Langston Moore has been the Mississippi Regional Director for the Society of St. Andrew since 2020, and he has worked in food insecurity for about 13 years. A lifelong resident of Mississippi, he graduated from Mississippi College and lives in Jackson. He and his wife, Lisa, have one son and are active members of Fondren Church in Jackson.
What is the mission of the Society of St. Andrew?
Our website is endhunger.org and I think that’s a good way to say our mission. We bring people together to basically harvest and distribute nutritious food. We build caring communities by offering nutritious fresh foods to communities throughout the state, and we partner with congregations of volunteers to get that done.
At the Society of St. Andrew, the way we tackle food insecurity and food access is we have relationships with farmers and packing houses across the state with just two full time employees. We partner with these farmers and packing houses to go glean the food that is not marketable. The reason it’s not marketable is it could have some blemishes, be too big or too small, or not ripe enough or too ripe. The thing is this food is perfectly nutritious to eat. Knowing that it can’t be marketable in grocery stores, it will just go to waste. So, we intervene between the farm and packing houses and the landfill. To date in Mississippi since 2006, we have gleaned and distributed 23 million pounds of food. This past year was 1.2 million.
What we do is we find the food and then we activate different networks that we have across the state. A lot of times, although we’re finding the food and we’re taking it to different places, we don’t necessarily see the end user because, much like the food network who supplies food to food pantries, we supply fresh food to food pantries and feeding agencies. We’re a fresh food network that pours into feeding agencies and those agencies, as we like to say, are hyperlocal. We don’t know who’s hungry in Hattiesburg, but we have people in Hattiesburg who know who is hungry. We don’t know who’s hungry in Northeast Mississippi, but we have a network of people from congregations and volunteers that know where that food needs to go.
Who does your organization serve?
We’re always looking for new partners. There’s so many people, especially since covid, that are trying to get food into underserved communities. We applaud all those efforts, and we want to let people know that we’re a vehicle to get fresh food — not your ordinary food pantry food because, when people think about food pantries, they know about canned goods and dried goods, whereas we offer fresh alternatives and over a million pounds a year of it.
How many farmers do you work with in Mississippi?
It varies each year but, in our network, it’s about 120 to 130 farmers.
How do you make those partnerships with the farmers in order to accomplish your goals?
We’re tied into the food insecure network. Mississippi leads the nation in food insecurity every year, but the world of people working in it is not that big. It’s all about networking, seeing what other people are doing, trying to fill those gaps and getting out in the community. We don’t always know who’s growing food in Northeast Mississippi, for example, so it’s all about tapping into networks. That’s what Mississippi is all about. If it wasn’t for networking and the people you know, I think it would be a totally different state.
How can people become volunteers?
It’s pretty simple. They can go to endhunger.org/mississippi and up at the top of the page, it says “create volunteer profile.” It’s a pretty simple process, but the easiest way is they can text SOSAMS to 42828. They will receive a link in return that will take them straight to that, so you don’t necessarily have to get a computer to do it.
What type of roles do volunteers fill?
We have a network of hundreds of volunteers. We’re very volunteer driven. Of course, there’s physical labor involved because we’re talking about 10,000 to 30,000 pounds of food sometimes at one time, and we have to bag the food, stack it and give it to people who come pick it up, as in feeding agencies or partners like Jackson State, which is our most successful community drive. We have a drive-through community drive where the students actually bag the potatoes and then they hand them out as cars are driving by.
The other thing we have is mesh rolls. We found out that there’s a certain length that you can cut this bag and tie it at the end — just like what onions come in — and it will hold basically about 10 pounds of sweet potatoes. I harp on sweet potatoes a lot because that’s our biggest commodity, and we do a lot of sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes last a very long time. Little known fact is people over in Iowa and up north get Mississippi’s last year’s potatoes. That’s why our sweet potatoes in Mississippi are so good because we get the ones fresh out of the field that haven’t been sitting in the warehouse. So, bag cutting is really one of our non-physical activities. We can do a group activity with bag cutting. Even the presbytery ladies up here at church do bags for us about every other month. It’s a big need because we always need bags. That’s like our lifeline. Could you imagine coming to the sweet potato drop and trying to get 10 pounds of sweet potatoes in your arms? It’s not going to work.
In the gleaning season, there’s a calendar of events and, once people sign up to be a volunteer, they’ll get emails about where we’re going to be. We have to get people in fields. One of our big things is, we’ll go to a cornfield and we need 10 volunteers to glean corn. We’ll walk out of that field with 2,000 pounds of corn. Then, the people who help us glean are allowed to take food back to their communities. That way, we’re not just serving one area, but we can serve 50 to 100 areas in one day, depending on how much food we have because of our vast network.
What makes this such important work?
We’re the oldest and largest gleaning organization in the United States. There’s so many people feeding hungry people, but having that fresh food alternative with the nutrients and the freshness and nutritiousness of our food is a gap that needs to be filled. There’s not many people out there doing what we do. We have 10 regions across the United States. We started in 1979 as an organization and 2006 in Jackson. With only 10 regional offices and two full time people in each office, we are able to put food consistently in all 48 contiguous states because of how vast our network is. We have a large load program coordinator who finds food all across the United States. She moves food all across the United States that may go to waste. I think the important part of this is filling the gap of more nutritious food, but also filling the gap of creating the ability for hungry people to access food, not between meals, but between their next meal because food insecure people don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That’s why it’s so important for us to use this nutritious food to feed our hungry neighbors.
I think we are a very unique way for people to get involved. We don’t have an age limit on who can volunteer for us. We feel like if a parent knows their child and feels like their child can do the work that’s going to be involved, then bring them along. To us, that plants that seed of giving within a child so that maybe they will learn to give back and do this kind work. That’s one thing that excites us, and kids are some of our best volunteers. They get so excited, and they just feel like they’re doing good. If you’re looking for an alternative to just your normal nonprofit, I would challenge people to come see us, to come to be a part of an event, and to come help us with bag tying. I’m also always looking for places to speak not just in the metro, but throughout the state, so we can spread awareness.
