Words from Our Pantry
Our food pantry coordinator sent me an e-mail expressing her concern with our current food shortage. If you read this remember that it is not Second Harvest’s fault that we are working on so little food. Its the LA govt’s fault for cutting their funding by 90%.
“The main problem is getting people enough food, as well as getting them balanced nutrition. Lately we have a serious lack of everything, but, items such as Gatorade are nowhere near as helpful as canned proteins, vegetables, fruits and grains. Our most severe deficit at this time is grains. We have not received a decent shipment of bread, rice or pasta, etc in over a month (if not longer). I can say that we have not received sufficient grains from Second Harvest in about two months. Whatever bread we were giving out regularly was coming from church groups. Now, we don’t even have that. Additionally, the vegetables that we gave out this week were mostly leftovers from Thanksgiving, or, from the food drives that we’ve collected from. Very little of the vegetables we’ve given out lately have been from Second Harvest.
Basically, in the case of all food groups aside from beverages, Second Harvest provides us with enough food for a day and a half of distribution. If Gary and I were not picking up from A.J.’s Produce every now and then, there would be days when people received NO fruit or vegetables.
Our other problem is proteins. If we run out of frozen meat to distribute, I am often forced to give out a very small amount of something that technically has protein in it, but is not healthy in the least. An example of this would be the week before Thanksgiving, when I had to give out bowls of very low-quality, microwaveable red beans and rice as a protein. I wasn’t even able to give out a large portion to each household. In short, it was pathetic.
This is the plight of the pantry. People are leaving with less food each time they come, and, the food they are walking out of here with is what we have scrapped together in an attempt to string together a healthy diet when we are working with so little to give out.”
