Food bank supply now ‘worst it’s ever been’

Demand is growing as stock diminishes

Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2008

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN George Mattingly, assistant manager, and Brenda DeCarlo, manager, of the Southern Maryland Food Bank display the little bit of food available for distribution from the Hughesville facility on Friday. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story   If you want to help Schools will participate in a statewide school food drive, Kids Helping Kids, from Oct. 20 through Nov. 7. Boy Scout and Cub Scout troops will coordinate a number of special collections for the food bank in November. Other businesses, churches or organizations that are interested in sponsoring their own food drives can contact Brenda DiCarlo, manager of the Southern Maryland Food Bank, a Catholic Charities program, at 301-274-0695 and leave a message. She can offer ideas and help coordinate and plan a drive for first-time groups as well as arrange for delivery and pickup of collection bins or barrels. Financial donations, which are tax deductible, are also welcome and can be sent to Southern Maryland Food Bank, P.O. Box 613, Hughesville, MD 20637. ‘‘For every dollar donated, I can buy up to eight pounds of food,” DiCarlo said.

After finishing the call, she continued to talk about being stressed. She also used words like ‘‘scary” and ‘‘worst it’s ever been.”

The problem, she said with a wave of her arm, is the empty shelves at the food bank. It’s true there were cases of corned beef hash, some canned pasta and a pallet of peanut butter crackers. And there was one large orange bin of miscellaneous cans of soup and boxes of pasta from a recent food drive. But those were pretty much the only foods in sight. Otherwise, it was empty shelves, empty bins ... empty space.

‘‘Well below” normal is how George Mattingly, assistant manager, described the bank’s current store of food. In a normal year, the food bank, a Catholic Charities program, serves as the conduit for approximately 310,000 pounds of food and household supplies. ‘‘That’s about 15 tractor-trailer loads” of food,” Mattingly said.

That’s when things are good, however.

Mattingly said that when the food bank is stocked the way it needs to be to assist the 35 area food pantries, group homes and shelters that are members, it is a tight fit to squeeze one of the three-foot-wide food bank carts down the facility’s center aisle because of the cases and cases of food waiting to be distributed. On Friday, however, a minivan or large pickup would have had no trouble driving straight into the facility, with plenty of room to spare.

So, last week the Southern Maryland Food Bank was closed ‘‘just simply because there’s been nothing here,” DiCarlo said. ‘‘Scary.”

The food bank’s empty shelves are a close-to-home indication of the troubled economy. It is normally open on Mondays to distribute supplies to member groups. But the food bank has had to lock its doors as much as every other Monday since about mid-May because there was not enough food to distribute.

‘‘The gas prices were the beginning of why we were suffering,” DiCarlo said.

The Southern Maryland Food Bank gets most of its food from the Maryland Food Bank in Baltimore, which collects donations from large manufacturers and businesses and then distributes those supplies, for a small shared maintenance fee, to secondary distribution organizations like the Southern Maryland Food Bank as well as others in Salisbury and in Western Maryland. The Southern Maryland Food Bank charges a similar fee to its members.

The higher gas prices, drop in confidence of the economy and sluggish consumer spending have caused those manufacturers and businesses to cut production. So not only is there less to donate, but those businesses have increasingly turned to auctioning food and household supplies to stores that deal in cut-price items to ‘‘recoup their losses as opposed to donating it,” DiCarlo said.

More people are in need and there are fewer people giving, she said. ‘‘It’s a vicious little circle.”

A tiny amount of grant funding, enough to purchase about 1 percent of their supplies for a year, comes from the Maryland Emergency Food Program. Local private donations like those collected during food drives are critical, DiCarlo said, and help kick off the ‘‘food drive months,” November and December, when giving to the food bank has become a holiday tradition to many.

So DiCarlo and Mattingly expect donations to pick up for the end of this year, but aren’t expecting that people will give as much as they have in the past. There are just not as many people who feel they are able to give. Everyone’s feeling the pinch.

Area food pantries have been reporting, and Mattingly and DiCarlo agree, that the current economy has noticeably added to the ranks of those in need. It’s not just the senior citizens on a fixed budget or the low-income earners and single parents needing assistance. ‘‘Now it’s a whole [other] group,” Mattingly said. Members of the middle class, dual-income families, are showing up at pantries saying they need help. DiCarlo and Mattingly estimate that there are now about 10,000 families in Southern Maryland that need assistance to make it through a month.

And DiCarlo said she is stressed because she can’t find a way to provide that help.

Even when the food bank is open for business, she’s had to conserve supplies. ‘‘I’ve put limits on how many cases each site can get ... just so everyone gets enough. I’ve never had to do that before,” she said. ‘‘It’s a fraction of what they need ... That means families go without.”

The food pantry at Good Samaritan Lutheran Church in Lexington Park gets most of its food from the Southern Maryland Food Bank, according to Dennis Allen, who started the church’s food pantry. ‘‘That’s our main source because it’s so cheap,” Allen said Monday.

Allen said the food bank’s periodic closing and rationing of supplies has ‘‘absolutely” impacted their ministry. The food pantry, will provides assistance to an average of 30 families a week, with the number going up at the end of the month, used to be open to offer that assistance five days a week. Reduced supplies have changed that to two days a week this year. The last two months have been so lean that they’ve had to cut back to only one day a week. ‘‘It’s a serious problem,” Allen said. ‘‘The other pantries around are in the same situation.”

DiCarlo is keenly aware of the problem.

‘‘This job is wonderful when you have it to give,” DiCarlo said. ‘‘Very stressful when you don’t.”

Between them DiCarlo and Mattingly have been running the Southern Maryland Food Bank for 10 years. They both said they couldn’t remember a leaner time. ‘‘This is the worst it’s ever been,” DiCarlo said, looking to Mattingly for confirmation. He nodded.