September 22-28, 2005
cover story
The Food MazeWhy Can't Philly's Poor Eat?
SUPPLY AND DEMAND: Philabundance's warehouse at Third and Berks has plenty of food. The problem is getting it to the people who need it the most. Photo By: Michael T. Regan  |
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In the waiting room of a County Assistance Office in West Philadelphia, just behind the children's play area, there is a bulletin board labeled "Job Information Center." After reading aloud the question beneath the title — "Do you need employment?" — Ms. Riley, here to apply for food stamps, goes over to investigate. There are four pieces of construction paper stapled to the board. Counter-clockwise, they read, "Your job is to get a job. Any job. Work is better than welfare." There is no other information.
Ms. Riley returns to her seat, exasperated. She doesn't much like this place. On a previous visit, a clerk treated her rudely, and the insult has stuck with her. As Ms. Riley tells it, she explained that she was applying for food stamps, "because I need them," and the woman quipped, "Well, I need them, too."
"You know how Bam-Bam smashes people?" Here she makes a motion of clubbing someone into the floor. "That's how I felt when she said that."
Ms. Riley stood up and walked away. This time, though, there is no room for pride. A few weeks ago, she'd been fired from her job as a nurse's aid after violating company rules by visiting a violent patient alone.
"We were short on help, and I wanted to go home on time," she says matter-of-factly. "They made an example out of me." She is still waiting to hear back about unemployment benefits.
Ms. Riley is built like a string bean, with skin the color of caramel. At 46, she seems at once younger and older than her actual age. She maintains a child's lisp, an affinity for baked macaroni and cheese, and when she calls people on the phone, she likes to disguise her voice and pretend to be someone else. But her temper breaks easily, as if she is forever on the edge, and she gets confused about basic things like north and south, a recent development she attributes to the stresses of the years.
This morning, she had arrived at 7:55, wearing shorts, a tank top and a thick cake of purple lipstick. She was the second person on line for the 8 a.m. opening. When most people begin to file in at 9, she is still not being helped.
While she waits, Ms. Riley explains how she has been feeding herself since losing her job. After exhausting her diminutive savings, she picked up a free bag of groceries from a food cupboard at the church next to her apartment complex. Now that those are finished, she has been trekking to a soup kitchen at 63rd and Market streets, one of the few kitchens in the city open every day, and even then only for dinner. For the prior few weeks, I had been visiting assorted cupboards and kitchens, and happened to know a West Philly kitchen that would be serving lunch in a couple of hours. When I mention it to Ms. Riley, she gets excited and vows to go there that afternoon.
At 9:05, a woman comes out and calls Ms. Riley's name. "That's the same one!" Ms. Riley whispers loudly as she rises. A middle-aged white lady in a black-and-gold pantsuit throws a glance in my direction, then leads Ms. Riley back into the labyrinth of cubicles. Five minutes later, the applicant emerges bouncing and smiling. She says that the woman had asked who I was, and she had responded, "'That's my reporter.' As soon as I said that, she started melting." She seems to take considerable joy in this morsel of revenge.
Ms. Riley had been approved for expedited stamps, which are available only to people with no income, no assets and an immediate need for food. They are issued within five days of approval, and Ms. Riley is glad that they're coming. But as she walks out of the office, she has no money, no food, and the church next door isn't distributing groceries for at least another week. I ask her what she plans to do for food over the weekend. She doesn't know.
It is moments like this when people get trapped.
Americans tend to think about hunger as a crisis of conscience: Children are told to finish their food because people are starving in China; the recent failure to get supplies to the victims of Hurricane Katrina was blamed on the detachment of gluttonous leaders. But as I examined why, despite an abundance of programs geared toward helping the needy, hunger persists in Philadelphia, I did not encounter a grand indifference. Instead, I saw resources scattered throughout an enormously complex and arcane system — a maze, if you will — where people in need pursue food distributors endlessly, sometimes meeting and completing their life-sustaining transactions, sometimes dead-ending into missed meals, and always, always, putting forth copious efforts for disproportionately meager results.
