Food

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Please Sir, I Want Some More

January 28, 2012 in compassion, Food, Hunger, poverty, recession, Uncategorized by boxcarkids | 37 comments

Some half dozen years ago I spent the better part of a day volunteering at a local soup kitchen/food pantry on the weekend before Thanksgiving.  There’s something about the holiday season that heightens my desire to care for strangers and this was a perfect opportunity for a busy single mom of 2.  A friend who admired my initiative but didn’t share the same commitment was happy to take my daughters for the afternoon so I donned my work clothes – jeans and a sweatshirt - and a feeling of benevolence, and headed off to dole out charity.

The first hour or so was spent sorting food that had been donated – mostly canned goods, bags of pasta and rice, but also loaves of day old bread, and produce; heads of wilted lettuce and limp bundles of carrots.  There were dented cans, food that was past the expiration date, and foods clearly given more as a means of cleaning out the pantry than to provide a meal for the hungry.  Cans of sauerkraut, pearl onions, gravy, and surprisingly (given that Thanksgiving was still to come) cranberry sauce.  The only meat I saw that wasn’t in a can of soup, was a can of Spam.

As we packed the food into paper grocery bags, a more experienced worker gave us tips.  “Put the generic veggie cans and odd stuff on the bottom,” she said, “then rice, bread or pasta and produce.  Try to top it off with something appealing if you can – like this.”  She handed me a box of Frosted Flakes cereal.  Naturally there was no dairy, nothing that needed to be refrigerated or frozen.

Once the bags were filled we were directed to the kitchen to help prepare the ‘Thanksgiving’ Meal.  This was a lot closer to the meal I would be having the following week – it was ham instead of turkey, but the other fixings were much the same.  Mashed potatoes, peas, dinner rolls, salad, and pumpkin or apple pie for desert.  We peeled mountains of potatoes, chopped lettuce, opened industrial-sized cans of peas and heated rolls.  It was an assembly line effort and we were hurried along by bustling workers who warned us of the growing lines forming outside the doors.

Eventually the food was ready, tables were set and the doors were opened.  The people filed through and lined up cafeteria style to receive a plate filled with a hot meal.  There were older homeless men who shuffled through silently, maintaining a tight grip on their soiled backpacks.  There were migrant workers, darkly tanned and hardened by hours standing and bending and lifting in the sun.  There were families – not so many (this was before the recession) but a few.  Children so eager, eyes alight, tummies rumbling, reaching for their plates.  Parents with downcast gazes, hurrying the children through the line, hating the need to be there at all, mumbling their thanks.

We dished out over 100 meals that afternoon, and gave each adult one of the grocery sacks packed with food that we wouldn’t take home and serve to our own families because it wasn’t our brand, or was too old or unpalatable in other ways.  We were brightly cheery in the presence of the needy, proud that we had taken the time to come and serve them.  We accepted their gratitude as our due and frowned at the child who had a tantrum and refused to eat her peas, instead shoving her entire plate to the floor.  We murmured among ourselves, wondering what led people to make a life on the street instead of getting a job and living a ‘normal’ life.  Drug use?  Lack of education?  Lack of drive?  We couldn’t imagine it.

Yesterday I stood in line at the biweekly food pantry at a local church.  Ahead of me were other single adults, an elderly lady white-haired and hunched over, a man who limped along with the aid of a cane, and a woman about my age, nicely dressed in a colorful skirt and blouse.  Behind me a young mother tried to keep her toddler son entertained as the line edged slowly forward.  Most of us moved forward silently, keeping eye contact and conversation to a minimum. At the head of the line was a small card table, manned by several nicely dressed and groomed middle-aged volunteers.

They politely asked each person their circumstance and the number and ages of the people in their household before handing out a little green ticket that afforded one entrance into the part of the parking lot that housed the food.  Tables laden with sacks of paper grocery bags, bins filled with local produced rejected by the stores, and another table stacked with loaves of bread.  I handed over my green ticket and took the grocery sack I was offered.  A box of Frosted Flakes peeked over the edge, resting on a head of limp lettuce.  I declined the offer of extra cabbage and carried my bag to the car where I pushed aside the cereal and produce and reaching in, pulled out one of the cans.  Cranberry sauce.

I took the bag home, put away the food and made two tuna fish sandwiches.  These I took to the homeless man who was squatting outside in the bushes, leaning against the wall that surrounds our mobile home park.  I put the cranberry sauce aside for the next food drive at the kids’ school.

