A few times each week, 88-year-old Presque Isle resident Calvin Tuttle drives to Graves’ Shop & Save, picks up boxes of donated produce, bread and other food and takes it all to Martha & Mary’s Soup Kitchen.
For almost 25 years Presque Isle’s Martha & Mary’s Soup Kitchen has offered free meals in Presque Isle with food donations from the local Shop & Save, a part of the Hannaford company.
For many of those years, Tuttle has been a key part of that successful relationships logistics, and he’s continuing on.
“After a while, it’s an old habit,” said Tuttle. “Everyone says ‘Hi’ and ‘Good morning’ when you come in.”
The soup kitchen is made possible thanks to volunteers like Tuttle and the donations from the grocery store, the kitchen’s sole source of supply, said Cindy Patten, director of the soup kitchen.
“If we didn’t get this, we would not be serving the amount of food we serve,” said Patten, who works as a hospital respiratory therapist on the weekends and the soup kitchen during the week.
“We use all the onions, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes. We do salads. They donate meat and freeze it until we have enough to make a meal.”
Martha & Mary’s is open 2 to 5 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and helps between 80 and 100 people on the three days, including senior citizens, people with disabilities, young families and people struggling with income, Patten said.
Don Samiya, Shop n’ Save manager, said that the store’s late, longtime owner Robert Graves started donating blemished but fresh produce and other foods to a community meal kitchen back in the 1970s. Today, it remains a win-win, helping with a community need while also saving the store on waste disposal.
Twice a day, staff cull through the produce for donations, as well as bread and other baked goods, Samiya said, estimating that the food they send amounts to more than $1,000 in retail value each week.
“Any produce that people will not purchase, because of pits or bruises or something, we don’t want to throw it away, because it’s still good,” Samiya said. “It saves us on filling up the landfills, and also serves the community.”
