DISPATCHES: The last resort

Shredded safety net puts pressure on private groups to help public

By Hank Kalet, Managing Editor
   The Harvest of Hope food pantry in North Hanover has put the word out that it needs supplies.
   So have the pantry run by the South Brunswick Department of Social Services, the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen and most of the region’s other food pantries and soup kitchens.
   The reason: More people than ever are in need of the services offered by food agencies.
   ”We currently have a two-week waiting list just to see people in our offices,” South Brunswick Social Services Director LouAnne Wolf told us last week. “We saw 50 families last month. People just can’t find jobs, their unemployment has ended and they can’t make ends meet anymore.”
   And local food banks are not alone. Agencies around the state and country are reporting a similar increase. Earlier this year, the New Jersey Federation of Food Banks reported that 830,000 people relied on food and hunger agencies in 2009 — a remarkable 45 percent increase in a four-year period.
   ”One in five people who came to a food pantry or soup kitchen had been out of work for up to a year,” The Star-Ledger reported when the report was issued in February. “One in three came from a home where at least one adult held a job but didn’t earn enough to pay the bills and buy groceries. Nearly half of the people who sought help did so because they had no money after they paid the rent or mortgage and the utility bill.”
   Keep in mind that this is in New Jersey, a state with one of the highest per capita incomes in the nation and among the lowest official poverty rates. Feeding America, a national anti-hunger advocacy group, said 37 million people — or one in eight — turned to food banks last year.
   Just as importantly, this is based on interviews from 2009, which means that the numbers have probably continued to rise as the economy has remained stuck in place.
   ”The client interviews for this study were almost a year ago, and we know every month since then there has been an increase,” Kathleen DiChiara, the executive director of the Community Food Bank of New Jersey, told the Ledger.
   Ms. Wolf, of South Brunswick, said South Brunswick is seeing a new group of clients, which has added to the difficulties of keeping food on the shelves.
   ”Things are not looking better on the job market,” she said. “We’re seeing new people coming in every week, whether it’s for an emergency need of food or an emergency need of financial help.”
   Food pantries are supposed to be the last resort, the place families can go when they’ve run out of other options.
   The fact that we, as a country, are attempting to address a societal need through the hit-or-miss efforts of private agencies proves that the dismantling of the social safety net has been a disaster.
   Three decades of bipartisan vilification of the poor has resulted in severe limits on welfare program eligibility and inadequately funded emergency food and wage programs, even as we have pushed more and more of our jobs overseas, weakened the ability of workers to join unions and generally allowed the transformation of our economy from one in which we made things into one in which we shifted money from one pocket to another.
   The free market and private, often faith-based groups, would take care of everything, we’ve been told — and then came the crash.
   The Ponzi scheme that replaced our industrial economy eroded the middle class, pushed income upward and created the most unequal distribution of wealth we have witnessed in this country in decades.
   During good times, it was easy to ignore — credit flowed freely and our consumer society left us feeling comfortable even as we took on more and more debt. As a society, we thought we were doing just fine.
   But when the collapse occurred, the iPods, flat-screen televisions and expensive shoes were not enough to maintain the façade, and now far too many of us are left to scrape by. One in 10 Americans are out of work, one in six are out of work or underemployed and one in eight are struggling to keep food on their table and they have to rely on the largesse of those who can afford to donate boxes of macaroni and cheese to the local food pantry to feed our families.
   This is not what the American dream is supposed to look like.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post. E-mail, [email protected]www.kaletblog.com@newspoet41facebook.com/hank.kalet.