Volunteers Help Feed 88,000 Hungry People : Food: The problem is not confined to the homeless. Senior citizens, children and the unemployed are among the growing number who have received aid.

An estimated one of every eight Ventura County residents, including nearly one of every four children, rely on food handouts to avoid going hungry.

Tom Frye understands their hardship as well as anyone.

In 1985, upon his discharge from the Navy, Frye could feed his pregnant wife and two children little more than peanut butter sandwiches on his income of $800 a month. Now, his garage is stocked like a small grocery with everything from green tomatoes to sheet cakes destined for people in need.

“I’m only there to say, ‘Here, brother, I got a hand like this,’ ” said the 37-year-old Oxnard jet mechanic, now the father of four, who runs an emergency food pantry for his church. “That’s not something I could pay back with money.”

Frye is one of more than 2,000 volunteers countywide who run food drives, harvest blemished and leftover produce, collect damaged goods from supermarkets, prepare meals, deliver food parcels and run emergency pantries to combat hunger and malnutrition.

Described by one assistance agency head as “the heart and muscle” of the county’s anti-hunger efforts, the patchwork of programs has become increasingly taxed in the last year.

Food Share, the county’s nonprofit clearinghouse for donated, salvaged and government surplus food, estimates that 88,000 county residents last month received food from its Oxnard warehouse through 160 assistance agencies. The number of recipients is up 25% from an average of 70,000 a month last year, said Jewel Pedi, Food Share’s executive director.

The number of people getting food stamps has also increased nearly 20% in the last year to about 24,000, said Helen Reburn of the Ventura County Public Social Services Agency.

Anti-hunger groups fear that the need is only going to increase as the economy heads into a recession. If unemployment is an indication, their fears are warranted.

Nearly 4,000 residents joined the unemployment lines in September as the county’s jobless rate jumped to 6.9% from 5.9% a month earlier; the ranks of the unemployed swelled to more than 25,000.

Hunger--be it going without food for a day or never getting a complete meal--is not confined to the homeless.

Recipients of food assistance include thousands of senior citizens--an estimated one in four countywide live in poverty--fed through such programs as Meals on Wheels. There are farm workers unable to weather seasonal layoffs and working poor families unable to subsist on scant wages.

And, in growing numbers, there are children.

In the Oxnard Elementary School District, two of every three students served in the cafeteria receive free lunches. Another 15% pay only 40 cents toward the $1.25 lunch through federal subsidies.

“For many of these children, it’s the only meal they get each day,” said Dorothy Sobonya, the district’s director of food services. The lunches also often provide the only animal protein that the children get in a diet generally devoid of meat, poultry and fish, she said.

Even in the county’s more affluent areas, thousands of children rely on food assistance.

In the Conejo Valley Unified School District, one of six lunches are served free or at a substantially reduced price. In the Simi Valley Unified District, 20% of the lunches are federally subsidized.

Personal income limits are about the same for most food programs. To be eligible for government surplus items from the U. S. Department of Agriculture, an individual can earn no more than $8,262 a year, with limits of $11,106 for a two-member household, $13,950 for a family of three, $16,812 for four people, $19,656 for five and $22,500 for six.

The USDA allotment for a family of four this month was three pounds of butter, a two-pound can of peanut butter, a 1.5-pound jar of honey and three one-pound cans of vegetarian beans. At other times, it might also consist of flour, corn meal and canned pork, pears or green beans.

Many of the shelves at the Food Share warehouse are stocked with such staples as beans, rice and peanut butter--the primary protein sources for many recipients. Individual agencies often throw in cans of tuna and, around the holidays, donated turkeys, canned hams or Cornish hens. But meats are generally not part of the package.

“We don’t get it donated; we can’t afford it and storage is a problem,” said Jeanine Faria, coordinator of food ministries for Project Understanding in Ventura. “We do the best we can to get the food where it needs to be.”

On Wednesday, Project Understanding’s emergency food pantry gave 45 families packages that included rice, pinto beans, macaroni, oats, tomato sauce and two cans each of condensed soup, tuna, pork and beans, and vegetables.

Each week, more than 1,800 senior citizens with incomes below $674 a month receive “brown bags” containing produce, soup, breads and canned goods.

Manna Conejo Valley Food Bank distributes emergency food packages to 600 to 800 needy people a month, many of whom appear to be living well.

“We see all these big houses and think everybody is doing OK,” said Pauline Saterbo, Manna’s chief administrator. “Believe me, they are here,” she said of the needy.

“People come in full of apologies, saying ‘I can’t work it out on $600 a month when there is no work in the fields or the packaging sheds,’ ” said Sister Carmen Rodriquez, who runs an emergency pantry for St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard. “Most of them wouldn’t know how to take advantage of the system.”

Tom Frye said it was parcels from his church’s food bank that made “the difference between eating and not eating” for his family during a five-month period in 1985. And it was those packages that were crucial to his building a better life.

“Life is still tough for us; we’re not in the lap of luxury,” he said. “We struggle from payday to payday, but now we have enough. There are still a lot of people out there on the bitter edge.”

Times staff writer Gary Gorman contributed to this story.