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 two area food banks.

Operation Food Search and The St. Louis Area Food Bank 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 Food Bank occupies 92,000 square feet in a distribution center near Earth City and takes in truckloads of food from donors.

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

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

, in Mehlville, tries to provide balanced meals to clients at least twice a month, but their donor base is all volunteer, and it’s waning just as the need is growing. Their roster has gone from 269 families served, up to 327 in the past year and a family can mean up to eight or nine people.

“All of us are experiencing an increase in client requests because the economy is still going downhill,” said Mary Hettenhausen, assistant daily operations manager. “It hasn’t even bottom-lined yet. I really and truly have a problem telling our clients that we can’t help them.” 

The Arnold Food Pantry isn’t doing as well. It serves about 275 people a week from Arnold, Imperial and Fenton, and is staffed entirely by volunteers.

“The need is up, greater than I’ve ever seen it,” manager Kathy Flanigan said.

She said demand is so great that she’s had to schedule families to come every other week instead of weekly. “I was up to 150 families a week, which was more than the volunteers could handle in a day,” she said.

She’s looking forward to the Postal Carrier food drive in May, but until then, she’ll put an ad in the paper or go to local schools if the pantry runs low.