This is less a crisis of conscience and more a crisis of capability. Hunger is a hard problem to combat, because people need to eat every day — it's like filling a hole over and over. Right now, Philly's not up to the task.
CARE PACKAGES: Ulia Sheen, a volunteer at Lady of the Blessed Sacrament in West Philly, fills paper bags with food. Photo By: Michael T. Regan |
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Thousands of people eligible for food stamps don't get them.
Hundreds of food cupboards and soup kitchens fail to coordinate.
And after introducing cost-cutting measures to stay afloat, the city's largest food bank, Philabundance, is currently at risk of losing almost half its members.
In other words, there's no way to be sure that when that moment comes — when the money is gone and the cupboard is closed — Ms. Riley will have food in her stomach.
A lot of ink has been spilled over the question of who the hungry are, so we'll make it quick: They're primarily poor people, and they're not so much hungry as they are, in the parlance of the industry, "food insecure" — unable to acquire enough food to meet basic needs. Some of these folks, like Ms. Riley, have been thrust unexpectedly into their situations; others have steady income through work or welfare that is just not sufficient to pay for rent, heat and other necessities. Since food is the most "elastic" expense — it can be obtained for free, cut back or postponed — it is the first to go. And when it goes, health, comfort and child development go with it.
There always seems to be some dispute over how many people are in this predicament. In Philadelphia, we know that thousands of people use food cupboards each month, and the Philadelphia Health Management Corporation recently conducted a survey finding that 254,000 people in the Delaware Valley have cut back on meals because of inadequate resources. But keeping count of people in need is technically difficult and hopelessly politicized.
In any case, there are more than enough of them. They can be found in line at the food pantries and soup kitchens that dot low-income neighborhoods like corner stores, where their presence stands as proof that society's first defense against hunger, government programs like WIC and food stamps, are not leading them out of the maze.
Ms. Riley was lucky to find her way to food stamps. She had been waiting for a check-up at a health clinic one afternoon when she overheard a young Asian woman asking another patient if she needed help with food. Curious, Ms. Riley went over to see what was going on and, before long, she and Jules Shen were huddled in a corner, a laptop perched on Shen's legs, going over Ms. Riley's financial information. "No bank accounts, no boats, no yachts," was Ms. Riley's summation. Shen determined that Ms. Riley was eligible for the maximum one-person benefit of $149 (for a household of four, the maximum is $499, though the benefit will increase slightly on Oct. 1), and completed Ms. Riley's paperwork for her, so that all Ms. Riley had to do was submit the application.
Shen, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, is a volunteer with the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger (GPCAH). Disturbed by low enrollment numbers in the food stamp program, the GPCAH, a nonprofit advocacy organization, dispatches outreach workers to find eligible persons and help them apply. Many of the people they find incorrectly believe they are ineligible, so they never even pursue this path to food. Others figure they're eligible, but have heard that the minimum benefit is $10 a month, which doesn't seem worth the complicated eight-page application (formerly 16 pages) and condescending treatment from bureaucrats. So they dead-end there. And though the number of eligible-but-unenrolled Philadelphians has dropped by about 35,000 over the last four years, according to GPCAH director Karen Wilson, there are still 65,000 out there not collecting the benefit, contributing to the millions of dollars of federal funding not coming in to Philadelphia.
Over her first three days waiting for her benefits to be processed, Ms. Riley ate twice at the 63rd Street soup kitchen — and that's it. On the fourth day, Monday, her "stamps," now in the form of a debit card, came through. This was faster than the five days allowed for expedited stamps, and much faster than the standard 30-day wait. But even then she wasn't home free.
On Tuesday, Ms. Riley sat smiling in her West Philly apartment, where a plate of clean chicken bones with a film of red sauce suggested a satisfying recent meal. She had lost 10 pounds during the previous few weeks, so she'd spent the bulk of her stamps on meat, and frozen it. But the maximum food stamp benefit only comes out to about $1.65 per meal, and meat eats up those dollars quickly. I asked Ms. Riley if she'd have enough to last the month. She predicted that she would; she said she ate like a rabbit.
