On a recent Saturday near Seattle, Cheryl Ewaldsen pulled three golden loaves of wheat bread out of her kitchen oven.

The fragrant, oat-topped bread was destined not for her table, but for a local food bank, to be distributed to families increasingly struggling with hunger and the high cost of groceries.

“I just get really excited about it knowing that it’s going to someone and they’re going to make, like, 10 sandwiches,” said Ewaldsen, 75, a retired university human resources director.

Ewaldsen is a volunteer with Community Loaves, a Seattle-area nonprofit that started pairing home bakers with food pantries during the COVID-19 pandemic — and hasn’t stopped.

Since 2020, the organization headed by Katherine Kehrli, the former dean of a culinary school, has donated more than 200,000 loav

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