Food Share needs help keeping shelves stocked

Food Share community outreach manager Susan Rousselle said in 2020 the food shelf had 45 percent more visits than in 2019, the year before the pandemic. Last year, that number rose to 57 percent more than pre-pandemic numbers.

This year, just in the first nine months, visitors are up 86 percent over 2019.

An even starker statistic? According to Rousselle, in 2019, the food share served 1,202 families, for a total of 3,898 people — an average of 389 visits per month. In just the past three months, 709 families have been served, with an average of 684 visits per month.

It’s unclear if there are more hungry people or if the stigma of availing oneself of food shelves and other public health organizations is simply eroding. As the cost of living goes up, so do visits, and so does the economic variety of visitors.

“If you have two people making $15 an hour, and they have two kids, or three or four, that’s poverty,” Rousselle said. “More people were just more vocal about saying, ‘I need help,’ because more and more people need help. There’s safety in numbers.”

Going green

Rousselle is hoping for increased participation in the Green Bag program, where the Food Share collects the bags on the second Saturday of even-numbered months — the next drop-off date is Oct. 8.

The program is what it sounds like. Folks grab a green canvas tote from the Harrel Street food shelf or local libraries and spend time filling it up with food. This is a good time to help because while the global virus has largely gone endemic, what replaced it is also deleterious — skyrocketing inflation.

“If you factor in all those numbers, with the cost of food these days, our expenses are just really, really high,” program manager Kevin Carter said.

Carrie Stahler, government and public affairs officer at the Vermont Foodbank, echoed this. She said dried pasta is up 60 percent in cost, while canned fruit is up 55 percent and frozen fruit “is really all over the place.”

Eggs are up 63 percent, and Stahler said eggs offer an idea of how inflation affects the whole food system.

“Eggs are this weird intersection, because chickens eat grain, which is up, but they are also part of poultry market,” she said.

Those are the prices if you can find the items. Carter said the food share does much of its grocery shopping locally — at Hannaford in Morrisville and Mac’s Market in Stowe — but supply chain issues mean sometimes those stores might be out of certain items, making it harder for workers to find food shelf stalwarts.

Cereal and pasta have gone through cycles of scarcity, Carter said. Last year, there was a mysterious shortage of boxed stuffing mix just as the food share was trying to stock up for its annual Thanksgiving bags. Last year, they gave out 802 bags, which includes a turkey and all the trimmings, like cranberry sauce, gravy, potatoes, veggies — and a whole lot of stuffing mix.

Last year, the teens on local American Legion baseball team The Yetis came to the rescue, holding a stuffing drive at Peoples Academy. This is illustrative of just how important it is to receive donations of actual foodstuffs — money is always helpful, but all the money in the world can’t buy pasta if the shelves are bare.

This is where an army of green bag-wielding helpers comes in handy. Carter said while food share staff tend to buy the store brand non-perishables and the sturdy veggie standbys, it’s always a surprise to see what comes in the bags.

People filling up green bags don’t need to limit it to just food products. Things like shampoo, feminine products and diapers are expensive and are popular items at food shelves. Pet food and supplies are also hot commodities.

Don’t worry about putting fresh food in the bags. For one, it won’t keep.

When it comes to vegetables, dairy and proteins, the national supply chain issues aren’t as big of an issue, although inflation still is, because Vermont is such a robust agricultural state. For example, the food share gets beef from Allstad Farm in Hardwick and dairy and eggs from Mansfield Dairy in Stowe, and the Foodbank gives them a grant for $6,000 to purchase fresh produce, while Morrisville-founded Salvation Farms delivers gleaned veggies once a week during harvest season.

“People are getting really good local products,” Rousselle said.

Getting hungrier

A study conducted earlier this year by researchers at the University of Vermont and the University of Maine, interviewing roughly 1,000 people — 415 Vermonters — found that the prevalence of food insecurity this past spring “remains similarly high to early points in the pandemic (35 percent overall), likely driven by inflation and food prices, and long-term impacts from the pandemic.”

Other findings:

• 62 percent of respondents — and 90 percent of food-insecure respondents — said recent food cost increases affected their food purchasing.

• One-third used food assistance programs in the previous 12 months.

• Two-thirds did some sort of home food production, such as gardening, raising animals, foraging or hunting, and half of that cohort were doing so for the first time.

• Nearly 40 percent of food insecure respondents ate fewer fruits and vegetables in the past year.

• Half of the respondents faced a health care challenge.

• More than half indicated anxiety or depression, with 17 percent of those people newly diagnosed in the past year.

One survey respondent said they lost their job due to COVID-19 complications, but even before that, was missing so much work that the paychecks weren’t enough to live on.

“The huge increase in food (prices) made it that much harder to get groceries and though my daughter had the items she eats, I would often go without meals due to not being able to buy more than my daughter’s food,” the respondent said. “I haven’t eaten my daughter’s food items so as to make sure she always had enough.”

Stahler said food shelves always see more visitors in hard economic times.

“Food insecurity is just a really tangible symptom of greater economic insecurity,” Stahler said.