PHOENIX (AP) — Long lines are back at food banks around the U.S. as working Americans overwhelmed by inflation turn to handouts to help feed their families.
With gas prices soaring along with grocery costs, many people are seeking charitable food for the first time, and more are arriving on foot.
Inflation in the U.S. is at a 40-year high and gas prices have been surging since April 2020, with the average cost nationwide briefly hitting $5 a gallon in June. Rapidly rising rents and an end to federal COVID-19 relief have also taken a financial toll.
The food banks, which had started to see some relief as people returned to work after pandemic shutdowns, are struggling to meet the latest need even as federal programs provide less food to distribute, grocery store donations wane and cash gifts don’t go nearly as far.
Tomasina John was among hundreds of families lined up in several lanes of cars that went around the block one recent day outside St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix. John said her family had never visited a food bank before because her husband had easily supported her and their four children with his construction work.
“But it’s really impossible to get by now without some help,” said John, who traveled with a neighbor to share gas costs as they idled under a scorching desert sun. “The prices are way too high.”
Jesus Pascual was also in the queue.
“It’s a real struggle,” said Pascual, a janitor who estimated he spends several hundred dollars a month on groceries for him, his wife and their five children aged 11 to 19.
The same scene is repeated across the nation, where food bank workers predict a rough summer keeping ahead of demand.
The surge in food prices comes after state governments ended COVID-19 disaster declarations that temporarily allowed increased benefits under SNAP, the federal food stamp program covering some 40 million Americans
“It does not look like it’s going to get better overnight,” said Katie Fitzgerald, president and chief operating officer for the national food bank network Feeding America. “Demand is really making the supply challenges complex.”
Charitable food distribution has remained far above amounts given away before the coronavirus pandemic, even though demand tapered off somewhat late last year.
Feeding America officials say second quarter data won’t be ready until August, but they are hearing anecdotally from food banks nationwide that demand is soaring.
The Phoenix food bank’s main distribution center doled out food packages to 4,271 families during the third week in June, a 78% increase over the 2,396 families served during the same week last year, said St. Mary’s spokesman Jerry Brown.
More than 900 families line up at the distribution center every weekday for an emergency government food box stuffed with goods such as canned beans, peanut butter and rice, said Brown. St. Mary’s adds products purchased with cash donations, as well as food provided by local supermarkets like bread, carrots and pork chops for a combined package worth about $75.
Distribution by the Alameda County Community Food Bank in Northern California has ticked up since hitting a pandemic low at the beginning of this year, increasing from 890 households served on the third Friday in January to 1,410 households on the third Friday in June, said marketing director Michael Altfest.
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Most of these people will grab a couple boxes of food, consume it, and a few days later go back for more. They will never learn to store food or grow it. Eventually there won’t be a food bank to provide them with their 2-3 days of food. Then what? What do they call it, 72 hours from anarchy? Maybe it is 48 hours. Hell, even 24 hours, considering the only source of clean water for millions of people is through a bottle.
Old timers who lived thru the Great Depression used to tell me that the difference between what you would and wouldn’t eat was about three days.
Growing enough food to store and be self sufficient is a full time job, as you know. Stockpiling will only help in times of temporary troubles.
Tough times never last, but tough people do. People who make excuses for not being prepared deserve to starve.
What a surprise. Black folks lining up for free shit. I am stunned, I tell you.
Only in America can you afford a car but not food. Cars keep people poor
^^^^^ This.
I drive a 2004 Ford Focus and my wife drives a 2002 Toyota Camry.
We have maintained these cars well and they both run great, get good gas mileage and are cheap to insure and they are PAID for.
All these people in these lines for food all have newer cars with huge payments.
Fuck all of ’em….don’t live beyond your means.
Next time you’re in a parking lot check out most of the newer cars /trucks with original BALD tires that probably have at least 50,000 miles on them.
Cars and phones before food and shelter?
Get a fucking clue people.
Increasing consumer prices are a result of inflation, which is actually growth in the money supply. And yes, the money supply is growing. Because the Fed is continuing the two main policies that increase the money supply:
Low interest rates and almost nonexistent reserve requirements, which incentivize more bank lending (banks don’t lend money they actually have – it’s created magically when the loan is issued)
“Quantitative easing”, a euphemism for various ways of increasing the money supply, such as buying US treasuries or MBSs with newly printed money.
Yet we hear that the Fed is fighting inflation? Of course, if they really did, the elites’ portfolios would lose a lot of (dollar) value very quickly. Expect to see even the tiny lessening of money expansion to reverse course soon, in my opinion.
So much for not having kids you can’t afford. A janitor with 5 kids… The beaners and Muslims just keep popping them out. At least they stay together in a family unit, unlike the blacks.
Speaking of banks (the financial kind)….
