VENTURA COUNTY REPORT: The Hunger Problem : Feeling the Pinch : Food Banks Face Shortages as New Breed of Poor Turns for Help

Hunger is driving a new breed of poor into food banks in Ventura County that once primarily fed the homeless and the hard-core unemployed.

They are the new poor--industrious, self-reliant folk who never dreamed that one rough shove from the economy could push them out of middle-class comfort and into food lines.

They have swelled demand almost beyond the ability of the county’s food bank network to feed them.

As the numbers of Ventura County’s hungry grow--by 28% in the past fiscal year--the supply of food and charity money is shrinking, food bank officials say.

And while the Ventura County coroner’s office reports no one has died this year of starvation, some of the hungriest are suffering from anemia, dental decay, blood imbalance and other symptoms of malnutrition, say health officials.

“I think there’s an awful lot of hunger in Ventura County,” said L. Jewel Pedi, executive director of Food Share, which supplies nearly all the county’s food banks. “But it’s hard to see because we’re so affluent.”

Food Share estimates its 256 member food banks are feeding 127,000 people a month--nearly one in six Ventura County residents, 53% of them children.

“We’re getting more people who are unemployed, people who have always worked, who have always managed to make their house payments . . . and make a good living,” said Aurora Moreno of the Commission on Human Concerns, an Oxnard charity.

She added, “Many of them are (embarrassed) because they’re the kind of people who have always taken care of themselves.”

Mike, a former construction company vice president who declined to give his last name, said he never expected to be selecting beans, pie filling and frozen meat off the shelves at the Manna food bank in Thousand Oaks for himself and his son.

“I’ve been out of work since ‘89, when construction started taking a dive,” said Mike, 52, of Thousand Oaks. His son, 25 and deaf, is also having trouble finding work.

The bank is about to take away his house, which is in foreclosure. Mike also filed for bankruptcy, costing him his Jaguar and a $6-million, 15-acre chunk of prime property off Lynn Road that he had almost finished paying for.

And he cannot find work despite more than 20 years experience in construction.

“I could build a building from the ground up if you asked me to,” said Mike, pulling an impressive two-page resume out of the beat-up sedan that a friend gave him.

“I go for a job and they tell me I’m overqualified. . . . I tell them I’ll take any job. One job I would have gone for paid 30 grand a year. They told me I’m overqualified.”

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Letting a charity feed him, he said, “is hard to take.”

“It’s very, very hard and very tough,” agreed another Manna client, Julia Gall, 83, of Thousand Oaks, waiting for her turn to pick food from the shelves.

Gall said her monthly $600 Social Security benefits and a $149 pension barely cover her mortgage, utility bills, health insurance and the cost of medicine needed after her heart attack in November. One bottle of pills costs her $161.

“I told the doctor I should live on the medication, it costs so much,” said Gall, a retired auto plant worker who never imagined she would be living on donated food.

“It’s very hard to manage on Social Security,” she said wearily. “We worked so hard and tried to save for our old age. We didn’t want to be on welfare.”

Demand for food aid also is growing among people who are more accustomed to leaning on the food banks--seasonal field workers such as Margarita and Higinio Contreras of Oxnard.

Left jobless by the rain-scarred strawberry season, Higinio waits on the curb in La Colonia hoping to be picked up for day labor, while his wife readies a modest supper of donated beans, eggs, potatoes, salsa and tortillas for them, their infant and 3-year-old.

Higinio’s $96 weekly unemployment benefits barely cover their utilities and $375 monthly rent, said Margarita, 35.

Without the food provided by St. John’s Community Outreach program, they would go hungry, she said, cradling 2-month-old Wendy in their cramped kitchen.

Higinio, 34, said he hopes to find work again when the growing season begins in January. Until then, he said, they must carefully budget the food they get from the St. John’s program, run by Sister Carmen Rodriguez.

Sister Carmen said she has even less food to give out now to the mechanics, assembly line workers and laid-off laborers joining her usual clientele at St. John’s center in La Colonia.

St. John’s served 31,000 people in the 1990-91 fiscal year, she said. In 1992-93, it served 35,000.

“It’s just so many people that it’s like hand-to-mouth existence for us trying to get enough food for them,” she said. “If there’s less employment, there’s greater hunger and greater need for food.”

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More often now, Sister Carmen says that “unless they’re really desperate,” she must give out less food, cutting clients back from two visits per month to one.

That dynamic is being repeated at food banks around Ventura County.

The Salvation Army in Ventura has cut back food handouts from monthly visits to only four times a year per family.

