Posted on 11/22/2007 7:27:08 AM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
Operators of free food banks say they are seeing more working people needing assistance. The increased demand is outstripping supplies and forcing many pantries and food banks to cut portions.
Demand is being driven up by rising costs of food, housing, utilities, health care and gasoline, while food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are finding they have less surplus food to donate and government help has decreased, according to Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks.
"I've been doing this for 20 years, and I can't believe how much worse it gets month after month," she said.
Diana Blasingame has lately found herself having to go to a free food pantry once a month to feed herself and her teenage daughter.
"I'm pretty good at making things stretch as far as I can, but food is so high now and I have to have gas in my car to do my job," said Blasingame, 46, who earns $9 an hour as a home health aide. "I work full time, but I don't have health insurance and sometimes there just isn't enough to pay bills and buy food."
"We have food banks in virtually every city in the country, and what we are hearing is that they are all facing severe shortages with demand so high," Ross Fraser, a spokesman for America's Second Harvest — The Nation's Food Bank Network, the nation's largest hunger relief group, said Friday. "One of our food banks in Florida said demand is up 35 percent over this time last year."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's annual hunger survey released Wednesday showed that more than 35.5 million people in the United States were hungry in 2006. While that number was about the same as the previous year, heads of food banks and pantries say many more people are seeking their assistance.
Tony Hall, vice president of the Food Bank of Southwest Georgia, estimates a 10 percent to 20 percent increase in demand for food in the 20-county area the organization serves. He cites cutbacks by local companies, rising fuel costs and the lingering impact of a March tornado that tore through Americus, Ga., destroying or damaging hundreds of homes.
"We really didn't rebound from that," Hall said Friday. "We're definitely down in donations. Each year the demand gets bigger and bigger."
Supplies are down to a little over 8 million pounds of food from a peak of about 12 million pounds two years ago at Hocking-Athens-Perry Community Action, which provides food bank services in 10 counties in southeast Ohio.
"We've lost factory jobs and many service jobs don't pay a livable wage," said Dick Stevens, director of the organization's food and nutrition division. "We see a lot of desperation in families who are trying to figure out how to pay higher fuel and utility costs and still put food on the table."
Most food banks and pantries aren't optimistic about the coming winter.
"November weather has been relatively mild, and you haven't seen the cost of home heating fuel added to what a family has to deal with," said Evelyn Behm, associate director of the Mid-Ohio Food Bank, which supplies food to pantries, soup kitchens and other charities in 20 central and eastern Ohio counties. "Those prices, we all know, are going up substantially this year."
At the Society of St. Vincent de Paul food pantry in Cincinnati, clients now get three or four days' worth of food instead of six or seven.
"We are trying to stretch our resources to help more people," said Liz Carter, executive director of the society. "But it's so difficult when you see the desperation and have to tell them you just don't have enough to give them what they need."
Officials with the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, which serves nearly 1,000 agencies in 23 counties, also are worried.
Through the end of August, the food bank was down almost 700,000 pounds of USDA commodities that include basic essentials such as canned fruit and vegetables and some meat — food that is very difficulty to make up in donations, Executive Director Mark Quandt said.
"We're bracing ourselves for a very tough winter, especially with home heating fuel prices at record highs in the Northeast," Quandt said. "People living in poverty or near poverty just can't sustain those types of increases."
Seafood from china L0L
You need to convert part of your barn to a chicken house.
I know you’re kidding, but in my case the answer is a resounding NO.
I buy my seafood directly from the guys and gals that are catching it. One of the advantages of living on the coast :)
Don’t even go there........
Can you get me Haddock? Cheap? ;0)
Oh yeah... that is the other one...chickens...whole chickens one used to be able to get for a few bucks. Now, yesterday well over $8 for one to feed a family of 4!
Like I said, it felt like the holiday gouge yesterday at the grocery store!
Gas is running an extra $90 a month for one vehicle...that goes to to work and home.
My raise isn’t going to cover $90 extra for gas and $120 for groceries!
Are you kidding? I would knock down that tin shed behind our garage and install a chicken coop in a minute, if it weren’t illegal...
I hate city life...sigh.
A few years ago the local rag printed a frontpage story about the local food bank. The gist of the article was that there was less food being contributed to the food bank as in recent years. They even featured a photo of a local woman who frecuented the food pantries and who supposedly would be in dire straits due to lack of food. The women was so fat she could hardly fit into the photograph.
Now if anyone is truly hungry, I'm more than willing to share my food with them. But I'd like to see some pictures of all these "hungry" people before I lose my cynicism.
I wish!!!!
Clams, oysters, crabs, and scallops are relatively inexpensive -— and with clams, crabs, and oysters nothing goes to waste around here — we dump all the shells in the driveway :)
I keep saying it and nobody listens to me:
Feed the obese to the starving.
I don't think anyone's can do that.
Personally I wait for chicken to go on sale and then stock up, but things like milk - I can't wait for that to be on sale, I have to buy that regardless of the price - which is now $4.50 a gallon.
My suggestion for you and your struggling friends is to either get another job or work two jobs. Try living in Britain where my in-laws pay double what we pay for just about anything you can name. As an example try seven dollars for a gallon of gas. And they don't complain.
So quit your whining. Real conservatives don't whine about their lot in life, they just try to make it better. And oh yes, I've been deep in the hole and climbed out. You can do it too.
Why do you think we live where we do?
As to raising livestock, of any kind, thanks, but no thanks -- I'll stick with produce.
Though sometime in the next couple of weeks I predict a bambi in the freezer :)
Discussion of reality is not whining
Mmmmm....Bivalves...
“Demand is being driven up by rising costs of food,.....”
One of the biggest factors in this past year’s food price increases is the taxpayer boondoggle to ethanol;
Increase factor (1) - moving land from corn-food-and-feed production to corn-ethanol production (a) reduces the # of acres under production for food; (b)increases demand for corn itself; (c)increases what food and feed producers must pay for corn; (d)decreases acreage in food commodities other than corn, raising prices on those commodities (soybeans).
Increase factor (2) - (1)(b)and (c) increase the cost of producing meet and dairy products.
Increase factor (3) - Increase factor 2 and (1)(d) adds to costs all across the grocery-food chain as the costs of corn, meat, dairy and other items pass into the grocery store items to which those commodities are the source material.
This will only get worse as mandates for ethanol use increase.
Unless you also raise the feed you will lose money buying feed.
Then you better figure on doing your own butchering or you will pay through the nose for that.
BTW, you can keep Britain
I love bambi...in the crock pot.
WOW - kind of harsh, don’t you think?
I don’t see anyone whining here, just stating basic facts of life. The cost of living is going up, and for many of us wages are not keeping pace with that reality.
I learned early on how to save on groceries without skimping on nutrition and have maintained that all my life, so no matter how bad things get, and they have been pretty bad at times, I can still feed myself and my family.
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