Second Harvest and those it feeds feel the bite of the rising cost of food
One woman says money has been tight since her husband retired from his job as a truck driver. Another tries to get by on the $960 a month she receives in disability. And a mother of three says her husband’s pay still is not what it was before the pandemic.
The three women were among the dozens of people lined up in their cars, minivans, pickups and SUVs on Wednesday in the parking lot of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Ceres for Second Harvest of the Greater Valley’s Mobile Fresh program.
Second Harvest staff and volunteers loaded groceries into vehicles as drivers pulled up next to the truck and tables laden with food. People were given bags filled with fresh fruits and vegetables, watermelons, containers of eggs and cottage cheese, and boxes of macaroni and cheese, cereal and fruit roll-ups.
Nearly two years into the pandemic, the increased need for food shows no signs of abating.
Manteca-based Second Harvest reports it is providing 485,000 pounds of food per week in San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties, with 42% of that going to Stanislaus County.
The food bank was providing about 230,000 pounds of food each week to the two counties before the pandemic. (Second Harvest also serves Merced, Amador, Tuolumne, Alpine, Calaveras and Mariposa counties, and the demand in those areas remains high.)
Now the people who rely on Second Harvest face rising prices, as does Second Harvest itself. The nonprofit organization also is feeling the pain of the nation’s supply chain woes. It is taking longer for the food it buys to arrive, and the amount of food donated by grocery chains and food manufacturers is down as they cope with their own labor and supply chain issues.
Second Harvest CEO Keenon Krick said donated food from grocery chains and food manufacturers’ distribution centers is down about 20% in the last four to five months, though he added that could be a temporary blip.
The food bank has filled the gap by buying more food, but prices are 12% to 15% higher, especially for produce, and deliveries are taking three to four weeks longer than normal.
Grocery stores feeling pinched
“We are dependent on grocery retailers and they are feeling the hit,” Krick said. “They have less food on their shelves to sell and less food to donate.”
Second Harvest is affiliated with Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks across the country. Krick said Feeding America has provided it with more grants to buy food, but there still are challenges. (Krick said while grocery chains and food manufacturers may not have as much food to donate, they have increased their monetary donations to Feeding America.)
Peanut butter, canned goods, cereal, canned tuna and chicken and other nonperishable foods that have been the mainstay of food banks are much more expensive and harder to find.
The people waiting for food Wednesday also had stories to tell.
“That’s what’s killing us right there,” the woman whose husband is a retired truck driver said about inflation and rising prices. She declined to give her name but said she is 62 and about to retire from her job in a cannery. “When I go to the (grocery) stores and see the prices on something, I can’t believe the prices, how high they are.”
Feeding schoolchildren and seniors
The woman said she, her husband and their disabled adult son live together in Ceres. She said they are grateful they own their own home and don’t have to worry about their rent spiking if they were renters. Their mortgage is $1,050 a month.
Second Harvest holds its Mobile Fresh food giveaway twice a month at the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It holds other Mobile Fresh events monthly in Modesto, Riverbank, Oakdale, Tracy and other surrounding communities.
Second Harvest also provides food to food pantries and has programs that help feed schoolchildren and their families and seniors.
The woman said she comes to the Mobile Fresh at the church twice a month and receives food from a church in Keyes once a month. She said this provides about half of her family’s food. Without this help, she said, she’d have to turn to her daughter in Washington state, something she tries to avoid.
“When we have a hardship, she helps us a lot financially,” the woman said. “It’s hard to take money from her.”
The woman who receives $960 a month in Social Security disability payments also declined to give her name. She is 51 and lives in Ceres and has been coming to the Mobile Fresh event for about two and a half years.
Bringing home fewer grocery bags
She said she feels blessed to live in subsidized housing and pays $312 a month for rent and utilities for her apartment. The woman said she gets about a $100 a month in food stamps, and that’s where she has seen the effects of inflation.
She said she used to be able to buy at least four bags of groceries with her food stamps, but rising prices have cut that to about two bags. “Without this,” she said about Mobile Fresh, “I don’t know how I’d make it through the month.”
Turlock resident Maria Vega, 45, is the mother of three boys. She said her husband works as a sales rep for a company that supplies Mexican food products to stores, but his pay has not returned to what it was before the pandemic. She said part of that is that his company struggles to get drivers to fill orders.
Vega, who has been coming to Mobile Fresh for about a month, said she’s shocked by how much food costs. “The meat is so expensive,” she said. “... And gasoline is expensive, too.”
Working but at less pay
Second Harvest Development Director Jessica Vaughan said some 20 months after California’s first stay-at-home order, people may be back at work but perhaps not at their full pay or hours. And they are feeling the effects of inflation.
“We’re starting to see the rising cost of things like rent and gas,” she said, “and (the cost of) food is starting to hit already tight budgets. So what we are seeing now is people who need just a little bit of help from one point to the next.”
Krick, the Second Harvest CEO, said in talking with other food banks, he expects it could take five years until the demand for food returns to prepandemic levels. He said that does not mean demand will stay as high as it is now but that it could take years for it to return to what it was before the pandemic.
Krick said that expectation is based on food banks’ experience during the Great Recession of more than a decade ago in which it took five years for demand to return to prerecession levels.
More information about Second Harvest, including how to donate, is at www.localfoodbank.org.
This story was originally published November 7, 2021 at 6:21 AM.