Banks Begin to Fret About the Threat of Civil Unrest
In May this year, Nafeez Ahmed, the special investigations reporter of the British newspaper Byline Times, published an article warning that global banks are privately preparing for “dangerous levels” of imminent civil unrest in Western homelands. Citing the head of a “financial institutions group” that provides expertise and advisory services to other banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, Ahmed reported that contingency planners at top financial institutions believe that “dangerous levels” of social breakdown in the West are now all but inevitable, and imminent:
An outbreak of civil unrest is expected to occur anytime this year, but most likely in the coming months as the impact of the cost of living crisis begins to saturate the lives of “everyone”…
According to the executive, major banks all over the world including in the US, UK and Western Europe are instructing their top managers to begin actively planning how they will respond to the impact of financial disruption triggered by a prolonged episode of civil unrest…
We are getting close, I have said this before, to a position of civil disobedience in this country, civil unrest… I just give a warning now: you cannot spend too much time on this. We have a genuine catastrophic crisis hitting with ten million people potentially moving into severe levels of poverty.
So people feed their cars but can’t feed themselves.
Gas prices in NJ are expected to drop BELOW $4/gal in the next week or so. I wish I understood what the hell is going on.
so how much did they spend on gas to wait in line?
The problems with charity are multiple.
1. It creates dependents.
2. It seeds a sense of entitlement.
3. Working Joe six pack gets taxed like a rape victim, then sees his government rapist giving away food to some who are worthy of help, but many more who are greedy, gaming the charity, or just plain lazy.
4. It’s not just blacks. We get Hispanics, Middle East, Far Eastern, and Whites coming through the lines as well.
5. Gratitude expressed is currently running at about 30% in my experience. i.e., out of 10 cars, 2 or maybe 3 parties say Thank You, God Bless You for doing this, etc.
6. Many arrogantly and RUDELY do one or more of the following:
A-order the loaders to put food in a specific spot in their vehicle; tell us to separate out into 2 piles, and often have trunks overloaded with all kinds of other shit…strollers, bags of empty cans, car parts, a trunk full of tools, etc.
B-ignore traffic flow, talk on their phones, endangering line workers. We had one worker get pinned between two car bumpers once. Older drivers routinely run over our orange traffic cones, put in place to give loaders a buffer zone of safety.
C-Grab for more than 1 family. We get people in Escalades and Mercedes coming through, gathering stuff for upwards of 10 families.
NOW, THIS IS A TOUGH JUDGMENT CALL.
The temptation is to see greed and abuse, and for sure, a good percentage is taking abusive advantage. As a follower of Christ, when I’m on my game, I let the Lord sort out who is cheating, and who is honorable, regardless of the type of vehicle.
MANY of these folks are picking up and distributing to other families, older folks, who perhaps have no car, or families where both parents are working during our daily weekday only distributions.
That’s just a good gesture, and example of individuals helping out others.
That said, some people, just like other government welfare recipients, are greedy and opportunistic, just because FREE.
People are addicted to free stuff like crack addicts to the pipe.
Like the article says, when you factor in gas prices, food prices, falling wages, and giving corrupt Ukraine and other governments trillions in spending, it’s no wonder that folks of all stripes are thinking:
“I’m going to get mine, too, then”
It’s a cycle, and it’s speeding up & out of control.
Now, if you stopped it all cold turkey, there would (will) be rioting & blood in the streets.
One last thought.
Private donations help fund many of these programs, often anonymously.
Yet here and now we have billionaires like Soros, Gates, Rockefeller, Bezos, Musk, Schwab, et al,.not only on the wrong side of the charity ledger, but actively trying to kill us off, starve people, inject them, all while coordinating 100+ food resource companies suffering fires or a mass culling of protein livestock.
Evil can only flourish, when good men do nothing and cease confronting / eliminating the evil.
Silence and inaction are cowardly, cynical, and pessimistic.
It’s easy to throw up (our arms or our lunch), and exclaim that things are hopeless.
To which I’d say, if that’s your attitude, then step out of the way, & try to no longer infect the hopeful & willing to try with such cancerous commentary.
Solution, stop all charity to able bodied/minded people. Shoot all rioters and bury them in mass graves. Repeat until the population is cleansed of freeloaders.
History is an endless repetition of forms of government that increase their domination over society [with seizure of personal property] until they destroy themselves.
Would the recipients of food donate a few hours of labor to the pantry for a credit voucher??
Ideally, that’s the best.
Earn it.
Nevertheless, some hungry people are disabled, infirm, too weak, or otherwise unable to work to earn it.
Those are truly people down on their luck who deserve some help, and those of means to help them ought to, IMHO.
It’s a humble expression of gratitude to our creator / karma.
Mammy always used to say, when she heard me criticize in judgment:
There, but for the grace of God, go you.
Food banks need to go away. Sell your shiny SUV for a bag of rice, shitheads.
I have no sympathy for any of these people. They need to get a little self respect and stop chasing charity as if they are entitled to something free. The only free thing you are entitled to is as much air as you can breathe. Everything else you should work for.