Nearly every morning since he was a little boy, Joe Arthur has poured 2 percent milk onto his breakfast cereal. He slurps down the last drops with satisfaction. As the executive director for the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank, Arthur admits that he takes this simple pleasure for granted.
Open thousands of refrigerators in Pennsylvania and they’ll be empty – missing the cold beverage that can provide families with life-saving nutrition, he said.
The unveiling of the Pennsylvania Farm Show’s 25th annual butter sculpture Thursday morning was about more than admiring the 1,100 pounds of Land ‘O Lakes butter that had been artfully crafted in just 10 days.
The message of the butter sculpture is of milk equality. Conshohocken artists Jim Victor and his wife, Marie Pelton started working on the design the day after Christmas. They welded metal poles and wire mesh to create the outline of their characters – a little boy receiving a glass of milk from a food bank worker, while his mother stands by, her arms full of groceries. In the background, the farmer and his cow smile at the scene.
“It’s really tough to know that many families don’t even have the option to buy milk,” Arthur said. “From a food bank perspective, it’s always been very difficult, if not impossible to have. The shelf life is short. It’s expensive. But it’s one of the most requested items.”
The Central Pennsylvania Food Bank had to find a way to get milk without paying full retail prices, Arthur said. Working with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, the food bank was able to be designated a milk subdealer, allowing them to buy the product directly from the dairies at a cheaper price than from grocers, he said.
For the past six months, the food bank has given away about 3,000 quarts of 1 and 2 percent milk a week. By the end of the next six months, they expect that number to double.
“It has been so well received that we’ve decided to do the program indefinitely,” Arthur said. “We can’t stop when people have expressed they need it so badly.”
The Fill a Glass with Hope campaign, which highlights the theme of the butter sculpture, is an initiative with the Farm Show to raise $100,000 to keep the program funded for nearly a year. Instead of offering very expensive, shelf stable milk products, or no milk at all, the food bank can now provide fresh, local milk to anyone who uses the service, Arthur said.
Trying to convey a positive message through the sculpture is always fulfilling, said Victor, who is almost 70. He and his wife have created the Farm Show butter sculpture since 2004, as well as the York Fair butter sculpture the past few years.
The couple learns the theme about a month before the annual event and they sketch out their ideas for how to bring it to life.
They get to work building their armatures – the metal outlines for the characters – many of which line their back studio like an audience, he said.
“We get a lot of satisfaction in modeling the figures and trying to create a lifelike vision,” he said. “It’s a lot of work and I get tired, but there’s a lot of fun in doing it.”
While many of the past butter sculptures are tributes to the farming industry or other nostalgic themes, it’s nice to work on one that requires a call to action, Victor said.
In the five or six butter sculptures he gets to create each year, he likes the ones that mean something to someone.
“Creating art can be fun in itself, especially when you work with a medium like butter,” he said. “When you can make it personal and when it has meaning – that is a different level of satisfaction. That’s one of the reasons why I keep doing it.”
