Maine food banks see rapid increase in mouths to feed

PORTLAND – It appears that the number of people who are at risk of going hungry in Maine is on the rise.

“The food budget, we sometimes call it the most elastic thing,” said JoAn Chartier, public relations coordinator with the Good Shepherd Food Bank in Auburn. “You can’t negotiate with the power company about how much you’re going to spend that week.”

The costs of housing and health care in Maine outpaced income growth over the past five years with the median home price rising four times as much as the median income, according to a poverty report by the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its 2006 food security report, measuring the number of “food secure” households – those that had access at all times to enough food to live a “healthy, active lifestyle.”

For the period from 2004 to 2006, 12.9 percent of the households in Maine were recorded as having low or very low food security, compared with 11.3 percent nationwide. In the very low category, 5.3 percent of Maine households fit the definition, compared with 3.9 percent nationwide.

Maine, Louisiana and Mississippi had the largest increases in the rates of food insecurity from 2001-03 to 2004-06, according to the USDA’s findings.

“At Thanksgiving, you have all the volunteers you could possibly want. They have something to be thankful for and they want to give back,” Elena Schmidt, director of development for Preble Street in Portland, told a southern Maine newspaper. “But just as many people are hungry the next Thursday and the next Thursday. Hunger is not seasonal.”

Those in need are not limited to “the person who’s fallen on hard times,” she said.

“We’re talking about a whole society. People’s wages cannot keep up with the cost of living,” Schmidt said. “People try everything else [before the food pantry]. We’re the bottom of the barrel, when they have done every single thing they can and it still isn’t working.”

The Midcoast Hunger Prevention Program, serving residents in Brunswick, Topsham and surrounding communities, saw a 31 percent increase in the number of households using its food pantry from 2003 to 2007, with newcomers including many working families and senior citizens, said Terry Howell, the program’s director.

“They are people who were struggling [before], but the idea of going to a food pantry, they weren’t there yet,” Howell said. “Now they’re putting money for food into their gas can.”

The Good Shepherd Food Bank, which provides food and other necessities to various food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters across the state, ran out of turkey last Thanksgiving and was forced to put out a plea to the public, the paper reported.

This year, Good Shepherd started a food drive a couple of weeks ago in which individuals or companies pledged donations online.

“We realized we had to be smarter and more efficient this year,” Chartier said.

“It’s heartbreaking when a family can’t provide enough food through the week,” she said. “For some people, it’s heat or eat.”

Maine’s Emergency Food Assistance Program works with 263 organizations to provide food assistance throughout the state, and those organizations provided help to individuals 680,000 times in 2001 and 1.5 million times in 2006, according to Tim Drake, an assistant with the program.