More need help putting food on table

Karen was determined this year to provide her four children with the usual Thanksgiving fare - drumsticks, stuffing, dollops of potatoes. The only trouble is, she couldn't afford it.

Her ex-husband recently lost his job, and while she earns $1,500 a month as a bus driver, her paychecks vanish quickly with car payments, heating bills, and clothes for the kids. So, under a late-autumn cobalt sky, Karen finds herself standing in line recently at a Red Cross food giveaway in this town west of Boston. "We eat a lot of pasta and a lot of hot dogs," says Karen (who didn't want her last name used) in a thick Boston accent.

Karen's plight is becoming disturbingly familiar this holiday season as the economic downturn begins to squeeze many low-income and even some middle-class families.

From Florida to California, soup kitchens and food banks are seeing a sharp increase in demand for basic foodstuffs. Many of the people showing up have been recently laid off and are first-time visitors.

At the same time, some charities are finding their donations are down, both because of the economy and the large number of contributions going to Sept. 11 relief efforts.

"It's scary," says Mary Hayes, assistant director of the Northern Illinois Food Bank. "We've been in existence for 18 years, and I think this is the worst we've seen since way back in the '80s."

Across the country, the evidence is sobering:

• In central Florida, demand at food agencies has gone up anywhere from 40 percent to 140 percent.

• Half of the 100 emergency food agencies served by the San Francisco Food Bank have seen a client increase in the past month, especially among laid-off restaurant and hotel workers. At the same time, food donations are down 40 percent from a year ago.

• In New York, more than 64 percent of the people using soup kitchens, food pantries, or shelters since Sept. 11 have never used emergency food assistance before, according to a survey of 1,200 such programs by Food For Survival Inc.

Food pantries frequently serve as a warning light on the economy's engine, because their clients are often the working poor - families struggling to make a small paycheck stretch to cover rent, utilities, hospital bills, and car payments. The Rev. Don Heath, a Roman Catholic priest who works at an Attleboro, Mass., food pantry, calls it the "heating or eating" syndrome. "You either heat [your home] or you eat," he says, "and the statistics are horrible for the number of people who go without meals."

A survey of 24,000 local food agencies across the US, released last week by America's Second Harvest in Chicago, showed that nearly 39 percent of households seeking emergency food have at least one adult working.

Food banks also emphasize that, while the demand has significantly increased since Sept. 11, the situation was already discouraging. The study done by America's Second Harvest showed a nine percent increase in the number of people (23.3 million a year) served by its network of food banks from 1997 to 2001. Between 56 and 60 percent of local agencies reported an increase in demand.

Page: 1 | 2