Inside a Food Pantry

~ Laura

Behind St. Cecilia’s church in Englewood, New Jersey lies an inconspicuous cement block building that does the Lord’s work. The Office of Concern provides shopping bags of food for 700 people every week.

After he retired from college teaching, my dad began volunteering there a few hours a week and now helps run the place. He unloads trucks, picks up turkeys at Thanksgiving, and writes grants. He gave me a tour this morning and introduced me to the other volunteers. I took a few pictures as background research for an article about food and poverty.  While there was a great deal of joking around between the volunteers, there was also a undercurrect of seriousness. Everybody understood the importance of their work.

On this frigid morning, a small crew of 70-year old men unloaded boxes of green beans and dried noodles from a food truck from The Community Bank in Newark. My dad showed me the routine for filing the bags. He said they set up an assembly line — filling 700 bags is no small task.

He explained that the number of food recipients has drastically increased in the past three years. They used to serve about 300 people a week. Now, the demand has more than doubled. These bags of ramen and cereal are meant to supplement other food programs that they receive from the government. Food stamps and WIC are not enough.

Between the money that my dad scraped together with his grants and donations from the local churches, they have a $200,000 budget. They also receive about $300,000 in food donations from local bakeries and businesses. Unilever headquarters are in town; they provide toilet paper and body wash and diapers.

But it’s not enough. The demand is too high. They have had to cut down the amount of food in the bags in the past year. The half  million in cash and product donations does not cover the needs in this small city in New Jersey. On this sub-zero day, there was a line of people, a few with small children, walking to the food pantry with their wire carts.

To donate or volunteer, please refer to their website or contact them.

Published by Laura

27 thoughts on “Inside a Food Pantry”

  2. The message on the dry erase board in the next to last photo is so sad.

    (Quite a post to follow the one about your son eating so much. 🙂 We are so blessed and don’t know it.)

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  3. That seems quite a bit neater and more organized than the food pantry I was at last year. (It was only one day and I got a free t-shirt out of it.) That place got donated baked goods, but they were put in a plastic bag the size of a trash can liner. Many of the pastries didn’t survive. I mean, I ate a couple of handfuls of the crumbs. When else was I going to get the chance to eat a combination of cookies, cakes, and danishes? It was delicious, but you couldn’t give it to people. The fruit was mostly from the people who send out fruit baskets. They reject any small flaw.

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  5. Thanks, Laura, for covering the Office of Concern as you did on this bitter cold morning in Englewood, NJ.
    (One small correction: It’s St. Cecila’s, not Celia’s, Church. We’re legally an auxiliary of it, though operationally and financially we’re independent, and of course we ask no questions about anyone’s religion, race, or culture.) Our website is http://www.officeofconcern.com and our e-mail address is officeofconcern@verizon.net. Volunteers and donations extremely welcome.

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  6. Thank you, John, not only for your patience with all my pesky questions (and errors), but also for your great work in the community.

    And, readers, please donate to the Office of Concern or your local equivilent. Times call for extraordinary acts of kindness.

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  8. While we’re at it, could we lay to rest the canard that “You people only care about babies until they’re born”? It pops up here from time to time, it’s never, ever accompanied by evidence of any kind (and certainly not by any empirical evidence), and if I never hear it again, it will be too soon.

    Going just by the evidence supplied by Laura and MH, it sounds like elderly pro-life Catholics are a fairly important segment of the food pantry volunteer force. Less anecdotally, I was just looking at the Trenton, NJ diocesan directory, poking around the Catholic Social Service section, it looks like there are quite a number of food pantries operated the auspices of the diocese.

    http://portal.dioceseoftrenton.org/page.aspx?pid=704

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  9. Yeah, let’s not start a fight. I want to call attention to a real need without the distractions of ax-grinding.

    Can someone tell me why I didn’t get more more buzz and comments about this post yesterday. Just curious. I can get 100 comments about making dinners for middle class families, but almost nothing about food for the poor. Could I have framed this post differently?

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      1. Also, I wouldn’t equate comments with buzz. Despite the above, I tend to not make as many comments if I’m not either making a joke or arguing with somebody.

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    2. Right. I generally only try to comment if I think I have something substantive to add that hasn’t already been said. I don’t really know what there is to add, or what other angle could be brought up to your original post. Volunteering at a food bank is a virtuous thing to do, and kudos to your father for doing it every day. I’ve volunteered at food banks and the food bank central distribution center in the past, and I should do more in the future.

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    4. “Yeah, let’s not start a fight.”

      That’s part of your problem, right there. How do you expect to have a lively discussion without disagreement?