The High Cost of Living

April 29, 2011 in Food, frugal living, Hunger, poverty, recession by boxcarkids | 15 comments

You’d have to be a (non-driving, non-car owning) New Yorker to not notice the rising cost of gas these days.  Around here the cheapest gas (the hunt around /drive out of your way station) is around $4.17 per gallon.  More typically the lower octane gas runs around $4.29 a gallon.  It costs more than $65 to fill our tank these days far exceeding my monthly budgeted amount of $90 for fuel.  Too bad city budget cuts have also reduced the available mass transit options.  Naturally the rise in fuel costs trickle down, or ooze into, the costs of other things, particularly things that have to be transported.  Like food.  

Wow – have you been to the grocery store lately?  Here’s my miserly staples list – 1 gallon of milk ($3.79), pack of 18 eggs ($2.99), 16 oz of cheddar cheese ($3.00), loaf of whole wheat sandwich bread ($5.89 – half that if I travel across town to the bread outlet shop), jar of peanut butter ($4.09), 18 oz of spaghetti ($1.99), jar of spaghetti sauce ($2.50), box of generic cheerios ($2.49), top ramen 6 pack ($1.25),  5.5 oz mac and cheese ($2.50), package of hot dogs ($4.39), hot dog buns ($1.50), 3 packs frozen veggies ($7.50 – $2.50 per pack), 3 lb bag apples ($4.39), 2 cans tuna ($5.00).   That’s around $50 of food which if I’m very, very careful might feed us for a week (the kids get free school lunch).  That’s very little meat or fresh fruits or veggies and no treats like yogurt, juice, crackers or cookies so I’m not always good at being so limiting and adding snacks (my youngest daughter LOVES avocados) can easily bring the total up to $60 or $65.  I thought about buying some bacon as a treat for Easter breakfast but it was nearly $8 for 16 oz so I didn’t.  When my son had pneumonia (he is better, thank you) the doctor recommended trying a spoonful of honey for his cough rather than using an over the counter cough suppressant.  Honey costs nearly $5.00 for the smallest jar. 

An article I came across says that a recent study shows that 99% of adults are aware of the rising costs of food.  According to the same study those adults are planning their strategy for dealing with the increased costs.  Things like clipping coupons, buying in bulk and shopping at discount stores.  In other words the same way we poor folk shop every day!  This upbeat article concludes that “with a wealth of coupons and other savings strategies out there, it’s easy to keep these rising prices in check.”  As the sole shopper for a family of five, a shopper who was already pinching pennies and using the strategies outlined in the article, and finding it harder to feed us on our limited budget I can tell you that it is not easy to keep those rising prices in check!

And rent is also going up, squeezing food budgets even more.  According to a Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies report the number of households spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent and bills jumped by 2.6 million to nearly 10 million in the past decade.  That means one in four families that rent now has to choose between buying food and paying rent.  ”In real terms, it means more people have less money to spend on household necessities such as food, health care, or savings,” Eric Belsky, director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, said.  You can’t clip coupons to help save money on rent. 

Rising food prices are a worldwide phenomenon – the World Bank reports global prices of wheat, maize, sugar and edible oils have all increased sharply due at least in part to last year’s droughts in Russia and torrential rains in Australia and Canada.  In a year wheat prices spiked 74 percent and corn was up 87 percent. The cost of food has been cited as one of the triggers of the unrest in the Middle East.  And prices are more likely to increase than decline in the next six months.  In developing countries the rising food prices have pushed 44 million more people into extreme poverty since June, the World Bank says. “Global food prices threaten tens of millions of poor people around the world,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick said. “The price hike is already pushing millions of people into poverty and putting stress on the most vulnerable, who spend more than half of their income on food.”

While we are unlikely to see rioting in the streets here in the US the rising food prices are more than many families can handle by clipping coupons and buying in bulk.  One in four Americans is “worried about having enough money to put food on the table in the next year,” reports the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) and 14.7 % of American households are food insecure at least some time during the year, according to a report published in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service.

Throughout the US food banks have seen a rise in customers – some to the point of not being able to fill the demand.  And new food banks are opening like the one in Beaverton, Oregon where the manager reports that 50 percent of the customers are using a food bank for the first time.  Food banks have even opened on college campuses as more students find their food budget squeezed by rising tuition costs.

I’ve been browsing the internet reading about food prices, hunger to the point of starvation in developing countries, middle class families turning to food banks to make it to the end of the month.  It’s a depressing, even alarming situation any way you look at it.  But somehow stumbling across this article while searching for news of food banks, made it worse:  ‘Banks used free Fed money in financial crisis to profit, not lend.’  This article relates how instead of using the money as it was intended- loaning it to individuals or small businesses to help the economy – banks purchased government bonds and reaped enormous profits.   The article concludes, “While the big banks were adding hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to their balance sheets using free money from the Fed, lending decreased.”  Credit dried up.  “Small businesses closed. Foreclosures skyrocketed. Millions of Americans lost their jobs. For banks, it was business as usual.”  And people go hungry.