CARRYING CHARGE: Though food cupboard supplies are meant for emergencies, some people use them on a regular basis. Photo By: Michael T. Regan |
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One woman I met at a food cupboard told me that she didn't even bother trying to budget her food stamps: She went to the grocery store, sold the stamps at 20 percent off, and picked up her food free from cupboards. Others spend their stamps on food, but run out of them. The next time I saw Ms. Riley, her stamps were gone, part of them spent on crabs' legs, for which, she says, she had a jones.
"I have to treat myself," she explained.
So, on top of everything else, giving in to a strong desire after a great period of want meant that, before the month was out, she would have to pursue a different path to food.
Roy Washington is blind, hungry and raving mad. A 54-year-old man with a slight chest and small sack of a belly, Roy is usually of even temperament — the type to sit and smile while people nearby have screaming arguments.
"Only thing that's fantastic about my life is the good God's blessing to wake up in the morning," he says.
But recently, Roy ran out of food and money, and the cupboards in his neighborhood were closed. He called every church he could think of. No luck. Desperate, he called the city, which referred him to a state emergency hotline, which told him that Crusaders for Christ Church in Southwest Philadelphia would be serving — two days later. Now he is sitting on line, having walked 30 blocks (with the help of a neighbor) to collect a bag of canned goods. He is about to walk back.
"This is like a job," he fumes.
It is in turning to the soup kitchens and food cupboards that someone truly enters the bowels of the emergency food maze. Cupboards and kitchens began popping up all over the country in the early 1980s as a response to increased need during a recession; gradually, they assumed the burden of feeding people previously carried by the government. There are now hundreds of them in Philadelphia, many run by churches, and, in particular, black churches.
"This is our ministry," explains Gladys Allen, a church lady with a stately countenance who runs the food cupboard at Saint Paul's Baptist in North Philly.
Allen's is a fairly typical operation. She collects food from two sources. One is SHARE, a nonprofit food network that distributes state-subsidized food and provides nonperishables, which Allen picks up herself. The second is Philabundance, which provides produce, individually packaged juices and Tastykakes. These are delivered by truck. Allen handles all the paperwork (many cupboards have shut down because the older volunteers who ran them could no longer muster the time and energy), and recruits a few volunteers to help sort the food into grocery bags. There's not a lot of refrigerator space, so everything must go. If that means handing two pints of strawberries and a bag of grapes to a homeless person on the hottest day in August, so be it.
On Wednesday mornings, a line forms outside Saint Paul's. Many guests come from within the neighborhood, but Allen receives people from all over the city. The supplicants join in a prayer, give their names and then go on their way with two or three days' worth of food. Technically, they're not supposed to return for another month.
What this means for the food insecure is that finding a cupboard, figuring out when it's open, and getting there at the right time can be a challenge, especially if you work. If you find a cupboard, you get two days' worth of food for 30 days. The system is meant to serve people in emergencies — like Ms. Riley — while discouraging dependence. But the cupboards don't advertise, and more importantly, they have a regular clientele.
"It has become a maintenance system," says Steveanna Wynn, executive director of SHARE.
The people who use cupboards don't need help in emergencies; they are in a perpetual state of emergency. And instead of revisiting one or two cupboards, they have to mix and match to put together a month's worth of food.
Standing on line at West Bethlehem Baptist in West Philly, Roy tries to keep track of all the cupboards that the man next to him is listing. "Forty-second and Parrish, they closed for August," the man says. "Forty-third and Wyalusing, you can eat all you want. I gotta hit this one here, and 40th and Fairmount."
When you're hungry, Roy explains, food is all you can think of — which may be why keeping track of cupboards can become an obsession. Roy really wants to find a cupboard that will give him some meat. He's heard that a cupboard up the street, open later this morning, gave out pigs' feet last week, but he's already been at this one for two hours, and he's at the front of the line. He decides to gamble and hope he can still make it to the other on time.