      In the middle class dinner thread, there was ample disagreement. Now, if your audience consisted largely of current food pantry users, I’m sure you could get a really lively discussion going on 1) procedures and 2) improving the content of pantry bags.

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  10. I can say why I didn’t comment. Hunger in America is one of my touch points. It makes me livid with anger.

    As a 7 year old, when my dad came home and said that someone had asked him for money for food, I literally went to my room and cried for hours and hours. I simply couldn’t get why there could be a hungry person in this land of plenty (I’d come to terms with hunger in places where there might not be enough food). My father has stories of being hungry as a teenager, living in hostels during his education, filling his stomach with water, but, then at least, I could believe that there wasn’t enough food.

    As an adult, I understand that the story is much more complicated. But I still get angry, and in particular, angry over solutions that don’t include a significant role for social safety nets, SNAP, funding for emergency food aid, ADC, unemployment insurance, . . . . (So, it’s hard to avoid the don’t fight admonition).

    I have come to recognize the value and importance of local food pantries, like the one you describe at St. Cecelia’s; the community involvement, the availability of more rapid aid (though I did wonder about the “card” and how you get one to access this food pantry), the human interaction of people trying to help each other.

    But (and this might be a more extreme analogy than I want) but like conservatives worry about needle programs, in spite of their effectiveness at limiting the spread of disease, I worry about undermining the support for more systematic solutions to hunger when we talk about food pantries. At the same time, I feel great warmth for the people, like your father, and others, who do what they can personally do to help people.

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    2. I’m conservative and honestly, I don’t mind needle exchange programs, as long as they’re miles away from my neighborhood, as anybody who is intravenously injecting drugs is pretty far gone.

      I expect even people who love needle exchange programs don’t want to live across the street from one.

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      1. I screwed up one of those sentences. What I intended to say is that there’s no point in thinking that needle exchange programs will encourage drug addiction, as intravenous injection of drugs is pretty much the very rock bottom of addiction. Most normal people (even normal drug addicts) get squeamish at the thought of needles and there are many, many ways to deliver drugs without using needles. To willingly subject oneself to the injection of recreational drugs (or to even consider it), one has to be very far gone.

        I don’t think needle exchanges encourage drug use, but residents who are concerned that their neighborhood will go to heck do have reason to be worried. I can see that in a bad enough neighborhood, a needle exchange might actually improve it (as it would reduce the amount of used syringe litter), but there have been horror stories of quality of life being radically harmed.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platzspitz_park

        I was just looking at the Wikipedia page on needle exchanges and surprisingly, it is not actually clear that the needle exchanges reduce HIV transmission much. One explanation that comes to mind is that if a lot of needle exchange users are prostitutes, there’s a more obvious route for HIV transmission. In that case, one might only share needles with a small group of friends, but have sex with a much larger number of people.

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  11. I don’t know why you didn’t get more buzz, but I’m in the “livid with anger” camp. I frequently went hungry as a child (some days the only meal was the free school lunch), and I always dreamed that one day I’d be rich and I’d fund free cafeterias. It’s all very well to give people food but many of them have no way to cook it, or even a can opener and a spoon. We didn’t always have a kitchen, and even when we did we might not be able to pay the electric bill to operate the stove.

    Whatever you are imagining, there are people living in much worse conditions than you imagined.

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  12. Kai, I made a donation to a hot meal program in my area, after looking up emergency food services.

    I’m thankful for the school lunch program and looked up information about the summer food service program in my area, two systemic solutions.

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  13. Many people feel the same way about food pantries and emergency food services — that they’re OK as long as they are very far away (and I speak from knowledge of the controversy over the establishment of a program in our neighborhood).

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    1. Aside from the obvious (not liking to attract poor people to your neighborhood), there is the issue of establishing a non-residential thing in a residential neighborhood. That never goes over well.

      However, the urge to keep out the riffraff can be surprisingly powerful, to the point of cutting the nose off to spite the face. I once lived in an upscale DC neighborhood that had fought off a metro station for decades because they didn’t want undesirables to have easy access. As a result, the closest metro stations were a 30-35 minute walk away, uphill to one station and across a bridge (with howling winds in winter) to VA to the other station. We once lived in an end-of-the-line suburban neighborhood that was only a 15-minute walk to our metro (Shady Grove), so the contrast in philosophy was very stark.

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  14. Hmm, I guess that is a difference between New York City an other places. Rich and poor are already so close here (I mean geographically) that people are less sensitive. So whereas residents of any nice neighborhood will quickly and vociferously object to any sort of drug treatment program, or to a trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I never heard of people objecting to a food pantry or soup kitchen.

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