Hunger hits home for many people
Food Bank, Salvation Army scramble to keep up
‘COVID has been unrelenting.’ CHRIS FARRAND Salvation Army’s regional director of emergency disaster services
After Russell Clifford lost his job working at a warehouse last year, he found himself, at the age of 43, living out of his uncle’s garage and, for the first time, going to Our Neighbor’s Table, an Amesbury food pantry.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Clifford said. “Obviously, I don’t want to have to do that. But what else am I going to do?”
One year into the coronavirus pandemic, Massachusetts has the troubling distinction of having perhaps the greatest increase in food insecurity in the nation, according to Feeding America, a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks that feed over 46 million people through food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and other community organizations.
The number of people who are unsure where their next meal will come from has increased by 59% in the state, and in eastern Massachusetts, the number has soared by 66%, compared to pre-COVID-19 levels, according to the Greater Boston Food Bank.
Since last March, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the food bank has given out more than 112 million pounds of food, or nearly 94 million meals. That total marks the largest 12month distribution figure in its 40year history and a 56% increase over 2019.
In the last six months of 2020, the number of people served by food pantries the Greater Boston Food Bank supplies has averaged more than 600,000 per month, the most the food bank has seen in its history. That’s more than twice the number of people that its partner agencies reported serving during the same period in 2019.
“COVID has been unrelenting,” said Chris Farrand. As the Salvation Army’s regional director of emergency disaster services, Farrand has responded to the Boston Marathon bombing, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Merrimack Valley gas explosions, among other crises. But the coronavirus “was so new to everyone. A hurricane is terrible, but we knew how to deal with that. Never, ever did I think we’d be serving 20.8 million meals in 10 months. That’s almost seven times what we served in 2019.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, the grocery stores where the Salvation Army often got its food suddenly had empty shelves.
“I had a whole logistics section whose sole mission was to find food from as many sources as possible,” he said.
So the Salvation Army used grants it received from the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency and Gov. Charlie Baker’s office to buy food from a company that prepares meals for airlines, which needed substantially fewer because the number of people flying dropped dramatically.
The Salvation Army packed up the meals in boxes, which Lily Transportation Corp. of Needham offered to deliver to food distribution sites and to the elderly and other people who couldn’t leave their homes.
“We’d sit with people and listen because there was a lot of anxiety and fear,” Farrand said. “Some people hadn’t seen their families in six months.”
“One of the beautiful things that came out of that really horrible time was people coming together to help each other,” said Sasha Purpura, executive director of Food for Free, a Cambridge-based, hunger-relief nonprofit. “So many volunteers told us having that opportunity to help was a lifesaver for them because they’d been stuck at home and they really wanted to do something. This not only got them out of the house, but also gave them meaning in a time of confusion and fear.”