Rising Demand Squeezes Food Banks

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/17/giving/17JOHN.html

 

November 17, 2003COPING Rising Demand Squeezes Food BanksBy DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

 

ROCHESTER

 

EVERY day, tractor-trailer rigs pull up to the loading dock of an old paper

warehouse on the bank of the Genesee River here and unload donated food. The

sturdy concrete warehouse was a donation itself, to Foodlink, a nonprofit

wholesaler that distributes about six million pounds of food each year to soup

kitchens, food pantries and meals-on-wheels programs in the Finger Lakes region

of western New York.

 

In the last decade, government has shifted onto charities the job of making food

available to the poor, unemployed, disabled and housebound. Foodlink is one of

230 nonprofit food banks that are vital to a large portion of Americans who

might otherwise go hungry.

 

From 1977 to 1997, one in four Americans at some point received federal food

stamps, Labor Department studies show, as millions of people slipped in and out

of poverty depending on the strength of the job market, changes in marital

status and other conditions. Similar numbers depend on soup kitchens, food

pantries and other charitable organizations for food, especially when jobs are

scarce.

 

Food banks are now caught in a financial vise, squeezed on one side by rising

demand for food, especially from the long-term unemployed, and on the other side

by shrinking donations from food manufacturers and cuts in federal spending. At

the same time, food banks face a growing demand for cash. They must buy about a

third of the food they distribute, mostly items that fill gaps between what is

donated and what is needed to prepare balanced meals. And food banks have their

own operating expenses, from maintaining refrigeration rooms to fueling trucks

and vans that deliver groceries to charities.

 

Janet Poppendieck, a professor of sociology at Hunter College who has studied

food banks and nutrition among the poor, said that " there is a built-in squeeze

on food banks, a constant downward pressure on supplies, which means they have

to work harder and harder to get the same level of supply. "

 

She compared it with " extracting oil from a declining field where you have to do

more and more to get less and less out. "

 

Tom Ferraro, the executive director of Foodlink since he founded it in 1976,

said that " the meat and potatoes for food banks used to be the waste and

mistakes of production. "

 

" Too much oregano in the spaghetti sauce, or too little, and we would be offered

tractor-trailer load after tractor-trailer load of the stuff that tasted fine,

was perfectly nutritious, but did not meet the manufacturers' standards, " he

said.

 

" Back then there were tons of boxes of cereals with the name `General Mills'

printed upside down or some other mistake that had nothing to do with

nutrition, " Mr. Ferraro said. " Food banks would trade everything back and forth

so we had some balance between what the manufacturers in our area produced. That

was food banking in the early days and it was easy. "

 

Then corporations embraced ideas like Total Quality Management, resulting in

improved production controls at food factories, which have benefited consumers

with lower prices and investors with higher profits, but have taken a toll on

donations to food banks.

 

" Fewer production mistakes have made it harder for food banks to sustain

themselves, " Mr. Ferraro said. " The only part of the food industry that has not

redone its production processes is the cereals business, where a $4 box of

cereal has 5-cents worth of food in it, so there is no point in replacing even

pre-World War II machinery if it still works. "

 

Foodlink and other food banks are nonprofit wholesalers in the middle of a

three-tier system. Above them is America's Second Harvest, a Chicago-based

charity that coordinates requests to food manufacturers and other big suppliers

and directs donations from them to food banks. The bottom tier is composed of

thousands of soup kitchens, pantries, churches and other organizations that

either hand out food or serve meals.

 

Last year, Foodlink distributed six million pounds of food valued at $6.9

million. It also raised $2.7 million in cash, a chunk of it through an annual

promotion with the Wegmans supermarket chain. Of $9.8 million in total expenses,

management cost Foodlink $209,000 and fund-raising an additional $187,000, which

together amounted to 4 percent of total expenses.

 

On the demand side, America's working-age population grew more than 3 percent in

the last three years, while the number of jobs shrank 2 percent, creating a gap

of more than six million jobs. One in five of the unemployed has been jobless

for more than six months, Labor Department data show.

 

Over the last three decades, incomes for those at the bottom have fallen in real

terms. The poorest fifth of families averaged $271 a week in income last year,

according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization in

Washington whose data on the working poor are widely respected.

 

One result of reduced incomes can be seen in New York City, where a third of the

population lives below or only modestly above the poverty line. The number of

food pantries and kitchens citywide has grown to nearly 1,000 from 35 in 1983.

 

The way government poverty statistics are reported understates the scope of the

problem, said J. Larry Brown, who runs the Center on Hunger and Poverty at

Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management.

 

" If the official figures show that 34 million people are poor all year, " Dr.

Brown said, " the question to ask is how many families are so poor that their

incomes fall below the poverty line one month during the year. When you ask the

question that way, the number rises to 74 million people, or one of every four

Americans. "

 

The first food bank is widely attributed to John van Hengel, a commodities

trader who retired to Arizona in the mid-60's and volunteered at a soup kitchen.

He started soliciting donations of food, applying his knowledge of commodities

in a state where warm weather allows nearly year-round farming with three annual

crops from the same field. Van Hengel was so successful that a warehouse was

needed to take in the donated food, much of which was passed on to other soup

kitchens and food pantries.

 

By 1976, after others copied van Hengel's warehouse idea, the federal government

gave grants to start more food banks. Congress also passed a tax incentive in

1976, allowing manufacturers to deduct the cost of goods they donated and a

portion of the profit they would have earned, which increased donations for a

time.

 

A Carter-era change in the food stamps program has also had a big effect on the

poor in ways that have unintentionally caused many people to run out of food at

the end of each month.

 

For years, advocates for the poor fought the Agriculture Department's policy

that required people to buy the stamps, paying, say, $30 to get food stamps

worth $100. The Carter administration changed the program so that those eligible

could get $70 worth of stamps without paying any cash.

 

" People kept that $30 sacrosanct, " Mr. Ferraro said, " because they needed it to

get the extra $70 worth of food. But once you could get $70 worth of food stamps

for nothing, then that $30 was no longer sacrosanct, and it was sometimes spent

on some other pressing needs. And that was when we started seeing this

phenomenon of people running out of food before the end of the month because

they had $70 worth of food when they needed $100. "

 

Professor Poppendieck sees other forces at work that push people toward food

pantries and soup kitchens.

 

" I do believe many consumers are profoundly disempowered by not having learned

basic food-preparation skills, " she said, " so they are at the mercy of a market

that peppers them with advertisements for high-value-added foods which have been

extensively processed. "

 

In addition, she said, many neighborhoods, urban and rural, do not have access

to supermarkets. " If you must do your grocery shopping at the convenience store

on the highway or the neighborhood bodega, " she said, " you are paying an

exaggerated price for a limited supply in terms of nutrition. "

 

So, she said, the lack of access to supermarket prices and weak food-preparation

skills, combined with falling incomes, have resulted in a growing demand for the

food banks and the soup kitchens and pantries they supply.

 

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

 

 

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