Monday, Jul. 06, 2009

Need for goods skyrockets at area food pantries

Children home from school add to families' tight food budgets

While food pantries around the metro-east are stocked at the moment, those stores aren't expected to last.

"The need is skyrocketing," said Jerry Messick, director of the Community Interfaith Food Pantry in Belleville. "We went from 352 families in May to 450 ... in June. We are not desperate yet, but it is dwindling fast, and I'm concerned."

School-age children home for the summer put additional pressure on an already tight food budget for families living paycheck to paycheck and relying on state aid to fill cupboards.

"Since school has let out, the kids are no longer getting the free meals at school," Messick said. "About 1,700 bags of food went out of here last month, and it doesn't take that long at that rate to empty a place. We're struggling, but the Lord has been good to us, and he keeps sending help."

Food drives held over the past couple months by the U.S. Postal Service, the Boy Scouts, St. Elizabeth's Hospital and Belleville School District 118 have helped keep the shelves stocked, Messick said.

The United Way of Greater St. Louis recently held a food drive to meet the increasing demand of people using food pantries. The drive collected 144,400 pounds of food that will be distributed to more than 500 food pantries in the St. Louis region. The St. Louis Area Foodbank, a United Way partner agency, has reported a 20 percent increase in food requests from people in the past several months due to unemployment. Seven out of every 10 of those requests are from people who have never used a food pantry before.

East St. Louis resident Fannie Martin, 69, waited for her allotment of food from the Bunkum Road Food Pantry in East St. Louis, sitting in the heat while volunteers loaded a couple of grocery bags of donated and government commodity food for her.

It was her second visit to the food pantry, any food pantry, in her life.

"I'm on a fixed income and I'm not on food stamps but the money definitely does not go as far as it did before. It's especially hard during the summer because the electric goes up and it really, really takes a toll," Martin said. "They give us quite a bit of food and they help me feed my husband and my son and they are both sick, so I have to take care of everything in the house. It would be very, very hard to feed them without the pantry."

The Bunkum Road Food Pantry is one of the 500 food pantries that received donated food from the St. Louis Area Foodbank. The pantry also receives an allotment of government commodities every month, said Don Baden, director of the East St. Louis AmeriCorps, which is part of the Lessie Bates Neighborhood House and operates the food pantry. The pantry receives about 30,000 pounds of government commodities every month, in addition to food donations from a variety of local businesses, churches, organizations and individuals, which amounts to a total of about $1 million in donated food annually.

Two years ago the food pantry served 2,500 people annually.

The pantry now serves about 5,100 people annually, Baden said. The pantry primarily serves residents in Washington Park and the Lansdowne area of East St. Louis.

"Just the fact that the numbers have gone up as much as they have suggests the need is far greater than it has been," Baden said.

Denise Beard is an AmeriCorps supervisor who works to move people through the line at the Bunkum Road Food Pantry, signing people in and checking their identifications for proof of residency.

"We have seen a major increase in the needy families coming in, and it's all ages and races: the elderly, families, young and middle-aged," Beard said. "Over the past year, we've seen the need increase about 60 percent."

Most of the time the shelves are stocked, but more often lately, the food in the pantry doesn't match the need in the community.

"Sometimes, it does run a little barren so we have to stretch it," she said. "For the last couple of months, the FoodBank has helped us a lot."

Beard said the pantry serves about 150 clients who represent about 400 hungry people each day they are open.

"But more often we've had up to 200 people in a day," she said.

Back at the Belleville food pantry, Messick is eagerly awaiting backyard gardens to start producing an excess of fresh vegetables.

"We always accept donations from backyard gardeners," he said. "I expect the donations of fresh produce to start coming in soon and that always goes quickly."

In May, an East Coast man started a nationwide movement to encourage backyard gardeners to donate excess produce to local food pantries after he was unable to find a food pantry to take his produce.

His created a Web site, AmpleHarvest.org, encourages food pantries to register and gardeners to find a pantry to benefit.

"There are 30,000 to 40,000 food pantries around America and the vast majority are under the radar. They aren't on the Internet and they aren't in the Yellow Pages," Ample Harvest founder Gary Oppenheimer said. "The issue is if food banks and pantries aren't registered by the time back yard gardeners harvest and are ready to share their harvest, they won't know where to share it. That produce is either going to be left in the garden to rot or thrown in the garbage."

Oppenheimer said he has received a very positive response from gardeners, but getting the word out to food pantries has been slow.

"There is an untold amount of produce available that goes to waste instead of going to where it's needed," he said. "For people to give cash donations to food banks is hard because of the economy; this allows them to reach into their backyard and help from their own harvest. Anyone who knows a food pantry in their neighborhood should tell them to take a look at the AmpleHarvest.org site and help them get on the site so they can be found."

The food pantry database is accessible by any one.

"This is a database that people will use to find food pantries," Oppenheimer said. "Pantries that register are findable. Pantries that do not register will not be found. We're not curing hunger. We are going to diminish hunger. And some people who are the recipients of the fresh produce are going to be eating better than they have been in a long time."

In East St. Louis, donations to the Catholic Urban Programs food pantry have been slow and may not keep up with the need.

"The need is there and there are a lot more people than normal coming to the pantry," coordinator Joe Hubbard said. "So far, we've been able to keep up with it but we can always use food. The postal carrier collection in May was very, very helpful and that's what's carrying us now, but the dog days of summer are coming up and that's when the donations usually dry up. As we get closer to August and September it will be harder to meet the need."

So far, the organization has seen an increase of about 40 percent over last summer in people who need help with food, Hubbard said.

"There has been a loss of jobs, and a dollar doesn't go as far any more," he said. "A lot of people are getting food stamps, but it just doesn't stretch when the kids are home for the summer. There are times when our shelves are totally empty."