When Ends Don't Meet

Food prices are going up. Food stamp allowances aren't.

by Tom Namako

on our watch

Michael T. Regan HARD TIMES: Vanessa Younger works in exchange for discounted food. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Wilson Robinson usually eats his own food on the first of the month. That's when the 65-year-old gets his Social Security check and food stamp card, and hobbles — he's on a cane — into the local grocery store to buy staples: milk, bread, eggs, chicken, vegetables and maybe, if he's feeling a bit indulgent, something sweet.

These groceries, along with a few subsidies, are supposed to last until the next first of the month. But they rarely do. That's why the busiest time for food pantries and soup kitchens is the end of the month, when people are waiting, cupboards bare, for their next check. Robinson has been on this routine for years now. This March, though, he was forced to go to the pantry a week earlier than usual. Soon afterward, he was traveling to soup kitchens for lunch almost every day. On the first of this month, Robinson ate ham and vegetables in the small auditorium of West Philadelphia's Resurrection Baptist Church.

He wasn't alone. There were about 20 people at Resurrection that day — a startling number for the beginning of the month, says Harriet Sanders, the church's director of outreach.

"This is a problem worldwide," Sanders says, mentioning food riots in Somalia and Haiti, "and we've got to deal with our own version."

As you've no doubt heard or noticed, food prices are going up — both around the world and here in Pennsylvania. According to figures in the 2008 Self-Sufficiency Standard of Pennsylvania, which has not yet been published, food costs in the state during the past two years rose $40 per month for a single adult household, $60 for an adult and preschooler and $100 for an adult, school-age and teenage child.

This affects everyone, of course, but is particularly hard for people on fixed incomes, who have just enough to pay bills and expenses.

"The [food] stamps aren't buying what they used to," says Robinson.

Indeed, there hasn't been a major revision of food stamp regulations since 2002. And since Robinson has no wiggle room — he can't decide to spend less on rent and more on groceries — he's compensating by going to pantries, and by employing what he calls his "rule of half": "When my milk is half gone," he says, "I fill it back up with water and it holds on a bit longer. I hold myself to smaller portions. When I bring chicken breasts home, the first thing I do is cut them all in half."

Robinson hopes he won't have to live like this much longer. But right now, things aren't looking good. The people trying to remedy the situation are struggling either with politics, or with the very economic woes that made Robinson's situation so hard in the first place.

There's a vast blacktop parking lot outside the Self-Help and Resource Exchange (SHARE) Food Program's warehouse in Tioga, where small trucks and vans with church names painted on the side come to replenish the supplies for the pantries and soup kitchens.

Usually, dozens of vehicles snake from the loading dock out onto Rising Sun Avenue. On May 1, there are only four.

"The vendors [who provide SHARE's food] are late getting food here because of gas prices," says Eloise McBride, SHARE's program director. "They're cutting back on trips," she adds. This delays pantries from getting their food.

The outlook isn't much better across the city, at the Philabundance food center in South Philadelphia. Executive Director William Clark says the warehouse is usually 80 percent stocked at this time of year. Right now, it's at 60 percent.

"We're struggling," he says. "A lot of agencies ask me for certain products that we don't have. The result is that a lot of agencies have to put less food in [pantry] boxes for people to take home."

Clark attributes the slowdown to economic forces that common citizens have no control over: gas prices, immigrant labor laws, the euro's strength against the dollar.

With food prices high and pantries low, people are turning to the federal government for help. It could come in the form of the Farm Bill, a massive, heavily lobbied piece of legislation that sets the income levels a family needs to qualify for food stamps, and determines how big a subsidy they'll get. The bill needs to be renewed every five years. The most recent incarnation expired in 2007; Congress has been "extending" it until it can pass a new one.

As currently proposed, the new Farm Bill would be a "significant improvement," according to Sydelle Zove, advocacy coordinator at the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger: It would increase the minimum food stamp benefit and send more funding to food pantries (of course, the bill is not law, and could change at any time). But President Bush keeps threatening to veto it over farmer subsidies.

Clark finds the impasse frustrating. "It's an afterthought, like, 'Oh, there's this thing called food stamps,'" he says.

The state isn't helping much, either. Granted, Pennsylvania is one of the few states with a program that, according to its mission, "provides cash grants to counties for the purchase and distribution of food to low-income individuals." But Gov. Rendell suggested no change in funding amidst rising food costs in his most recent budget proposal (people like Zove are lobbying the state to increase the program from $17 million to $22 million).

Even if one of these changes can be brought about, the relief won't be immediate: Pennsylvania's budget hearings don't usually heat up until June. As for the federal bill, it took about four months for food stamp changes to take effect the last time a Farm Bill was passed, according to Jean Daniel, spokesperson for the USDA Food and Nutrition Service.

In the meantime, Philadelphians on food stamps continue to wait, and improvise. Vanessa Younger, 45, volunteers every day at SHARE's warehouse, answering phones and doing clerical work while she looks for a job in data entry.

There's no money involved, but there is sustenance. SHARE sells bags of groceries valued at $35 for $18 and two hours of community service. Younger logs nearly 30 hours a week here; the food she earns, along with more than $200 in food stamps, is just enough for her and her 9-year-old to make it through the month.

It's tough, however, walking such a thin line. Younger has a college age-son who visits home frequently. "When he's back," she says, "well, those are the weeks I really fall far behind."

(tom.namako@citypaper.net)