Cyndi Kirkhart has some 26 thousand square feet of warehouse space at the Facing Hunger Food Bank in Huntington, West Virginia, where she is executive director. That sounds like a lot of space. But very little of it is cooler space.

“This is the only cooler we have,” Kirkhart said, stepping into a walk-in cooler the size of a large closet filled with half-gallon containers of milk. “This is Kentucky milk, and this is West Virginia.”

She said her operation has been receiving about 8 thousand of these containers, about a truck load, every couple of weeks since November. She expects to continue receiving the products from the federal government through March. read more