Got extra peanut butter in your pantry? Great. But you can hold tuna fish this year.

It’s the second week in May and time for the National Association of Letter Carriers’ annual Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive.

Now in its 25th year, the local effort, set for Saturday, May 13, encourages postal customers throughout the 98368 ZIP code to collect nonperishable food items and leave the bounty in or near their mailboxes for pickup by Port Townsend letter carriers, who are volunteering their time for the annual effort.

Leaving a check in your mailbox also goes a long way as the Jefferson County Food Bank Association pays 4 cents per pound when buying from Food Lifeline, a nonprofit food distribution center based in Shoreline, Washington.

While the food bank gets a lot of bang for donated bucks, Shirley Moss, the food bank’s executive director, said local food donations are important for keeping a variety of options on the shelves.

“When I order from Food Lifeline, I get cases and cases of the same things,” she said. “The donations allow us to offer a variety of food we normally wouldn’t have. We get some really unusual things from people.”

“I think people go into their cupboards and see what they haven’t eaten and they donate that, and that’s fine so long as the cans are in good shape and they aren’t past due,” Moss said of not accepting contributions that are past the pull date, especially baby food and tomato-based products, which have a shorter shelf life.

Moss said First Federal recently conducted a food drive, and consequently, the food bank is awash in tuna fish.

That said, Moss also noted that she has looked in the storage room recently and “I’m noticing our storage room has space where it normally doesn’t have space.”

Seniors especially are using the food bank these days, Moss said, noting that since starting Senior Saturday, use has almost doubled – from an average of 54 families using it each week to more than 104 families each week.

Overall, the food bank is serving an average of 350 families each week between the Wednesday food bank and the Senior Saturday food bank.

HISTORIC COLLECTION

Port Townsend’s post office typically collects more food than nearly all other post offices of its size in the nation, according to food drive organizer and letter carrier Saul Samsky.

But the Port Townsend post office has struggled to match its one-time peak haul of nearly 13,000 pounds of food, collected just prior to the Great Recession.

Letter carriers deliver the plastic bags, which are exempt from the City of Port Townsend’s plastic bag ban, to postal customers in the days ahead of the food drive.

Letter carriers load donations into their postal vehicles along with the mail itself and bring them back to the post office, where they are picked up by an Olympic Community Action Programs (OlyCAP) truck and delivered to a food bank warehouse for sorting.

“We couldn’t do this as efficiently without OlyCAP,” he said.

Food collected in Port Townsend also is shared with other food banks in the county, Moss noted.

CHECKS, TOO

Anyone who wants to write a check can do so by making it out to the Jefferson County Food Bank Association, putting it in a marked envelope and left in mailboxes or prominently attached to food donations.

Checks also can be sent to the food bank at P.O. Box 1795, Port Townsend, WA 98368.