Today, the central storehouse uses its own fleet of trucks to take food and supplies across the country to five regional storehouses, from Alberta to metro Atlanta. A recipient may be asked, for example, to help clean a church or fix a widow’s fence in exchange for aid a single mom might be asked to “stay home and take good care of her kids.” It has never been a “dole” system, Humpherys said, which “helps maintain the dignity” of the process. But the system works much the same way it did at its start: It begins with a call from a Mormon bishop seeking help either for his congregants or his community. The church buys many items it keeps on hand today at the storehouse - from wheelchairs to sugar and rice.

It opened the first regional storehouse in 1937 in Salt Lake City and began to buy orchards, farms and cattle ranches to provide commodities to redistribute to those in need. During the Great Depression, when unemployment ran 30 percent among members, the church formalized its welfare system. Since its inception, the LDS Church has viewed looking after its members’ well-being as part of its core mission. “As I walk through, I (don’t) think,’What a beautiful building’ but how the Lord must truly love the poor to provide this building to take care of their needs,” Humpherys said during a tour of the facility, built with members’ donations. The new storehouse, which opened in January, is the centerpiece of the Mormon church’s intricate network for taking care of its members and lending a hand to others in times of natural disasters, putting scriptural encouragements into action in the aftermath of hardship. This, Humpherys said as he holds the can in his palm, is “the best food money can’t buy.” The can’s label is stamped “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” and “Welfare Services, Salt Lake City, Utah.” Storehouse manager Richard Humpherys stops a golf cart next to one steel storage rack, slits open a cardboard box with a pocket knife and pulls out a can of peaches made with fruit grown at a Mormon church-owned orchard and processed at its cannery in Lindon, Utah. SALT LAKE CITY - At the new Utah Bishops’ Central Storehouse, pallets loaded with food wait to be ferried to locales near and far, their destinations handwritten in black marker on plastic wrap covers: Lindon, Ely, Mesa, San Diego, St. By Brooke Adams| Religion News Service April 27, 2012

Bishops store house