Interesting article on food pantries...from the NY Times, via Jordon Cooper...
For years, public and nonprofit food assistance programs have been reporting a sharp rise in the number of working families using their services. But now, as working families are becoming as common visitors as the indigent elderly at the city's soup kitchens and food pantries, many program officials say an ambitious shift is under way in how food for the needy is delivered.
The conventional answer of a box full of donated canned fruit, rice and beans, and the odd piece of eggplant is being supplemented, and in some cases replaced with new options: complete premade meals for takeout, for example, or frozen family-size portions of chili and spaghetti sauce.
Driving the shift in strategy, experts and providers say, is a familiar social and economic phenomenon: the growing numbers of working poor turning up at the soup kitchens and pantries, in most cases single mothers with children, are so busy juggling jobs, commuting and child care that they have little time to cook the food they are given. "The face of poverty is a working woman with two children," said Robert Egger, the founder of D.C. Central Kitchen and an advocate for rethinking what goes into a charity food basket. The options most of the nation's poor have, he says, are to stand in line for a meal at a soup kitchen or to go to a local church to pick up a box of groceries assembled from donations.
Kinda makes you think about the set-up of a church pantry. Normally you would just have people donate cans of food...stuff that they probably don't want (of course, every person I know would just kill for that old can of Cranberry sauce that you have in your pantry from Thanksgiving, 1975!). Using the above model, people in the church would be cooking meals. That would require thought...hmmmm...interesting....
For years, public and nonprofit food assistance programs have been reporting a sharp rise in the number of working families using their services. But now, as working families are becoming as common visitors as the indigent elderly at the city's soup kitchens and food pantries, many program officials say an ambitious shift is under way in how food for the needy is delivered.
The conventional answer of a box full of donated canned fruit, rice and beans, and the odd piece of eggplant is being supplemented, and in some cases replaced with new options: complete premade meals for takeout, for example, or frozen family-size portions of chili and spaghetti sauce.
Driving the shift in strategy, experts and providers say, is a familiar social and economic phenomenon: the growing numbers of working poor turning up at the soup kitchens and pantries, in most cases single mothers with children, are so busy juggling jobs, commuting and child care that they have little time to cook the food they are given. "The face of poverty is a working woman with two children," said Robert Egger, the founder of D.C. Central Kitchen and an advocate for rethinking what goes into a charity food basket. The options most of the nation's poor have, he says, are to stand in line for a meal at a soup kitchen or to go to a local church to pick up a box of groceries assembled from donations.
Kinda makes you think about the set-up of a church pantry. Normally you would just have people donate cans of food...stuff that they probably don't want (of course, every person I know would just kill for that old can of Cranberry sauce that you have in your pantry from Thanksgiving, 1975!). Using the above model, people in the church would be cooking meals. That would require thought...hmmmm...interesting....
