SPANISH FORT—Mary Lou McNair remembers speaking with a gentleman six years ago who said he didn’t give Prodisee Pantry strong odds for survival.


“I told him it was our first birthday, and he said we’d been such a help to him, he was afraid the program wouldn’t last because he didn’t see how we could do what we do and keep the doors open,” said McNair, 72, of Daphne.


The secret, she said, is the strong commitment of a core group of volunteers like herself, supplemented by an army of peripheral souls no less dedicated to the mission of being certain hunger in Baldwin County is never overlooked, under served — or worse — disregarded.













“We have a tendency to be a little too insulated. Our life is fine so everybody else’s life must also be fine. Everybody has a picture in their head of what hungry people look like, and that’s not the right picture to have because hungry people look like everybody else,” McNair said.


Indeed, the emergency food and social-services referral organization based in Spanish Fort has provided food and support to more than 25,000 families, representing about 70,000 individuals — over the past seven years, and McNair said national recession has expanded the base of people seeking services considerably over the past year.


In light of the pantry’s increasing services, McNair said it is almost unthinkable that the need was not immediately recognized.

For more of this story, see the July 7 edition of Baldwin People, found in all of your Gulf Coast newspapers.