San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mission Bay popup supplies hundreds with food
On an unseasonably warm and brilliant holiday weekend day Saturday, the crowd gathered in the Oracle Park parking lot might have been expected to be there for a pregame tailgate before a Giants game.
Instead, they were there to pick up bags of food. The San FranciscoMarin Food Bank set up its first Mission Bay walkup, popup food pantry in the shadows of a place where popup usually means something else.
Those who walked up to the pantry scored a big plastic bag stuffed full of food, including a pork loin, a loaf of bread, potatoes, onions, a head of lettuce and some apples and oranges.
“There’s protein and vegetables and fruits — enough to feed a family of four,” said Gabriela Piña of San Francisco, who volunteered to help hand out food with her son, JeanLuc DesnoyersPiña. When the pantry opened at 9 a.m., nearly 100 people were lined up. A steady stream of people needing or wanting food walked into the lot, some arriving by car, others on foot or in wheelchairs.
“Every time we open a popup pantry in San Francisco, the number of people showing up just keeps growing,” said Tina Gonzales, director of community partnerships for the food bank. “Every week there are more people who lost their jobs and have kids at home. There are lots of people in San Francisco who need food. A lot of folks are just hanging on right now.”
So many people showed up to the two canopies in the
Giants’ parking lot that the pantry ran out of its 600 bags of food at about 12:20 p.m., 40 minutes ahead of the scheduled closing time. A trickle of cars continued to drive in, with people parking and walking up to the tables, only to be turned away.
Maria Cagang, who is in her 20s and lives in the Mission, arrived just in time to get one of the last bags of food for her family of five.
“I am so happy,” she said as she carried the goods to a car filled with relatives. “This is going to help us out a lot. I’m very thankful.”
Cagang said she was visiting her mother, who told her about the new popup pantry.
They immediately hopped in the car and drove to the parking lot, arriving just in time. Her mother gave away her own bag of food to a family that drove up just after the supply ran out.
As they drove off, a speaker in the parking lot played Tony Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
Bay Area food banks are feeding record numbers of people as the the coronavirus outbreaks and extended shelterinplace orders lead to job losses, leaving many without the resources to feed themselves or their families.
The San FranciscoMarin Food Bank is serving twice as many people as before the pandemic, many of them at 25 popup pantries it has set up in the two counties. Across the bay outside another ballpark, the Oakland Coliseum, the Alameda County Community Food Bank has set up a pantry that’s serving about 1,000 families a day.
The Oracle Park popup pantry is the first in the Mission Bay neighborhood, a place people often perceive as an area populated only by affluent condo dwellers, Gonzales said.
“But it’s not,” she said, pointing to veterans’ and lowincome housing nearby. “We had a lot of neighbors bringing neighbors, even one pushing his neighbor in a wheelchair. You know you’re in the right spot when neighbors are bringing neighbors to make sure they get food.”