As on any other rainy late summer morning in Southern Appalachia, the sun rose over densely wooded, knobby green peaks cloaked in a thick downy mist.
At a large, nondescript warehouse off Swannanoa River Road just outside downtown Asheville, it may have looked like any other day — workers bustling about, trucks coming in and out — but for MANNA FoodBank, which fights food insecurity in a historically poverty-stricken region by serving up to 190,000 people a month, this day would be unlike any other for perhaps the last thousand years.