When the cupboard is bare
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Worl ... 701528.cms
12 Nov 2008, 0027 hrs IST, David Cay Johnston, NYT News Service
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Rebecca Muscarello had long worked as a secretary, so she never imagined that at age 35 she would be left with no choice but to take her two children to a food pantry to get groceries. But like a growing number of Americans whose jobs have evaporated in a shrinking economy, Muscarello ran out of money and then food.
Since the spring, the number of people showing up hungry at food pantries and soup kitchens has surged, straining the capacity of many organisations in the vast, largely unseen and lightly financed network of volunteer emergency feeding operations. Many are newcomers who were reluctant to seek help until they had no choice.
In the four months since June, demand for food aid has risen 20 per cent in areas of the country with the healthiest economies and more than 40 per cent in areas with the weakest, leaders of non-profit food-distribution organisations say. And they predict that the need will keep growing in 2009 if the job market continues to contract, as expected.
Requests are so high that some food centres are turning away the hungry. In Winston-Salem, the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina posted a notice on its website advising food pantries and soup kitchens of an 8 to 10-week wait to find out whether their membership had been approved.
Kitty Schaller, who runs the Manna FoodBank in Asheville, NC, said that while demand was up, donations had fallen because of the local economy. “We are flat against last year on contributions,” she said. “The trouble is, expenses are going up and it is a very uncertain future in terms of our ability to have enough goods in the warehouse” to meet demand.
Her agency supplies food to more than 330 pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and other such operations in 16 counties, on a budget of just $2.5 million, half of which comes from individual and foundation gifts, with another 5 per cent from the local United Way.
Even when much of America is prospering, hunger is a significant problem, according to annual reports issued by the United States Department of Agriculture.
One American household in nine was “food insecure” (the government avoids the word “hungry”) for part of 2006, and more than a third of these households “had very low food security — meaning that the food intake of one or more adults was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food,” according to a recent department report.
The federal study estimated that 35.5 million people — nearly as many as live in California — sometimes lack enough to eat and that 10.1 million adults and children, roughly the population of Michigan, often go hungry in America.
What makes the demand so striking this year is not only the suddenness but also the demographic that is seeking help. Most of the newcomers have been employed and have managed to survive dips in the job market. Many of them are couples and single parents who, like Ms. Muscarello, had managed without handouts.
“A lot of people coming to us have never been to a charitable distribution center before,” said Larry Sly, executive director of the Foodbank of Contra Costa and Solano, two counties east of San Francisco where about 1.6 million people live.
“We are getting people whose work is always up and down, and they have lived with that their whole lives because they work construction,” Mr. Sly said. “Construction here has just stopped, and so we have carpenters and masons and electricians who have not worked on a new house in forever. So it is not that they are out of work for some weeks and then they go back to work. There is nothing for them, and they cannot imagine when there will be work again.”
At the core of the problem is the lack of job growth. The number of Americans earning any wage grew by two million a year in the 1990s, but at only half that rate in the first seven years of this decade. In recent months the economy has been shedding jobs at a quickening pace, especially in construction and manufacturing.
At the same time, tax data show that 55 per cent of Americans have no interest-bearing savings accounts to draw on during hard times. Among the bottom half of taxpayers, who make less than $30,000, two-thirds have no interest income.
And every year another major problem further squeezes emergency feeding organizations, a movement that began in the mid-1970s as a temporary solution to hunger and then grew as wages in many industries stagnated and employment became less secure.
The food industry used to be a major source of supplies, donating truckloads of canned goods and other foods with long shelf lives. Then, two decades ago, every part of the food industry except cereal makers began embracing quality control. Improvements in quality control meant there was almost no chance that a ton of spaghetti sauce had a bit too much oregano or that thousands of labels were misprinted.
So the big donations of food that were once easy to come by have now become, like jobs, increasingly scarce, food bank directors say.
“We have been unable in the last several months to obtain the amounts of food on an ongoing basis that we usually did,” said Clyde Fitzgerald, executive director of the Second Harvest food bank in Winston-Salem .
“Our local sources, those major grocery chains, continue to come through wonderfully. But where we’re having difficulty is in the national network of feeding America because the calls we used to get from the national food companies saying ‘We have truckloads of excess product and how much do we send you?’ have stopped.”
Surplus production is often sold to overseas markets at a discount that brings food manufacturers more than the value of the tax deduction of a charitable donation, food bank managers across the country said in interviews.
And donations from grocers have fallen, said Jilly Stephens, executive director of City Harvest in New York, because of two factors. One is the rise of secondary grocers who buy canned and boxed goods whose “best if used by” dates have passed, food that used to be donated. The other is a growing practice of shipping such past-date foods overseas, she and others said.
Food banks are nonprofit wholesalers that gather and store foods, then distribute them to pantries, which act as free grocery stores, and to soup kitchens, which serve meals.
There are roughly a thousand pantries and soup kitchens in New York, said Ms. Stephens. City Harvest collects surplus food from restaurants and grocers and distributes it to nearly half of these volunteer feeding operations. It also operates a twice-monthly farmers’ market in the South Bronx, providing fresh produce at no charge, part of a small but growing trend among emergency food providers.
The Bush administration has also started shifting the federal government’s support of food banks toward more vegetables and fruits, and away from surplus agricultural commodities like nonfat dry milk, butter, peanut butter and lard.
But that does not address, and may even increase, the need for cash to fuel delivery trucks and pay for electricity to run coolers and refrigerate storage rooms, as well as to buy food to supplement what comes from businesses and government.
Each dollar of donated money, many food bank managers said, can be leveraged through barters, buying surplus products and otherwise arranging for $12 or more of food. City Harvest, for example, relies on 100 paid employees and 700 volunteers who gather surplus food and deliver it. “One of the big misconceptions is that we collect waste, which we do not,” Ms. Stephens said.
Ms. Muscarello’s woes began with Hurricane Katrina, which hit Chalmette, La., a tiny refinery town, even harder than New Orleans, a few miles to the west. Her marriage broke up, and she lost her secretarial job and then her job as a cook at a local diner, which closed, like so many other businesses in town.
“I want a job, and I just paid $800 for rent so I have to get a job,” Ms. Muscarello said. “And it’s not just me, it’s like 87 per cent of this community, because there are no jobs right now. People are losing jobs left and right because businesses are shutting down.”
She said that “food stamps get you just so far.” She relies on a food bank for canned goods and similar items, she said, and saves her food stamps for meat, vegetables and fruit.
Not only have jobs disappeared in her area, but so have agencies that offer help.
Natalie Jayroe, president of Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana, said that after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the number of agencies that her organization supplied with food had dropped to 270 from 400, across 23 Louisiana parishes.
“There is nothing like being hit with your distribution chain being swept away to make you realize how crucial distribution networks are,” she said.
Over the decades, the way food is obtained and what is eaten has changed significantly. Many people who lived through the Depression, for example, recorded in diaries the way they grew food in their yards, storing cabbages and other vegetables in root cellars to provide vitamins in winter, and canning other foods, some of them gleaned from orchards and fields.
Today, far fewer Americans have experience making foods from scratch, and fewer still understand food preservation, which requires both skill and an investment in steam cookers, jars and lids, said Janet Poppendieck, a Hunter College sociologist who has studied emergency food needs.
“We have seen a major shift in the way people prepare foods and eat foods over the last one or two generations,” said Vanessa Ulmer, policy and advocacy coordinator of Tulane University’s Prevention Research Center, which seeks to reduce obesity by promoting access to fresh, healthy foods.
Her centre is one of many working to change cultural attitudes about food and to revive these skills. But that change could take a generation or longer, she said.