Despite the holiday spirit and the constant work of Salvation Army bell ringers, food donations and gifts of money to the charity’s ubiquitous red kettles are declining, said Major Eddie Patterson, the charity’s local director.

“If it gets any worse, we may have to cut them down to three times a year,” Patterson said. “I hope I have a good Christmas this year, because right now, it doesn’t look that way. The kettles are down.”

Supplies of food are down, too.

As the monthly average of people served by Food Share’s member agencies rose from 93,000 in the 1992-’93 fiscal year to 127,000 this fiscal year, the charity lost some government funding and a sizable chunk of government food donations.

Contributions remain steady from other sources--canned food bought with federal emergency aid, day-old bread from supermarkets, hot meals from restaurants and slightly imperfect vegetables and fruits pulled out of the fields by Food Share’s 250 volunteer “gleaners.”

But this year the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development failed to deliver a hoped-for $40,000 grant for operations that Food Share has received in the past.

And the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut in half its donations of surplus beans, tuna, peanut butter and other food to Food Share, effectively cutting the charity’s food supply by 10%, said Lonnie Smith, who oversees those contributions.

Now, demand at the county’s food banks is outstripping Food Share’s supplies, officials there say.

“For the past two months, I’ve been recommending to all the agencies that I serve to find alternative sources for food,” said Smith.

As the food banks struggle to feed more people in Ventura County, so does the food stamp program administered by the county Public Social Services Agency.

The number of food stamp applicants in Ventura County has almost doubled, from 8,355 in 1989 to 16,527 in 1992, according to the agency’s records.

“Cases are going up,” and food stamps have been the fastest-rising type of government public aid this year, said Karla Olander, who heads the agency’s food stamp program.

The most common type of applicant is the unemployed worker, said Sandy Cabral, who manages the agency’s Oxnard office, the largest and busiest in the county.

“We’re having a lot of people from the service industry, waiters and people from the construction industry” applying for food stamps, Cabral said. “It is the last thing that a lot of clients . . . want to do. . . . (It) still has the stigma of welfare.”

Sister Carmen said of the pride of the unemployed, “They’ll say, ‘Oh, sister, this is the first time I’ve had to come in and ask for something, I’m so embarrassed.’ And I say, ‘If you’re not stealing and you’re not lazy, what is there to be embarrassed about?’ ”

While hunger is one of the strongest human needs, it is the last thing many Ventura County residents choose to take care of when they run short of money, food bank operators say.

“The first thing that’s paid is the rent, the second thing paid is the utilities,” said Ruben Castro, office manager for Catholic Charities in Moorpark.

“Then you have to have money to have gas for the car” to get to and from work or job interviews, he said. “And if they have any money left over, then they buy food.”

Charities see that situation from the inside out.

“We probably all would agree that by receiving the food from some of these pantries . . . they can pay the rent and keep the lights on,” said Marlene Spencer, executive director of Help of Ojai.

Some will go to extraordinary lengths to feed their families before asking for a handout.

Terri Zittel, 22, of Ventura tells of being evicted after her husband went off to Japan with the Marines, sending her only periodic payments for their two young daughters.

“I got evicted and we were homeless,” she said, waiting in line at Project Understanding’s food bank off of Ventura Avenue.

A good Samaritan spotted them sleeping in Zittel’s car, and now lets Zittel stay with her 2-year-old in a trailer on his property while her mother cares for her 4-year-old.

Food was another matter.

Zittel says she worked a scam to feed herself and the kids, driving through fast-food takeout lanes and tricking restaurants out of burgers and fries by claiming she lost her receipt.

That worked for a while, she says--until her car broke down, had its windows smashed and then was stolen.

Sullen, she collects food from the volunteers at Project Understanding, loading so many bags onto the handles of her stroller that it tips over backward when her daughter hops out.

Ellen seems proud but more resolute about her lot, dutifully picking up fresh fruit, vegetables, tortillas and desserts for herself and her daughters, ages 12, 13 and 14.

“I’m going in for back surgery,” said the unemployed waitress, dressed sharply in black velvet jacket, jeans, pointy boots and a gold watch lapel pin. “I’ve got my three children to take care of, and I’m a single mom.”

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Although the family is strapped for cash, “I don’t think we’d ever really go hungry,” said Ellen, who would not give her last name. “My dad’s a Lotto winner, and when it gets hard, I can ask him for a loan.”

But she added, “We’re eating a lot less than when I was working.”

