NEW YORK – In the months after Hurricane Katrina, Americans sent waves of trucks loaded with food to the many thousands of people displaced by the storm. But that generosity may have had a hidden cost.
Some hunger-relief charities in cities far from the disaster zones are reporting a decline in donations this fall, in part because of resources being redirected to the Gulf Coast.
The Food Bank for New York City, which supplies 1,300 soup kitchens and food pantries, said it collected nearly 1 million fewer pounds of food in the past four months than it did during the same period last year.
“We are tapping into our reserves,” said spokeswoman Lisa Jakobsberg. “I have not seen our shelves as empty as they are right now since 9/11.”
The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank said donations have declined by about 12 percent.
In Milwaukee, an annual fall food drive held by a regional food bank collected 19,216 pounds of food, down from 40,594 pounds last year. One reason: Only 49 schools volunteered as collection points, compared to 103 in 2004.
“We heard specifically from many of the schools that the reason why they weren’t collecting this year was that they had already collected for Katrina victims in September,” said Gina Styer, spokeswoman for the Wisconsin chapter of America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest network of food banks.
Charity administrators said the problem isn’t that people are giving less.
Overall, donations of food are up 40 percent this year to America’s Second Harvest, which supports 210 food banks nationwide.
Much of that increase in aid, though, has been in the form of hurricane relief, said the group’s spokeswoman, Mara Daley. Since the storm, the Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana has been distributing more than three times its average volume of food.
Daley said it isn’t entirely clear yet whether the Gulf states will have too much or too little food this winter, or whether the drop-off in donations to some food banks will ultimately lead to major shortages at some of the soup kitchens and food pantries they supply.
So far, that hasn’t happened, Daley said, largely because the food banks keep reserve supplies, but the group is studying the storms’ effect on its network and plans to finish a report next month.
Only a small portion of the food served in soup kitchens and food pantries comes from individual donors.
Most either comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which spends more than $50 billion a year on anti-hunger programs, or in bulk donations from manufacturers, supermarket chains and other food retailers, who give extra inventory to relief agencies rather than allow it to spoil.
In New York, those donations find their way to a 130,000 square foot warehouse in the Bronx, which then distributes food to places like the Neighbors Together soup kitchen in Brooklyn.
The cafeteria, which feeds 300 people a day from a room just big enough to hold three picnic tables and a serving counter, hasn’t experienced any shortages yet, said executive director, Ed Fowler. But that could change, he added, if the donation pattern remains unbalanced for months.
“I’d hate to be worrying about how to feed 300 people in the middle of winter,” he said.
On Wednesday, as customers began lining up for a lunch of chicken soup, his problem was turkeys.
The kitchen had a dozen ready to go for Thanksgiving, but would be left with zero for Christmas.
Then, in a minute, the problem was solved. A van pulled up and out hopped a group of off-duty U.S. Postal Service employees carrying an unexpected gift of a dozen frozen birds.
“This is fantastic,” Fowler said. “This is the one time of the year at which people are conscious of hunger. But don’t forget that we’re here for 363 other days of the year, too.”
About 3.9 percent of people living in the U.S. went hungry at least once in 2004, up from 3.5 percent in 2003, according to a USDA survey.
Darren Hoffman, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, said a greater long-term threat to hunger-relief organizations may be the ever-improving efficiency of the American economy.
Manufacturers and retailers generally only have large amounts of food and other products to donate, he said, because they’ve made mistakes in production or ordered too much of an item.
“Computer systems have really cut out those overruns,” Hoffman lamented. “Marketing and production is getting so much better, so there is less waste. And that means less mis-ordered milk for us.”
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On the Net:
America’s Second Harvest: http://www.secondharvest.org/
Neighbors Together Corp.: http://www.neighborstogether.org/
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