Images of thousands of cars waiting in line for hours for food from the San Antonio Food Bank went viral late last week, prompting a flood of donations of which the food bank’s CEO, Eric Cooper, said “philanthropy came to the rescue and food companies donated to extend our inventory another week.” The donations are the good news, but the last two words of that sentence are the bad news: another week.
Across the country, food banks—and diaper banks, too—are burning through their reserves in a desperate effort to keep up with demand as unemployment soars due to coronavirus, and philanthropy isn’t going to be enough for the long haul.
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Demand in San Antonio has more than doubled, from 58,000 households per week to 120,000, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers is appealing to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to provide state aid. But food isn’t the only need and San Antonio isn’t the only place facing an emergency. Also in San Antonio, the Texas Diaper Bank has seen need increase by 58%. “We do have sufficient enough supply to get through the next two months,” the diaper bank’s Ashley Hernandez said. “But we’re dipping into our stock that was supposed to be our reserves.”
Massachusetts diaper banks and food banks are similarly struggling. One Boston-area diaper bank told The Boston Globe that need has gone from 1,300 sleeves of diapers to 10,000 for a month at this time of year. Diapers are expensive, and really difficult to go without—being left in the same diaper for too long can cause health problems for babies.
In Massachusetts, food banks are also seeing big increases in need. One local food pantry that usually serves 250 to 300 families ran out of food when 900 people showed up. The Greater Boston Food Bank is facing a 50% increase in need. Food banks are trying to cope with this increased demand with fewer volunteers than usual, too.
In Boston and elsewhere, food banks that buy food—which they increasingly need to do, since direct donations of food are down in some places and certainly aren’t keeping up with the need—are facing increased food prices. Eggs have gone from 79 cents a dozen to $3 in Boston. In Northeast Pennsylvania, a food bank reports food prices rising from 64 cents a pound to 80 to 90 cents a pound.
In some places, food pantries are closing, in many cases because volunteers can’t risk their own health to help run them. CBS News reports on one Texas county that has dropped from six food pantries to three in the past few weeks. A woman in the area who can no longer access a food pantry because she can’t afford the gas to get to one said that her husband will “go one day without eating, so I eat. And I'll go a day eating, and vice versa.”
This amount of need will not be met by private philanthropy. The government needs to act—through a temporary increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, speedily processing the millions of unemployment insurance applications already submitted, and much, much more.