Phila., PA -- Thirty percent of adults in southeast Pennsylvania and 19 percent of their children miss meals each month because they do not have enough food or money to buy food, according to a comprehensive survey on hunger in America, released today by Second Harvest, the national network of food banks.
These and other local statistics about hunger in southeastern Pennsylvania, were compiled by the Greater Philadelphia Food Bank, the local Second Harvest affiliate, as part of its participation in Second Harvest's most comprehensive national study on emergency feeding programs to date.
Other startling local results include: 82% of clients served by emergency feeding programs that receive food from the Food Bank have no other resources for food other than agency or government food programs, that 78% of households receiving food from emergency food programs have an annual household income below $10,000, that 26% have no stove for cooking and 46% have no telephone and 89% have no car. Furthermore, while 50% of clients receive food stamps, 76% reported that food stamps do not last the entire month. Compounding the concerns raised by this survey is the fact that it was conducted in winter 1997, before most food stamp and public assistance cuts were implemented in Pennsylvania.
Contrary to public opinion that most people who go hungry in this region are homeless, only 13% of the clients surveyed were homeless. Forty-three percent of households, however, reported having to choose between paying their rent or mortgage and buying food.
Second Harvest, the national network of 185 food banks of which the Greater Philadelphia Food Bank is the local affiliate, presented the findings of "Hunger: The Faces and the Facts," the most comprehensive study to date about the state of hunger in this country at a press conference in Chicago, its headquarters city.
This is the second major national hunger study undertaken by Second Harvest, the first being in 1993. Both studies compiled data gathered from the thousands of charitable feeding programs served by the food bank nationwide network, identifying whom food banks serve and the impact of distribution of millions of pounds of donated food.
The Greater Philadelphia Food Bank is the largest distributor of donated food to charitable organizations that feed the needy throughout Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties. Each year, the Food Bank distributes an average of eight million pounds of food to 700 shelters, emergency food cupboards, soup kitchens, and other programs that feed nearly 310,000 needy households in southeastern Pennsylvania.
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Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)