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Retailers, consumers and prices
As downturn takes toll, food bank volunteers become clients
The longest recession since the Great Depression has taken an exacting toll on Americans and their ability to put food on the table. Families who once considered themselves solidly middle class are now signing up for food stamps or turning to food banks to feed themselves in the face of lost jobs or cut wages.
“These are our neighbors, our friends, the people we go to church with,” said Margaret McKenna, president of the Walmart Foundation, of the number of Americans who are going hungry. “This is not like this is the other, people we don’t know. These are people we do know.”
Food stamp enrollment has reached record numbers, while a survey by Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger relief organization, found that 99 percent of participating food banks reported a surge in demand for emergency food assistance in the past year. Ninety-eight percent of food banks said that demand is being driven by first time users.
Jean Osborn, 61, who lives in Bluffton, Indiana with her 76-year-old husband, knows what it means to lose her footing in this economy. Osborn can no longer work due to health issues and her husband supports them with a factory job that pays $33,000 a year — an income level that means the couple does not qualify for many government benefits.
So Osborn, who used to volunteer at food banks to help the needy, now relies on them to feed herself and her husband. She tries to extend the hand-outs of bread, peanut butter or meat as long as possible.
“If you’re creative, you can make chili and live on it for three days,” she said.
But between paying a $540 mortgage, medical bills and living expenses, Osborn said she can still barely make ends meet.
Will food banks need a bailout?
Job losses and rising costs for food and housing are driving up demand for emergency meals from charities and food pantries around the United States. But donations aren’t keeping up.
Demand in the Los Angeles area has risen 41 percent from a year ago, said Michael Flood, president and chief executive at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.
The food bank currently provides the equivalent of 560,000 meals a week to local charities, said Flood. Compared with last year, the LA Food Bank is delivering 33 percent more food to the 875 charitable agencies it serves, but that’s still falling short of need by 8 percent.
Such supply and demand imbalances are being seen around the country as the economic downturn triggered by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is also resulting in fewer donations from companies and individuals.
“It’s ironic and sad that in this land of plenty, so many people have to make due with so little,” said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
In 2007 — before the economy took a sharp turn for the worse — some 36.2 million Americans, or 11.1 percent of households, struggled to get enough food to eat. About one-third of the people in that group went hungry from time to time, according to a report issued this week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.
“This is a problem that is only going to get worse,” Fielding said of the nation’s growing hunger issues. “Things are moving rapidly in the wrong direction as we get more unemployment.”
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