It usually takes free holiday turkeys to bring 200 people out to Feed Salem.

But last Saturday, the food pantry inside the Salem Alliance Church got a holiday-sized crowd — nearly double its normal turnout for twice-monthly food distribution.

Volunteer Kent Hungerford, 70, has helped pass out food for around four months after first going to the pantry to get help. He attributed the influx of people Saturday to the impending delay of federal food benefits, which won’t go out as scheduled Nov. 1.

Hungerford said the pantry was “picked clean” by the end of his Saturday, Oct. 25, shift after just two hours of being open. They ran out of popular items like elbow noodles, tortillas, white rice, spaghetti sauce, and were low on soups and oatmeal, he said.

“The amount of people that came throu

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