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, ma'am, shop on.
In the same year, television personality Mike Rowe 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.
I didn't ask Scotty.
How'd you love life, Scotty?
That's too haughty Scotty in the holler.
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, and to find creative ways to thrive when many others would throw in the towel.
Okay, you don't need this as long as you got this baby, okay?
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 her might tell you that that might not be enough to stop Linda McKinney.
Rock on.
See you next night.
God bless.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 Otis Gray.
Thanks for listening to On the Job.
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The season of On the Job is produced by Audiation and Red Seat Ventures.
Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins.
Our producer is Otis Gray.
The show is mixed by Matt Noble at the Loft in Bronxville, New York.
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