Senator Kerry and Paul Knarr, the food drive coordinator for Branch 51 of the U.S. Postal Service, recently penned an editorial for the Fall River newspaper the Herald News about the dire straights many Massachusetts food pantries are in this year. The article mentions a food collection drive being run by local letter carriers at local post offices across the Commonwealth.

Although originally scheduled to run only through Sat May10th, the Post Office has extended their collection efforts through Saturday, May17th. The need is great this year, as the editorial pointed out: Call your local post office and see if they are participating in this food collection effort and, if so, please see if you can drop a few items off. It will make a big difference.

This is a section of the editorial that ran last Saturday:

Helping out our food pantries is more important this year than it’s been in a long time. To paraphrase an old saying, when grocery shoppers get a cold, food banks get the flu. And this year, things aren’t looking good. Rising food prices lead to increased demand, decreased donations and increased operating costs — a lethal threesome that makes tough times even tougher.

That’s where we find ourselves today. Groceries are increasingly expensive: According to The Greater Boston Food Bank, the price of spaghetti is up 63 percent from a year ago. Canned peaches are up 57 percent. Peanut butter is up 19 percent. Overall, the cost of food at home is up 18 percent since January 2003.

So it’s no surprise that more and more families struggling to make ends meet are turning to food banks when they can no longer afford their groceries. Food banks are preparing for a 30 percent increase in requests for help. The Greater Boston Food Bank found that more than 95 percent of the agencies it works with have seen an increase in demand.

Meanwhile, donations to food banks have declined by 9 percent, 52 percent of agencies have run out of food at some time in the past year, and 58 percent reported a drop in donations.

It’s also more expensive to operate food pantries. About 82 percent of agencies said they were having difficulty buying protein; 52 percent were struggling to buy vegetables. Consider this: Last year, food banks distributed more than 30,000 turkeys on Thanksgiving. But the wholesale price of a pound of turkey is up 38 percent, and pantries are being asked to help more people when the same dollar buys far less food than it did just one year ago. At the same time, food banks are struggling with the rising food and health costs that all of us face. To quote the president of the Greater Boston Food Bank, which offers 20 million meals to 320,000 people every year, “We’re in hard times.” That means millions of people, including hundreds of thousands here in Massachusetts, rely on food banks to survive. No one should go hungry because Washington fails to see the urgency of the problem.


Additionally, the editorial mentioned what kinds of items are, and are not, being collected:

"The kind of items they’re looking for are canned meats, fish, soup, juice, pasta, vegetables, cereal and rice. Unfortunately, they can’t accept items in glass containers or perishable items, like milk, eggs or anything that spoils quickly. "

###