Food banks help as more in Monroe become hungry

September 6, 2011

More Pennsylvanians are having difficulty affording food, a recent study says. And local charities and food banks resoundingly concur with that conclusion.

About 20 percent of all Pennsylvanians said they had trouble affording food for themselves and their families, according to the study conducted by Gallup and the Food Research and Action Center.

The study, conducted between 2008 and 2010, divided Pennsylvania into 19 regions. It rated each region based on the number of residents who reported having trouble affording food.

The region encompassing Monroe County ranked fourth worst of the 19; the region encompassing Pike County didn’t do much better, ranking eighth worst.

“That’s no surprise,” said Kate Newman, director of Bushkill Outreach, a food bank. “The number of people coming through our doors has been going up, for sure.”

Newman said her center usually experiences a lull in the number of people it serves between January and April. But this year, she said, the number of people it serves has increased each month since January.

Researchers for the study asked over one million Pennsylvanians the question: “Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?”

About 25 percent of respondents who live in the region encompassing Monroe County, a region that also includes Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton, answered yes.

“What we’re seeing in recent years are people that had been making $45,000 to $50,000 a year and then, boom, they lose their job and are flabbergasted and just don’t know where to turn,” said Jill Brink, food pantry coordinator at the Salvation Army in East Stroudsburg.

In addition, some local food banks said they are serving more and more people who make just enough money to disqualify them from being eligible for food stamps.

According to the study, the region in Pennsylvania that encompasses parts of southern and central Philadelphia and Delaware County rated the worst, meaning it had the highest number of respondents say they had difficulty paying for food.

The region that rated the best was the one that included Bucks County, northeast Philadelphia and parts of Montgomery County.

Though the study was conducted between 2008 and 2010, things still don’t look good: The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics said in its monthly Consumer Price Index report that the price of nearly all major foods in metropolitan areas in the U.S. rose in July. The price of dairy and fruit products rose most dramatically.

Source: by Chad Smith, Pocono Record