LINC’s eight-month old local food distribution program got a lot weightier for the holidays.

The Local Food Purchase Assistance program — which since May had delivered more than 500,000 pounds of fresh produce to families connected to more than 65 sites inside and outside the Kansas City metro area — added significant protein.

During the second week of December, the more than 1,500 produce boxes for distribution were accompanied by 540 hams and 25 turkeys.

“It’s very heavy . . . and cold,” 9-year-old Kordai said after he lugged his family’s frozen ham to their car with his mother, Kashie Holland. They were heading home from LINC’s Caring Communities after-school program at Holliday Montessori School in the Kansas City Public Schools.

“We’ll cook it for our Christmas dinner,” Holland said, sharing her thanks that the food program came to their school.

Farm fresh: How free produce from Missouri growers is getting to KC area families

As one of the state’s regional community partnerships, LINC was given the task by the Missouri Department of Social Services to coordinate the program in a multi-county area around Kansas City, reaching out to local farmers and producers to supply the federally funded LFPA program with fresh and locally produced food.

To add more protein, LINC has added a partnership with Paradise Locker Meats in Trimble, Mo., to connect the LFPA program to Paradise’s collaboration with local meat-producing farms.

“That’s exactly what we do — it’s right in our wheelhouse,” said Paradise’s Louis Fantasma.

By partnering with Paradise, Fantasma said, LINC and the LFPA program is boosting an effort that helps small family farms thrive.

And that means families receiving the hams are benefiting from farms where “pigs are raised better, in a special way, that tastes really, really good,” he said. “And I think that’s really neat when people in this local community can taste and have something that’s grown right here, locally.”

At Wheatley Elementary School in Kansas City, the neighborhood has many immigrant families that have been enjoying the produce boxes, and now the hams, said Monique Limon, the school’s family and community engagement liaison.

“I had a mom saying that she was going to use her ham to prepare a dish from her country,” Limon said. “She was able to use that, and the sweet potato — and that she was going to learn how to use spaghetti squash, she didn’t know anything about it.”

Many families are in need of resources, she said, “and to be able to provide them with a couple of meals for them and their family is a huge help, especially in this economy right now.”