I wrote a couple years ago about AmpleHarvest.org, which had the simple idea of making local food pantries more visible to the thousands of local growers who plant too much and can't use all their produce at harvest time.

Growers, many of the backyard variety, can go to the site, plug in their zip code, and see all the food pantries around them that accept fresh food. Well, all such pantries that are listed on the site, anyway.

The news is that the roster of such pantries continues to grow. A press release says it just topped 6,000, about 20 percent of all the pantries in America. Though I'm not about to do the research, I have to wonder why that proportion isn't even higher. AmpleHarvest has to be known in among the family of pantries, so what's stopping them?

I do know that some pantries don't accept fresh food because of the added costs of refrigeration, but it would be disappointing to learn that 80 percent of food pantries provide only processed foods. If so, maybe someone could make a website to correct that shortfall, too.