Food Crisis a Measure of Suffering Caused by Riots : Unrest: Thousands line up each day for free groceries. The situation reflects the complexity of restoration task.

Naomi Green spends a lot of time these days standing in lines at South Los Angeles charities, waiting for free food.

“I visit the food pantries when I have a ride and thank God for whatever I can get,” said the 59-year-old retiree, talking with friends in the shaded courtyard of a relief agency. Since the riots, the small garden of her 61st Street home has received less attention than usual.

But there is no choice. “I’d like to be at home in my yard or watching my programs,” she said one recent morning as her wait stretched into a second hour. “But I’ve got to do this so we can eat.”

Each day, from Pico-Union to Watts to the Central City area, thousands of Los Angeles riot victims such as Green gather in the dawn light at food pantries for their share of butter, cereal, canned vegetables, pasta and other free food.

It is a crisis that has received little attention in the debate on how best to rebuild a ravaged inner city, but one that reflects the human suffering caused by the destruction--as well as the complexity of the task of restoration, community activists say.

The fiery havoc that erupted April 29 after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case claimed lives and livelihoods. But it also disrupted the pipeline that put food on the table for thousands of residents, many of whom now spend unproductive hours waiting in long lines for handouts:

* About 20 major supermarkets, 50 to 60 smaller markets and dozens of convenience stores were destroyed, further limiting options in communities that have long been short on major shopping areas. Some of the destroyed shops were liquor stores. Although they also provided essential convenience items, many residents do not want them rebuilt.

* The destruction of businesses claimed an estimated 20,000 jobs--eliminating income for many people from poor families already barely able to afford enough food.

* The riots exposed the glaring absence of a plan on the part of the city for dealing with a food crisis, charity officials say. The city’s response, they charge, does not bode well for dealing with more a widespread disaster such as an earthquake.

* Demands on charities that provide food have increased 30% to 50% since the riots. The need is expected to remain constant through the summer, service providers say. But there are already signs that the outpouring of individual and corporate support for food pantries has begun to slow down.

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank has distributed three times as much food as it normally does in an effort to serve about 70 new food outlets that opened immediately after the riots, Director Doris Bloch said. Most food pantries have expanded hours and others have relaxed guidelines restricting how often a family can obtain food.

“The need for emergency food was nearly at a crisis level even before the riots,” said Carolyn Olney, director of the Interfaith Hunger Coalition. “The people we are seeing at the food pantries now were just getting by anyway, but were pushed over the edge.”

The Seedling, a South Los Angeles food pantry, served three times the number of families it would normally assist during May. What is more, 471 of the 1,238 families who signed up for food last month were new clients, Director Rita Russo said.

“From where we are, it’s maybe two miles to get to the nearest grocery store,” Russo said. “If you drive down Main, all the mom-and-pop stores that people depended on are gone. Many people don’t have money to even ride the bus, so they walk here for food.”

One woman waiting for food in the small courtyard with Naomi Green said she and a neighbor who has a car had driven as far as Gardena and Downey to find food. “But I can’t count on people always carrying me to the store,” she said. “There (have) been days when I was stuck and my family has just had to make things last.”

For some, the necessity of taking whatever you can get has meant adjusting to a new diet.

Green, for example, said she traveled 2 1/2 hours by bus to one food pantry to discover that the only items still available were bags of tortillas and cans of beans. It was good for a day or two, she said. But a steady diet of Mexican food was not something to which her family was accustomed.

“I ended up giving a lot of it to the Mexican families in my neighborhood,” Green said.

Green’s household, like thousands of others in the riot-ravaged areas, lost power for several days during the unrest. The result was a refrigerator full of spoiled food that the family could ill afford to lose.

Green receives a small Social Security check and her 25-year-old son works, but he lost a week’s pay during the riots when he could not get to his security guard job in San Pedro. “There’s just no way to recover from something like this,” Green said.

Inside the Seedling’s small storefront, volunteers are nearly constantly busy, packing boxes of crackers, cereals, muffin mix and macaroni and cheese along with cans of soup, vegetables, beans and juice into bags that many families will have to carry blocks to their homes.

