Just about every morning when Daryle Bascom gets to the office, he logs onto his computer and immediately starts bidding online.

“It's kind of fun to go out and shop each day,” he said.

But he’s not wasting company time on eBay — he’s the chief operations officer of The Food Bank for Central & Northeast Missouri, based in Columbia. And he’s bidding on truckloads of food.

“We have a bid coming up at noon,” he said. “I found a snack load on there: some Slim Jims, it has some Angie's popcorn, some cookies.”

But what Bascom really wanted that day was a truck of baby formula. The government shutdown affected some programs that usually provide formula to families who need it.

“All the food banks have been scrambling, trying to figure out how can we get baby formula into the network,” he s

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