Workers at Second Harvest Food Bank pause to talk while preparing food to be distributed Thursday afternoon at the warehouse on Salt Springs Road in Youngstown. On Thursday, the food bank that distributes around 50,000 pounds of food a day, had about 459,000 pounds available - or about 10 days worth.

Staff, wire report

WASHINGTON — Staffers at Bread for the City, a venerable charity in the nation’s capital, thought they were prepared for this year’s annual pre-Thanksgiving Holiday Helpers food giveaway. The pandemic had faded, but inflation was high, so they budgeted to give out 12,000 meals, 20 percent higher than normal prepandemic levels.

But they were overwhelmed quickly, with long lines of clients waiting hours to receive a free turkey and a $50 debit card for groceries. They were forced to shut down three days early after helping 16,000 people, many more than anticipated.

Bread for the City’s experience reflects a larger dynamic playing out across the country. What many Americans hoped would be the first normal holiday season in three years has instead been thrown into a heightened hunger crisis once again.

A September report by the Urban Institute estimated that about 1 in 5 adults experienced household food insecurity last summer, about the same as during the first year of the pandemic but a sharp increase from the spring of 2021.

The government estimates food prices will be up 9.5 percent to 10.5 percent this year. And that’s squeezing the budgets of many Americans and the food banks that have helped them, especially with the expiration of the massive flow of pandemic relief aid.

LOCAL STRUGGLE

Second Harvest Food Bank of the Mahoning Valley is grappling with food availability and prices going up, sometimes gradually and sometimes almost overnight — and then through the roof — on certain items.

Take for example pasta — a nice family food staple. Its cost has slowly gone up, said Kim Brock, the food bank’s director of operations, but not as quickly as another in-demand item at pantries — instant potatoes.

They went from about $25 per case around August and September to about $65 per case recently.

“When there hasn’t been a price increase, one of the things that we have noticed is a decrease in the size of the product itself,” said Brock.

That’s called “shrinkflation” — when manufacturers quietly shrink package sizes without lowering the price.

The result is that the about 200 pantries the food bank serves in Trumbull, Mahoning and Columbiana counties have had to reduce the size of their food baskets or packages to make the same amount of food stretch further.

Brock said community need today is higher than before the pandemic, and the food bank’s pantry and kitchen partners are experiencing about 30 percent more people coming for food help, Michael Iberis, the food bank’s executive director, said.

And a good number of those people are senior citizens.

“Seniors are on a fixed budget and they have so much every month to spend for groceries and because of the inflation, that is going up …,” Iberis said. “Their dollars are not going as far, so they are having to come to a food pantry, and in many cases, the pantries are telling us these are first-timers. These are people who have never had to come before.”

NATIONWIDE

The Capital Area Food Bank in Washington originally projected it would need to distribute about 43 million meals during the July 2022-June 2023 budget year. Now four months into that fiscal year, it already is 22 percent ahead of those predictions.

“That was an educated prediction with a good four or five months of information,” said the food bank’s CEO, Radha Muthiah. “We are always thinking about Thanksgiving and Christmas right when everybody’s heading to the beach in summer.”

In Illinois, Jim Conwell of the Greater Chicago Food bank says the need remains elevated. “So we’re purchasing more and we’re spending more on what we do purchase,” he said.

His organization’s network served about 30 percent more households in August 2022, compared to the previous August.

“Families that were just getting their feet back underneath them are experiencing a whole new challenge or even if they have employment, or have several jobs or sources of income, it’s just not going as far as it was two years ago,” he said.

Higher prices are forcing people to make “sacrifices on their food,” said Michael Altfest, director of community engagement at the Alameda County Food Bank in Oakland, California.

For example, he said, the price of chicken has more than doubled — from 78 cents per pound last year to $1.64 per pound this year. Estimates from the Farm Bureau set the cost of turkey as 21 percent higher than last year. And market researcher Datasembly estimates that a 16-ounce box of stuffing costs 14 percent more than last year, while a 5-pound bag of Russet potatoes averages 45.5 percent more.

Mike Manning, president of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank in Louisiana, draws a distinction between the increased hunger levels sparked by the pandemic and the current crisis. During the pandemic, millions of people’s jobs and incomes essentially disappeared, creating an immediate wave of need that he compared to the aftermath of a hurricane.

But the current crisis has been a slow and steady rise, starting in late February and still climbing. Manning said his food bank has seen a 10 percent to 15 percent rise in local food insecurity in just the past two months.

“You’re talking to people who are on lower incomes and they’re working multiple jobs — just think of the cost of them to get from one job to the other with the gas eating up whatever extra they’re trying to make,” he said. “What are they going to do? Do they give up gas so they can’t get to work or sacrifice on food and come back and ask us for help?”

And with no clear signs on when the long-term inflation wave might ease, “This almost feels like more of a marathon with no finish line in sight,” said Conwell of the Chicago food bank.

business@tribtoday.com