After the civil unrest, the pantry was able to get 125 cases of tuna from the federal government, said Russo. The Vons grocery chain donates bread twice a week, and the pantry was awarded a $5,000 grant from the Ahmanson Foundation to obtain juice for babies.

But even as the extent of the food emergency has become more apparent, there are fears that the community response will not hold up. At many pantries, the calls offering help that came flooding in from PTAs, Little League teams and other groups are beginning to dwindle.

“Right after the riots we got a lot of checks from individuals and from things like church groups, from all over the United States, but that has already begun to level off,” Russo said.

“Unfortunately our attention spans are short, and we are seeing the results,” said Gene Boutillier, director of the nonprofit Emergency Food and Shelter Program. “Agencies are hard-pressed to keep up with the demand, and many have taken money budgeted to last through October and spent it all in May and June on food.”

Boutillier blames authorities for failing to recognize and respond to the food emergency quickly enough. “For a while, public officials were saying, ‘Look at what a good job the private agencies are doing; we don’t need to go into an emergency response,’ ” he said.

The federal government, after being hit with a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups, agreed last week to relax some Food Stamp requirements to allow more people to qualify for emergency aid. That measure will help Social Security recipients, amnesty immigrants and a few others who did not previously qualify, but will not solve such people’s long-term need for food aid.

In addition, the one supermarket chain with a large number of inner-city outlets, Food 4 Less Supermarkets Inc., has rushed to reopen its stores. The La Habra-based food retailer--which operates The Boys, Alpha-Beta and Viva supermarkets and Food 4 Less warehouse stores--has repaired and opened 39 of its 44 markets that were damaged in the riots. The firm says it will rebuild the remaining five--and has plans to open three more inner-city supermarkets, one within 60 days.

Olney, of the Interfaith Hunger Coalition, said the city had begun developing a hunger task force before the riots; its importance, she said, was made even more urgent by the destruction. One of its tasks will be to look at the entire system of food distribution in South Los Angeles.

“Where are stores located? And how are people able to access these markets? These are things that must be looked at,” Olney said. “Maybe there are things people can do--like community gardening and food co-ops--so they are not so dependent.”

But people who work in emergency food distribution also say it is deplorable that the public and private sectors lack a coherent plan for dealing with the sort of food crisis precipitated by the arson, looting and power outages.

For more than a year, a countywide recovery and reconstruction task force has been exploring issues involving disaster response. But the group had come up with no plan to deal with a food emergency, Chairwoman Constance Perett said.

“There has not been one central coordinating body to gather and disburse information,” said Perett, assistant manager for the county Office of Emergency Services. “One thing that surprised us was that we could not get a handle on what the food needs were,” Perett said. “People were afraid to go out in the field. . . . When bullets are flying, you can’t do that.”

Part of the problem may lie in an outmoded conception of disaster relief, said Janet Workman, an independent food consultant specializing in marketing and emergency food distribution.

“Public agencies tend to think in terms of mass feeding and getting food to shelters,” she said. “But they don’t think of the provision of food to people who are still in their homes.”

Workman argues that many of the difficulties encountered during the riots would be magnified tenfold during a major earthquake. The city, she says, must better prepare for major disruptions in the food pipeline.

So must the commercial food industry, its leaders acknowledge. Many major chain stores and smaller markets were caught off guard during the riots, said Everett Dingwell, chairman of Certified Grocers, a cooperative of small grocers that is heavily represented in South Los Angeles.

Other than evacuating employees, most markets had no emergency plans to ensure that stores were protected and that food would not spoil during power outages. There were also no plans to deal with disruptions in shipping and trucking of food or to ensure the safety of drivers.

Dingwell and Workman are trying to enlist state and local authorities and private industry--including utility, telecommunications and transportation companies--in a joint planning effort.

They are also proposing that someone from the commercial food industry be included on the Rebuild L.A. team, the official post-riot recovery effort headed by Peter V. Ueberroth.

“In looking at the riots, I think one of the most important things we see is the necessity of protecting the food pipeline if people are not to suffer,” Workman said.

Times staff writer George White also contributed to this story.