County social worker Jan Standing said complaints about child neglect increasingly cite lack of food.

“They’ve got enough for a day or so--cereal, milk, potatoes for the evening or lunchtime meal--but only for a day or so,” said Standing, supervisor of the county Child Protective Services division’s emergency response team in Ventura and Ojai.

“And they’ll have to figure out something for the next day. Sometimes their plan is maybe they’ve got another welfare check coming, or they’re going to work for a day and get a check, or they’re going to borrow from a relative.”

Of the 150 to 200 neglect complaints she reviews per month, 20 to 25 cite hunger, she said.

“It’s important to me that parents understand they can reach out to the community to ask for help to feed their children--they don’t have to hide it,” Standing said. “When it comes to your children who are growing and their bodies are developing, they can’t be without food as long as adults can. . . . It can have much more serious repercussions for children.”

Yet many mothers cut corners where they can.

“There’s a difference between eating and not eating well,” said Dr. Linda Tigner-Weekes, a Simi Valley pediatrician who treats children of indigent families.

“A lot of mothers will persist in keeping their babies on bottles after two years of age as a substitute for food,” she said. “It’s very common. All it does is cause infections, anemia and rotten teeth.”

Food Share’s Pedi sees it as a problem that will only worsen as California slogs through the recession. “For some reason, hunger is not something people want to own up to,” she said. “To me, hunger is the worst form of child abuse in the world.”

Some of the county’s adults also suffer from malnutrition because they cannot afford a balanced diet or simply do not know how to prepare one.

“A person does not need to be scrawny to be malnourished,” said Evelyn Burge, a nurse who ministers to Ventura’s homeless. “That’s a principle a lot of people don’t understand. You can have a big, fat, heavy woman who’s malnourished--she’s eating too much food and not enough of the appropriate foods.”

Without a balanced diet, people suffer tooth decay, obesity, constipation, fatigue, aches, and even imbalances of chemicals in the bloodstream such as potassium, which can be fatal, Burge says.

Pregnant mothers and those with young children especially need the milk, cheese and other nutritious food provided to them through the county Public Health Department’s Women, Infants and Children program, said Edith Wald, its director.

Last month, the program gave supermarket vouchers for such foods to 13,000 people, along with lectures on proper nutrition, Wald said.

As more workers are laid off, more people retire with meager Social Security support and more self-employed tradespeople are left jobless by the recession, Ventura County is growing hungrier.

“I’ve seen the demand increase, and I’ve seen the number of families increase, and the greatest change in the last six to nine months is the amount of new applicants,” said Jeanine Faria, who oversees Project Understanding’s food bank in Ventura.

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For some, it didn’t take much to put them on the bread lines.

When Reta Cacciapaglia worked as a senior citizens’ aide, she would donate food from her own pantry to the Manna food bank in Thousand Oaks.

Now the 51-year-old widow from Agoura picks up food there to feed herself.

A work injury forced her to retrain for a new profession that is yielding no jobs, and her workers’ compensation benefits have run out.

Behind on her mobile home site rent, in debt to friends who help pay her bills, she is looking hard for work as a medical office assistant and finding none.

“It’s like you’re part of a herd of cattle, and you’re one of the cattle,” Cacciapaglia said of the search. “Once you’re over 50, they look at you and say, ‘How long will you be working?’ ”

Picking cans of food from Manna’s shelves, she thinks of hungry families. “I feel guilty because I’m only one, but then I think, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I have to eat, too.’ ”

Then, embarrassed by the donated food in her hands, she leaves Manna in tears, saying, “This just kills me.”

Hunger in the County

Food Share, the countywide food bank, estimates that its 256 member agencies feed nearly one in six Ventura County residents, 53% of them children. In fiscal year 1992-93, Food Share members fed an average of 92,743 people a month. This year, it is feeding an average 127,000 a month. This is a breakdown of where Ventura County’s hungry lived in fiscal 1992-93.

People Fed Per Month Per City:

Camarillo: 4,437

Fillmore: 2,416

Moorpark: 4,926

Newbury Park: 262

Oak View: 910

Ojai: 821

Oxnard: 49,004

Piru: 665

Port Hueneme: 4,018

Santa Paula: 4,112

Simi Valley: 4,813

Thousand Oaks: 130

Ventura: 16,214

Other: 15

Note: Manna, the Conejo Valley food bank, is not a Food Share member. It served an average of 2,300 Conejo Valley residents in 1992-93 and is serving an average of 3,026 a month this year, its director says.

Source: Food Share