Filling empty stomachs in U.S. a growing challenge

Bob Randels, Rose Miller and Teresa Osborne spend most of their waking hours rescuing food.

They’re not Dumpster divers, but they are relentless in their pursuit of pizzas that weren’t picked up, sub-shop bread that wasn’t used and even small bags of shrimp from Red Lobster that didn’t get tossed into a pasta Alfredo.

Their efforts are part of a much larger, organized daily hustle to meet the increasing need -- especially in Midwestern states -- to feed the hungry.

“We’re trying to keep pace, as much as we can,” said Randels, executive director of the Food Bank of South Central Michigan, which last year served 92,000 people, up from 62,000 in 2001.

“Only a handful of people out there believe that we are the long-term answer to the hunger problem,” Randels said.

But near the end of every month, after food stamps are used up, food pantries are the most visible and accessible answer for many of the estimated 35 million Americans the U.S. Department of Agriculture classifies as “food insecure.”

A recent USDA report on hunger in America introduced new labels for people’s access to food, omitting the word “hunger” from the labels. In job-bleeding Michigan, which has the highest unemployment rate in the nation -- 6.9% in October -- the agency’s semantic change is likened to politicians’ relabeling of tax increases as “revenue enhancers.”

“That’s a bunch of malarkey,” said Archie MacGregor, coordinator of a small basement food pantry on the east side of Battle Creek.

MacGregor complains about the lack of peanut butter.

Meat is scarce, he said.

And applesauce is sometimes used as a substitute for vegetables in the food bags his pantry hands out to about 1,000 people a month.

One recipient, Jaime Romero, a 28-year-old unemployed waitress and mother of three, left the pantry Tuesday with several bags of food, including baby supplies for her 2-year-old. She and her husband moved out of their rented home because it was infested with mice; they live in a motel.

“I only came because I absolutely needed it and I just lost my job,” Romero said. “I don’t believe in coming every month, because other people need it more.”

Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to generate an outpouring of donations.

On Tuesday, 320 skids of cereal were dropped off without notice in the parking lot at Randels’ Battle Creek warehouse.

That’s enough cereal to fill 14 semitrailer trucks.

For most of the year, though, the patchwork collection of pantries, warehouses and faith-based groups scramble to try to fill the holes in a tattered safety net.

Recent developments have increased the challenge.

Federal food assistance, in the form of such commodities as milk products and canned goods, is down about 55% since 2001.

The Battle Creek food bank, which serves an eight-county region in southern Michigan, received 629,000 pounds of food from the USDA last year, 15% less than the previous year, said Miller, who is director of agency relations.

Pantries in some states report that food manufacturers sell goods to secondary sellers -- dollar stores, for example -- instead of donating them to pantries.

And some cost-cutting supermarkets have eliminated reclamation centers, which distributed unsalable products, often to food pantries.

Meanwhile, demand for food has steadily increased.

And federal food stamp use has sharply risen since 2000 -- up about 70%, the USDA says, in Ohio and Michigan, which have lost hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs since the late 1990s.

A recent report from the University of Michigan forecast two more years of job losses in the state, the longest stretch of employment losses in Michigan since the Great Depression. Most of that is because of restructuring in the domestic auto industry.

“We’re seeing more plant closures and the food stamps aren’t lasting. That’s why we’re seeing more people,” said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Assn. of Second Harvest Food Banks.

In Battle Creek, which describes itself as Cereal City, food banks have established close relationships with Kellogg Co. and Kraft Foods’ Post division, which has helped keep a 30,000-square-foot warehouse well stocked with cereal.

The ongoing challenge is to obtain meat, tuna, peanut butter and household items.

Officials supplement corporate and private donations with leftover food from restaurants, including Pizza Hut, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and sandwich shops.

“This is what we call ‘deep-diving,’ ” said Teresa Osborne, who leads the donor and community relations program at the Food Bank of South Central Michigan.

In Kalamazoo, about 20 miles to the west, the patchwork quilt of services resembles those in Battle Creek.

At Loaves & Fishes, which acts as a food distributor and referral agency for the hungry, Executive Director Anne Lipsey said demand was increasing 10% to 15% annually.

About a third of Kalamazoo’s population lives below the federal poverty line.

“We’re seeing more adult-only households, a complex and multigenerational coming-together of people, for economic reasons. It’s people living on one person’s income, Grandma’s Social Security and disability income for Uncle Fred,” she said.

Monday through Friday, Lipsey’s office runs a phone bank from 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. to let people know where they can get food that day.

On Tuesday, overwhelmed pantries had to shut down the phone bank at 2 p.m.

That happens “with increasing frequency,” Lipsey said.