U.S. food banks run short on staples as hunger soars
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[April 24, 2020]
By Michelle Conlin, Lisa Baertlein and Christopher Walljasper
(Reuters) - It’s pitch black in El Paso,
Texas, when the minivans and pickups start lining up at 4 a.m., snaking
for more than a mile down the desert roadway leading to the city’s
largest food bank.
When rations are finally distributed five hours later, many boxes are
filled with too many castoff beefsteak tomatoes but no pasta. Nor is
there any rice, beans or other dry or canned goods.
“We really have no dry goods,” said Bonnie Escobar, chief development
officer of El Pasoans Fighting Hunger.
Food banks nationwide are squeezed between short supplies and surging
demand from needy families as the coronavirus pandemic has put more than
26 million Americans out of work. In New York City, the mayor appointed
a food czar as lines of masked people form outside overstretched
charities. More than a third of the city’s food banks have closed for
lack of supplies, donations or volunteers, who are harder to recruit
because of infection fears, according to the New York Mission Society.
In San Diego, a local food bank waits on a $1 million order it placed
weeks ago. Chicago and Houston food banks say they are nearly out of
staples.
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Before the pandemic, 1 in 7 Americans relied on food banks, according to
Feeding America, a national network of the charities. Now, demand has
doubled or tripled at many organizations, U.S. food bank operators told
Reuters.
And yet farmers are destroying produce, dumping milk and culling
livestock because the pandemic has upended supply chains, making it
impossible for many to get crops to market. Grocery stores struggle to
stock shelves because suppliers can’t adjust to the sudden shift of
demand away from shuttered restaurants to retailers, which requires
different packaging and distribution networks.
“The U.S. likely has a surplus of food right now,” said Keith Dailey,
group vice president of corporate affairs at Kroger Co, the No. 1 U.S.
supermarket operator. “It’s just hard to recover and redistribute.”
Before the pandemic, Feeding America member organizations received about
a third of their food from grocery store programs that “rescue” fresh
food and dry goods that are imperfect or close to expiration. Almost a
quarter came from government programs that provide meat, cheese and
other products. The rest came through donations from farmers and grocers
and purchases by the food banks.
Now those supply lines are disrupted. Panic-buying of groceries stripped
store inventories of often-donated surplus items, causing grocers to
shift to cash donations for food banks. Surging demand from needy
families, along with higher prices on some products, is busting food
banks’ cash budgets - one Nebraska food bank, for instance, will spend
up to $1 million on food in April compared to about $70,000 in a normal
month.
“This is not an anomaly” across the region, said Angie Grote, a
spokeswoman for Omaha’s Food Bank for the Heartland, which serves
communities in 93 counties in Nebraska and Western Iowa.
Many farmers would rather donate food than destroy it, but overwhelmed
charities do not have the labor or storage to handle such bulk
donations. Neither can the government act fast enough to fill the gap
left by disruptions of other sources and the sudden spike in hunger.
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The Trump administration faces mounting pressure from trade groups such
as the National Pork Producers Council and the National Potato Council
to buy more surplus foods and redirect them to charities or schools that
continue to provide meals to low-income families after halting classes.
That could include, for instance, between $750 million and $1.3 billion
worth of potatoes and derivative products that are trapped in the
pipeline, the potato council said.
But U.S. Agriculture Department regulations can pose problems in
redirecting food from restaurants to charities. The USDA has strict
specifications on products that can be purchased for food banks,
allowing only certain cuts of meat that are packaged in certain size
boxes, said Dallas Hockman, vice president of industry relations for the
National Pork Producers Council.
The pork trade group requested that the USDA ease such rules to speed
the flow of food to needy families, Hockman said. It normally takes one
to three months for the USDA to receive food after a company wins a
government contract to provide it for distribution to charities.
Meanwhile, bulk packages of ham and bacon that would normally go to
restaurants are sitting in cold storage.
"What we're saying is, for right now, go buy this stuff, get it out of
the pipeline and get it to these food banks," Hockman said.
The agency did not directly answer questions from Reuters about the
concerns that it moved too slowly to address the food bank crisis or
suggestions that it relax regulations. The agency repeated a pledge it
made in a news conference on April 17 to spend $3 billion in food
purchases for its newly announced Coronavirus Food Assistance Program,
with monthly $300 million purchases through February 2021. In a call
with food distributors Thursday, USDA representatives said the new
program could deliver food more quickly than usual and that it expected
to begin deliveries to charities by mid-May.
