AUBURN — On Monday morning, U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary Kevin Concannon ate breakfast with preschoolers: Frosted wheat flakes, juice and skim milk.

He poked his head into a high school food pantry and stopped in at the Good Shepherd Food-Bank. He called the Auburn schools pioneers and praised the food bank for its efforts.

It made for a whirlwind morning around a single theme: “You can’t learn if you’re hungry,” Concannon said.

Concannon, a former Maine health and human services commissioner and now undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services in Washington, D.C., recognized the Auburn School Department’s recent decision to be among the first schools in Maine to pilot a federal free-lunch program. Four elementary schools here qualify for the lunches based on the number of families who receive food stamps.

Food Services Director Paula Rouillard said it was too early to tell how many more students were eating lunch now. Figures are due this week. The schools had already been serving free breakfast for three years.

“The Auburn schools are pioneering,” Concannon said. “It solves the issue for kids and families, ‘Hey, your household is behind on paying,’ and then it cuts down on the stigma, ‘Oh, you’re a poor kid, you’re having a meal here.’ No, all kids have a meal. So it’s a good thing.”

He’s heard from teachers in other states, where school has been in session longer, that they’re already seeing fewer trips to the school nurses’ office and fewer complaints like headaches and stomachaches.

After breakfast at Park Avenue Elementary School, Concannon was taken to Edward Little High School, his first visit there, and shown a student greenhouse project. He admired the raised vegetable beds and suggested federal grant opportunities for more greenhouses.

Engineering students are at work on a greenhouse that would pair raising tilapia with hydroponic gardening. 

“Come on back when we start raising our fish,” Assistant Principal Jim Horn said.

Concannon toured a high school food bank stocked with macaroni and cheese, peanut butter, cereal and other staples supplied by Good Shepherd. Students are given backpacks to fill up and are able to slip out a back door so other students can’t tell who has visited the pantry and who hasn’t.

“Thank you for doing this,” he said.

At the last stop, Concannon, who still keeps a home in Scarborough, toured the Good Shepherd Food-Bank on Hotel Road, which announced that it had won a $100,000 USDA competitive grant for its Mainers Feeding Mainers program.

President Kristen Miale said the funds will go toward more support staff for the nearly five-year-old program.

Last year, Mainers Feeding Mainers bought a half-million pounds of fresh produce from local farms; farmers donated a half-million pounds more. The program is on pace to see 1.5 million pounds this year, she said.

All of the fresh produce is given away to the 350 agencies and food pantries Good Shepherd works with.

The food bank has plans to build a zoned-temperature root cellar to be able to store vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, onions and cabbage longer, she said, and stretch out Maine’s short growing season.

Currently, most fresh produce is in and out the door in 48 hours.

As they walked, Miale pointed out another of the food bank’s current issues: Too much sugary snack food and soda in storage. 

“The good news is, people want the healthier food,” she said. “They don’t want it, I don’t want to give it to them, but it costs me $100 a ton to throw it out.”

Concannon asked questions about a summer meal program for children and wasn’t surprised to hear Miale tell him of her experiences with people being unaware of a hunger problem in Maine.

“We run into that across the country,” Concannon said. “These tricks we use to deny ourselves the reality of it; there are a lot of struggling people. You have to be open to recognizing it.”

kskelton@sunjournal.com