"As fate would have it, we'll leave here and the [Philabundance] van will show up," he says.
Wynn says that cupboard-hoppers like Roy Washington are rare. According to data SHARE collects from its member cupboards, only one percent of cupboard users go to more than one per month. This statistic seemed unlikely to me after listening to the networking on food lines, or seeing a whole line of people walk from one cupboard to the next. All the cupboard users I spoke to said they went to more than one cupboard, with just one exception. Lisa Johnson, an unemployed woman trying to get on disability, said she would go to more places if she knew of them. Many cupboard operators shared my impression that their clients used more than one cupboard.
Some people cupboard-hop with a passion. Sheryl Johnson, a, small, effervescent woman who has struggled with drug abuse, is what you might call a maven of emergency food. She carries a crumpled green spiral notebook filled with the names, locations and hours of cupboards and kitchens throughout the city. She goes to "at least" two or three a week, she says, though "when I had my car it was more like bam-bam-bam." She still makes sure to get to the tastier soup kitchens every time they serve and suggests that people who don't travel like she does are "too lazy to get up and get their own."
Many people don't realize they're eligible for food stamps. Here is the maximum monthly income that households of various sizes can have and still be eligible for the benefit. *The monthly income limit will rise slightly on Oct. 1. Call the Food Stamp Hotline, 215-430-0556, for more information. Illustration By: Hyacinth Hughes |
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Johnson is the type of cupboard-hopper who inspires a fear that people hop because they can, not because they must — the emergency food manifestation of Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen." But the general feeling among coordinators is that she is the exception — which makes you wonder whether the rules in place to stop somebody like her are disproportionate to the problem.
As Roy continues to wait, people start walking by with bags; the other cupboard has begun serving. Upon hearing this, Roy shakes his head. He'd bet wrong.
He ends up making it to the second cupboard in time, but they're not serving pig's feet, or any other meat.
"I gotta come back last week," he grumbles as he walks out. Somehow, this makes perfect sense.
Roy is grateful to the people who run the cupboards. "They give you a nice dinner and a bag of food — and the roof is leaking!" he says of a church near his home. And, of course, they're doing good work. But the fact is that, in their decentralized, volunteer-run form, cupboards and kitchens just don't have the resources to serve their communities adequately.
Perhaps the best evidence of this chaos is the once-a-month rule. Time and again, cupboard operators told me that this was a SHARE regulation, that they tried to follow it, but that, if someone showed up hungry at their church, they felt obligated to serve them anyway. However, once-a-month is not a SHARE rule; it is just widely imagined to be. So, operators are actually stealthily breaking a rule that doesn't exist.
It's not that nobody's trying to organize the local emergency-food system. It's that no one can control the little old ladies who run the kitchens and cupboards.
Philabundance, which combined operations with the Philadelphia Food Bank in January, is the biggest name in town when it comes to emergency food. It collects millions of pounds of food each year through donations and discount purchases, then sells it to distributors at very low prices (the company also charges membership and delivery fees).
The CEO of Philabundance is Bill Clark, a Wharton graduate who made his bones in the food business, starting the successful Bean Cuisine franchise before coming to this position in late 2001. Clark is a businessman through and through.
His vision for improving food distribution is to use the rules of the market. The emergency food system, he says, could learn a lot from emergency medicine. When someone who can't pay comes into an emergency room, he gets treated, and the hospital recoups its losses by profiting off of paying customers. Clark would like to see a food co-op that sells food to some customers, gives it away to others, and offers discounts to those who shop with food stamps. The co-op would be able to compete with supermarkets because, like Philabundance, it would solicit donations of surplus food.
With such a system, says Clark, "I could get [food] to you cheaper than any grocery store on the East Coast."
