Food banks across the country say they are straining to meet record levels of demand following the recent government shutdown and lapse in food aid benefits — as Thanksgiving season arrives.
Programs reported massive increases in distribution over the past month, with some networks claiming traffic as high as 250% above previous years, according to interviews with the Daily Caller News Foundation. Program directors largely attributed the unprecedented demand to cost-of-living issues magnified by the 43-day government shutdown — prolonged by most Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — which saw food aid paused and paychecks missed for millions.
“We buy turkeys in the summer in preparation for Thanksgiving, and in no way did my bingo card have government shutdown and SNAP benefits going away. That had never happened.” said Cynthia Kirkhart, CEO of Facing Hunger Food Bank in Huntington, W. Va. “So, I hadn’t, in no way, purchased enough turkeys for what we started to see. But thankfully, we have vendors that I was able to kind of access additional turkeys and protein so that we’d be able to provide for families.”
“To try and be predictive in a really uncertain time through the end of the year is, you know, I don’t have a crystal ball that does that,” Kirkhart continued. “So, we’re just really pivoting every day with information and trying to adjust, which is what we do all the time. But this is like the pandemic on steroids.”
Kirkhart reported an increase in distribution of emergency food boxes, with an expected monthly allotment of 50 emergency boxes jumping to about 60 per day in early November.
“Our mobile pantries, where we typically serve 250 households, suddenly went to 350 that were lined up and needed food. So then we increased to 350, and then it was 500. And then, as we got into November, we had mobiles that had 900 households,” Kirkhart said. “We attributed that increase to the fact that people were saying, ‘We’ve never had to use your services before,’ or they may have indicated that they had missed a paycheck, or they had missed a second paycheck and really needed some assistance.”
The Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina described a two-and-a-half times increase in requests for assistance in November, according to CEO Eric Aft.
“Nearly 90,000 different neighbors requested help with food this past October,” Aft told the DCNF. “All this to say that the need in our communities … for extra support in the form of food assistance is an ongoing, significant community challenge.”
Feeding the Gulf Coast programs described a similar increase in assistance, often serving new families, as reported in West Virginia, “many of which had really never found themselves in that position before,” according to President and CEO Michael Ledger.
“[On Tuesday] I was actually at three different distributions we were doing, and each one of those had a line of cars that were serving over 500 people each,” Ledger said. “We were also able to bring more food in to meet the need, or at least as much of the need as we could meet. Of course, there’s really no way we could ever try to replace what SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits provide, but we were certainly trying to do our best to try to reach people that were in the most desperate need.”
The Food Bank of Northern Nevada similarly reported “the highest need we have ever seen in our 40+ year history,” beginning before the government shutdown and continuing through November, according to spokesperson Jocelyn Lantrip. The network noted that a special distribution on Nov. 15 served more than 640 families, an increase over its Nov. 1 distribution.
A Second Harvest network serving 26 counties in Central and Eastern Washington and five counties in North Idaho echoed the same increased demand, according to team member Eric Williams.
“In those direct service, mobile markets, we advertise for 250 families. So they’ll each get a box of 30-35 pounds of food,” Williams told the DCNF. “For example, we had one in Wenatchee, where I think we served, it was over 550 families, so there was just this huge surge, very much related to the SNAP pause.”
“I can give you three or four other examples, very similar. It really stinks to turn people away from a mobile market,” Williams said. “I mean, you got people who are deciding, ‘Do I have money for rent, gas, or food?’ The last thing they want to do is spend money on gas and not get something. And we had to turn away, four or five times, we had to turn away 50 to 70 cars. Which is … we do not want to do.”
The surge in need for food assistance comes as programs try to provide meals for Thanksgiving to families who otherwise would not enjoy classic Thanksgiving staples. The novel demand, however, has proved challenging in meeting holiday goals.
“Back in June, when we were making decisions about how many turkeys, because we have to start planning for that, really even a year before that, when we talk about the finances of it,” Ledger told the DCNF. “When the government shutdown came, it was really considering how much of that would we cannibalize to try to make sure that we were serving people in real time.”
“And I’m pleased to say that though we depleted our inventory fairly dramatically, we were still able to hold on to most of those foods that we would hope to be able to serve for Thanksgiving, to folks in need,” Ledger said.
During the government shutdown, a fund earmarked for emergency SNAP benefits was originally slotted to keep the aid program afloat, as detailed in the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Sept. 30 lapse of funding plan. However, in late October, the USDA announced that it would not be tapping the fund to provide SNAP benefits for some 41 million Americans.
The government shutdown ended on Nov. 12 after eight Democratic senators broke a Schumer-led blockade demanding extensions on Obamacare tax subsidies. Senate Democrats blocked attempts to reopen the government for 14 consecutive times during the standoff, with only three members of the upper chamber’s Democratic caucus voting with Republicans to end the shutdown during this time.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
