THE BREAD LADY
She’s fed the hungry for decades with ‘throwaway bread’ she leaves on her porch
About 30 years ago, Shauna Devenport discovered the world of
throwaway bread.
She went to a grocery store near her home in Salt Lake City to pick up baked goods the store had set aside for a local food bank when a salesclerk pointed out something jarring: hundreds of edible loaves of bread were being thrown out because they were a day or two past their expiration date.
“I cried all the way home thinking of the waste,” Devenport said.
She went back to the store and requested the loaves that would otherwise be discarded, then set them
on the front porch of her small brick bungalow and put the word out that anyone could come by and take whatever they needed. Then she did it again.
“I’d put it out and an hour or so later, it was gone,” she said. “People would show up from all over. I saw there was a real need out there.”
Devenport, a mother of four, asked her neighbors if they’d be willing to help her pick up the store’s leftover bread every day. About a dozen agreed to pitch in.
Three decades on, the
“Bread Lady” as Devenport is known, is still going strong.
Now 67, she admits that she’s a bit slower and grayer than when she started her free front porch food pantry around 1992 but she is still determined to help feed anyone in need...READ MORE