He is trying to implement this philosophy in one of Philabundance's warehouses, but first he needs to deal with another market principle: Sustainability. Before the merger, both the Food Bank and Philabundance had lost money for three years running, so Clark has had to introduce various cost-cutting measures, including raising the price of food and deliveries and implementing a "sliding scale" membership fee that makes certain foods available only to higher-paying customers. These reforms have created a grassroots discontent among distributors.
"Things at the Food Bank have changed," says Annette Hall, of Redeem Baptist Church. "We pay out of pocket now." Several other operators echoed these complaints, with more than one citing rotting produce as a problem and voicing distrust for the provider. Philabundance is "becoming more like a business," one said.
The fallout is striking. In June, Philabundance sent out its annual renewal package to member organizations. Three months after the initial deadline, only about 475 of the 800 cupboards and kitchens have renewed. Of those that haven't, Clark says, more than 100 are in debt to the distributor for a total of about $35,000.
It's not yet clear how big a problem this poses. About 10 percent of Philabundance's members distribute 90 percent of its food, and Clark doesn't know whether any of the bigs are among those who haven't renewed. He does know, however, that the cuts are necessary.
canned good: CEO Bill Clark thinks a Philabundance co-op could compete with supermarkets . Photo By: Michael T. Regan |
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"We can't go out of business," he explains. "We have an obligation for good times and bad."
SHARE, a nonprofit that distributes government-subsidized food to about 500 cupboards, hasn't even made any changes, but runs into problems trying to enforce its rules. In an effort to prevent cupboard-hopping mayhem, SHARE asked cupboards to turn away people from outside their ZIP codes, but many cupboard directors won't cooperate.
"I have too much compassion for these folks," says Deacon Harry "Buddy" Wise, of the Church of the Redeemer Baptist.
The problem is clear: It's terribly hard to impose the efficiency of a market on a group of volunteers. They're already making big sacrifices. If things get tougher, they might just go home. Nor can the burden be easily shifted to the government. For years now, says Wilson of the GPCAH, cupboards and kitchens have been providing the government with an excuse not to assume responsibility.
This is a tragedy, she says, because "food is a basic human right," and if you leave the job to charities, eating becomes a gift that the rich give the poor.
So what can be done? If the government won't take responsibility because charities are feeding people, that means the little old ladies have to stop feeding people. And Lord knows, that's not going to happen.
Wilson says that the middle ground is to have the distributors complement their charity with activism. But that would require organizing them, and when the GPCAH has its monthly meetings, fewer than 30 cupboards are represented. Most just don't have extra time to put into something not directly related to running their operation.
To say that we have a logistical crisis is not to make excuses for society; hunger amidst abundance is a scandal. But saying that the problem is simple (people don't care) suggests a simple solution (everyone should care more). And the solution is about more than berating the Bush administration for cuts to the food stamp program — though that's part of it. It's about more than more food.
It's about more volunteers, more refrigerators, more incentives for cupboard operators to cooperate (rather than disincentives not to), and, above all, a more user-friendly food system. Right now, it takes acumen and resources to navigate the maze. But many people in need are low-functioning. And if they had resources, well, they wouldn't need emergency food.
After I had done most of the research for this story, Ms. Riley called me up to ask a favor. She had scored two job interviews, but she needed tokens to get there. Giving things to sources is frowned upon in journalism, and, before beginning my reporting, I had debated what I would do if someone on a soup kitchen line asked me for money to buy food. To be honest, I hadn't really reached a conclusion. But it never came up. Ms. Riley didn't need food; she needed tokens to get to a job interview (I provided them). Later, she needed help writing a letter to the unemployment office, and Roy Washington needed a ride to a food cupboard. They needed help finding their way.
Ms. Riley got a job as a nurse's aid caring for hospice patients, but there were two weeks between the hiring and starting dates. Meanwhile, her request for unemployment benefits had been turned down, and she'd used up her food stamps.
For two more weeks, she was back in the maze.
Despite its problems, Philly's emergency food system puts food in a lot of bellies. And it depends on donations to keep going. Here's how to help out:
To find a food cupboard or soup kitchen in your neighborhood, visit www.ndsarch.org/rghome.asp.
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