A Withered Harvest in the Bronx

September 20, 2007

New York Times
Opinion
By FRANCIS X. CLINES

As a practical matter, there really is a food chain extending from Washington to the poverty precincts across the nation where hungry people are nourished. It is ever subject to legislative whim and crimping in nutrition aid and farm bill formulas. That whim — and its painful crimps — can be witnessed at the huge Bronx warehouse run by The Food Bank for New York City. There, the nonprofit’s normal store of eight million pounds of food — stocked to the ceiling for mass distribution to the city’s one million-plus poor residents — has shrunk alarmingly to half that size.

“Not in 20 years have I seen our shelves so bare,” laments the food bank’s president, Lucy Cabrera. Further down the food chain, this means the more than 1,000 soup kitchens, food pantries and charity shelters that are primarily supplied by the food bank are being forced into their own kind of institutional indigency, begging elsewhere for help.

Before erosive cuts in government aid, the warehouse was kept stocked by five or six trailer-loads a day of the most nutritious food, including frozen meats. They wheeled in as a steady boon, trickling down from the rich federal subsidy program bolstering farmers. Last Friday, there was but one trailer of grape juice and another of vegetable soup, forcing the food bank, devoid of basic canned foods, to keep its normal six million pounds of free food a month cut to half-rations. On the street, this means smaller, less balanced meals for hungry people, or no food packages at all for some.

This dearth has been building across years beyond public notice, deepening since the Republican ascendancy in Washington. But there’s guarded hope lately at the food bank and the scores of similar charity conduits that make up the national network called America’s Second Harvest. Congress is wrestling with a new farm bill; so far it proposes a significant boost in nutritional programs for the poor, enough to dispatch more trailer loads down the food chain.

The House approved that step, but nothing final is guaranteed in the Senate, where the furious and necessary debate over the Iraq war has the larger agenda on hold. Current farm programs expire this month, and food bank workers are begging the Senate to second the House solution. So comes fall’s harvest to the city, gleaming bright and fresh across the retail produce marts, with the second harvest, the one for the poor, still caught up in Congress.

September 20, 2007

Press Room