One volunteer's bread run in war against hunger
David Schoen is one foot soldier in the fight, which is growing more intense as fuel and food prices rise and the impact of the subprime mortgage crisis is felt.
By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the March 6, 2008 edition
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NEW YORK - On a recent cold, rainy Wednesday, David Schoen left his corporate office, walked in his wingtips past ground zero, and stopped at a Starbucks a few blocks away. After filling two bags with the morning's leftover croissants and bagels, he walked to the Coalition for the Homeless and dropped them off.
"It's rather touching when you see some of the people there, who, when they see the food come in, tell you they haven't had anything to eat all day," he says.
Mr. Schoen is one foot soldier in the fight against hunger. As a volunteer for City Harvest, he takes time out of every workday to ensure those few leftovers don't go to waste. Now, he feels even more committed to his work as the economy slows down and demand for emergency food donations goes up.
Indeed, lines at food pantries and soup kitchens have been steadily growing in the past year, according to the Bread for the World Institute, a hunger think tank in Washington. Those emergency food programs, in turn, are finding it difficult to keep their shelves fully stocked. While much of the evidence from around the country so far is anecdotal, the story of longer lines and scarcer supplies is being repeated from Los Angeles to New York.
"The demand is really increasing, and shelves are increasingly bare in the emergency feeding programs around the city," says Jilly Stephens, executive director of City Harvest, a nonprofit that retrieves and donates leftover food.
Rising food and fuel prices are contributing factors, but so, too, is the subprime mortgage crisis, which has hit hardest in low-income areas.
"Families that are already struggling to pay their mortgage costs now are seeing them shoot up 30 and 40 percent," says Todd Post, senior editor at the Bread for the World Institute. "They're stressed in every which way, and some are forgoing food."
To meet this increasing need, emergency food organizations are getting creative – perhaps none more so than City Harvest. It was started in the early 1980s, when a group of friends noticed a lot of hungry people in the city and a lot of restaurants that were throwing out perfectly good food. So they decided to put the two together in 1982. Today, the nonprofit rescues more 20 million pounds of food annually. But in the past few months, they've seen that is still not enough.
"So we committed to find an additional million pounds of food through November and December [of this year]," Ms. Stephens says.
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