Food Pantries Stretch to Meet the Need

The biggest food pantry donations of the year have come and gone with the holidays, but the need to help feed the hungry is year-round, and in past years, growing.

Hundreds of area food pantries, shelters and soup kitchens serve people directly. They get their food from various sources, and the biggest of those are the two food area food banks.

Operation Food Search and The St. Louis Area Foodbank works with donors like General Mills, taking in truckloads of food, which is distributed to outlets in the metro area and beyond.

Operation Food Search serves 130,000 people through 265 outlets each month, according to executive director, Sunny Schaefer. She said 30-40 percent more people are coming to them for help.

“It really stated at the beginning of the downturn of the economy, and it’s just not changing,” she said

The St. Louis Area Foodbank occupies 92,000 square feet in a distribution center in Bridgeton, takes in truckloads of food from large donors like General Mills, and distributes it to more than 500 partner agencies such as food pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens.  

In 2009, the year of a national study, the St. Louis Foodbank helped 261,000 people in 26 counties in Missouri and Illinois, an increase of 35 percent in four years. It served 101,000 children, a 62 percent increase, also in four years.

At the local level, food pantries have seen the need increase dramatically too, some more than others.

The Maplewood serves a large part of central and western St. Louis County. Its food pantry normally serves 60 to 100 families once a week on Wednesdays, but could serve more, if more people knew about it, Major Kris Wood said.

“The system is not built to withstand the number of people in the system,” he said. “We have to go outside the system and help as many people as we can, giving so we can meet the basic needs.”

In University City, the Agape Food Pantry has gone from serving 100 to 400 families a month in the last year, and recently nearby pantries have closed, which has increased the load.

“Just in the last couple of months, three government agencies have closed,” said Rollo Johnson, volunteer, and pastor of the Seventh Day Adventist church, the location of the pantry. “That got us 400 new seniors for our monthly food pantry—just seniors alone.”

There’s no room for storage at the pantry so they pay $300 a month to store the food off-site. That’s money that could be better spent elsewhere, Johnson said. The shelter now helps twice the number of families as it did a year ago.

“We’re straining,” he said. “We need a bigger place. Right now we’re working out of a fellowship hall in a basement of a church, and it’s a struggle for space.”

Bethany Prange, communications coordinator for the St. Louis Area Foodbank, said across the board, their agencies are telling them they are getting more than they can handle. “A lot of the people have never had to turn to a food pantry for help before.”

Major Wood at the Maplewood Salvation Army does his best to help under the current conditions.

“There are times when we don’t have food,” he said. “We can buy it and have a little bit to give them. We don’t get overwhelmed by the huge need, and just do what we can for these people at this moment.”