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![](../images/042420pics/news_a3.jpg)
People queue to pick up fresh food at a Los Angeles Regional Food
Bank giveaway of 2,000 boxes of groceries, as the spread of the
coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Los Angeles,
California, U.S., April 9, 2020. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
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FEAST, THEN FAMINE
Less than a year ago, food banks were overwhelmed by a glut of food
from the USDA. The administration’s Trade Mitigation program bought
billions of dollars in food from U.S. growers who saw their export
markets - especially China - cut off in the tariff war started by
President Donald Trump in 2018.
The excess prompted the Greater Chicago Food Depository to build
extra cold storage for milk and meat. Today, that storage has been
emptied, and food banks are scrambling to buy increasingly scarce
and expensive staples, such as canned fruit or peanut butter.
Some items are no longer available or require two-month waits for
delivery, said Greg Trotter, a spokesman for the Chicago food bank.
“Food manufacturers have struggled to keep up with demand” from
grocery consumers, he said, “and are therefore selling less food
directly to food banks.”
As supplies tighten, demand soars. The Jacobs & Cushman San Diego
Food Bank saw the number of people it fed jump from 350,000 to
600,000 in a month, said CEO James A. Floros. A similar demand spike
hit Fresno's Central California Food Bank, in the heart of the
state's Central Valley - which supplies a quarter of the nation's
food, including tomatoes, vegetables, nuts, tree fruits and table
grapes.
Restaurant closures were a double hit - putting furloughed workers
in the food line and reducing donations from grocers whose shelves
were picked clean.
The state’s food-service distributors have scrambled to empty
warehouses of bulk products like 50-lb bags of carrots or 21-lb
grape bunches that had been destined for restaurants, airlines or
cruise ships. Many would donate them, but food banks can’t handle
the packages.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2020/Apr/24/images/ads/current/elkhart_grain_daily_sda_022614.png)
"We don't have the ability to unpack it and repack it in family
size," said Kym Dildine, the Central California Food Bank’s chief
administrative officer.
Neither do the charities have the storage, trucks, labor or
processing facilities needed to accept and distribute large
donations of produce from farmers. When one local farmer recently
offered a million heads of lettuce, Dildine could only take a small
portion.
Monica White, CEO of Food Share of Ventura County, said the
organization has had similar difficulties accepting bulk produce.
“It’s like asking Tesla to start building gas cars,” she said.
About 300 miles away, in Holtville, California, farmer Jack Vessey
had to destroy a crop of fresh-cut romaine lettuce after failing to
find a charity to take it.
TAKING ACTION
Jon Samson, an executive director at the American Trucking
Association, has been frustrated with the juxtaposition of news
images of long food-bank lines with those of farmers destroying
food. Over Easter weekend he started pulling together a list of
food-industry representatives he believed could get perishable foods
to the needy.
The working group of about 80 members includes representatives of
trade groups such as the American Farm Bureau Federation and the
National Restaurant Association, charities including Feeding America
and distribution experts such as the American Logistics Aid Network,
or ALAN.
ALAN has already coordinated an International Paper Co donation of
about 45,000 empty boxes to Salvation Army food distribution centers
in several states. Samson's group is considering other efforts
including breaking down bulk food packages and freezing or canning
goods from food factories.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2020/Apr/24/images/ads/current/graue_preowned_041320.png)
“We've got the product, we've got the truck and warehouse capacity,
and we've got the consumer,” Samson said. “The problem is linking
all of that together."
Food banks are scrambling to adjust, too. Operators in seven cities
are borrowing refrigerated trailers from food-service distributor
Sysco. In California, Ventura County’s food bank and local partners
are bottling orange juice that would have been dumped.
The San Diego food bank ordered a $500,000 machine to repackage bulk
supplies of staples like beans and rice into individual family
packs.
“Should COVID-19 come back later in the year,” said Floros, “we’ll
be ready for it.”
(Reporting by Michelle Conlin, Lisa Baertlein and Christopher
Walljasper; Additional reporting by Tom Polansek, Karl Plume and P.J.
Huffstutter; Editing by Brian Thevenot)
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