A month ago, the director of the Winthrop Food Pantry sent board members information about the number of people who came to the pantry from January through April 2014. (Full disclosure: I am on the board.) Four hundred two families came, and this added up to 1,102 individuals. For a city the size of Portland or even Augusta, one thousand people might not seem like very many. However, according to the 2010 census, the population of Winthrop is 6,092, and a realtor I know pegged it at 6,200 for 2014. So my town’s population is 6,000, give or take a couple of hundred, and this year between January and April, 1,000 residents were fed by the food pantry.

I admit it. I was shocked that the numbers were so high. I shouldn’t have been. On days when the pantry is open, the waiting room is crammed with people waiting to get food. But to me, Winthrop seems like a middle-class community, a macaroni and cheese kind of place. Yes, there are some wealthy people, and they tend to live by the many beautiful lakes in town, but there are a larger number of state workers and other folks who earn an average salary.

Until I saw the food pantry numbers, I didn’t realize that there were also so many people in town living on the edge, people who are—let’s be honest—earning so little money that they meet the federal guidelines for poverty, the guidelines the pantry uses. The number of people coming to the pantry has risen since the start of the Great Recession, and those numbers don’t seem to be going down anytime soon.

For a completely different view about how some people eat in Maine, you only have to turn to last week’s Maine Sunday Telegram and its recently added food section, Source: Eating and Living Sustainably in Maine. The article’s headline was innocent enough: “Dinner is nearly ready: Summer brings a slew of opportunities for right-there-on-the-farm eating.”

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Bucolic and simple with lots of mouth-watering food fresh from the fields or the creamery at various farms in southern Maine. And I’m sure it is—albeit for a very hefty price. Most of the prices for the farm meals listed were between $110 and $60 per person. Yes, per person. (The Well, at Jordan Farm in Cape Elizabeth, was the only farm listing with what might be considered a reasonable price—between $23 to $20 per entry, with a kids’ menu available.)

I try to reconcile these two Maines—the thousand people in Winthrop who rely on the food pantry for some of their food, and those who can afford to spend $125 per person on a meal at a farm. But I can’t reconcile these two Maines. As the saying goes, it blows my mind to think about the discrepancy. (The idea of farm food being so expensive also blows my mind.)

To borrow yet again from the late writer Tony Judt, ill fares the land when there is such inequality.

Yesterday, I went to the Lewiston-Auburn College with my friend Claire Hersom to the third annual Poetry & Peace Potluck. Not only did this event include an abundance of poetry and food, but there was also a documentary called Down by the River’s Edge. The film is about the Otis Paper Mill in Chisholm, the southern end of Jay, and the people who worked in and lived by the mill, which closed in 2009. Not surprisingly, the predominant ethnic group was Franco-American. (By one estimate, Franco-Americans make up 30 percent of Maine’s population.) But Chisholm also had Italian and Slovakian immigrants as well. Who knew there were so many ethnic groups in the Jay/Livermore Falls area? I certainly didn’t.

Down by the River’s Edge is a combination of stills and clips of interviews with people, some of them quite old, who had worked in the mill. The film did a nice job of weaving in the various elements of life in a mill town—the history, the hard work, the big families, the crowded living conditions, the sense of community, the Catholic church, and the fun that people made for themselves.

Susan Gagnon, the writer and director, was on hand for a discussion after the film. She told about how she wanted to expand the stories told about mill towns, which usually included the words “dirty” and “working class.” Growing up in Chisholm, Susan saw a vibrancy and a keen sense of community. She became aware that the story of the workers at the Otis Paper Mill had never been recorded, and Susan had to “beg and borrow but not steal” the many stills featured in Down by the River’s Edge.

The story of Maine is also the story of the Ku Klux Klan, who were a major presence in the state and marched against Franco-Americans and other Catholics. Susan decided not include that segment in her film, and while I understand that her focus was on the people and the community of Chisholm, it seems to me that to not include something about the Klan was a major omission.

Nevertheless, Down by the River’s Edge, four years in the making, is a good film. Not only is it worth seeing, but it also tells the stories of people who for too long have not had a voice.

After the documentary came poetry, and many of Maine’s notable poets were at the Poetry Peace Potluck. Henry Braun, Gary Lawless, Robert Farnsworth, Jeri Theriault, and my personal favorite, Claire Hersom, are just a sample of the fine poets who read yesterday. The general themes were peace, May Day, and workers.

Claire read “In America Dreaming,” which ties in Walt Whitman, the Civil War, and the Vietnam War. She gave me permission to quote from the poem, and here are the last two stanzas, especially lovely and poignant and wistful.

Isn’t that what you wanted, to have a place
and a breeze
blowing against your face.
And when it got too loud to hear the birds,
to hunker down, hold on the the sway of the world?

Sometimes at night, I think I hear you
endlessly calling to the universe.
I see you illumed in the night’s shadows
rambling across the meadows
climbing the old stone walls
searching for a way back.