> There are many poor people in America, but there aren't exactly many
> breadlines.
Oh for heaven's sake Chuck. In San Francisco when I was between temp assignments I stood in the line at St. Anthony's many a time w/ a good thousand souls at lunchtime. Here in downtown Denver, on a temp assignment for the RTD for the maintainance dept. we drived past a hellacious line around Noon in front of the church that feeds the homeless.
And because Colorado gave a contract to EDS to "streamline" the welfare and food stamps benefit system application process which has led to months of delays in hungry families getting their first booklet of food stamps (been on those too, as a single person I got a walloping $70 a month) the food pantries around XMAS time esp. appealed for donations above and beyond the usual from the public.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/fanrr29/
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/fanrr29/fanrr29d.pdf
> ...Community Food-Assistance Providers
Food pantries and emergency kitchens are the main direct providers of
emergency food assistance. These agencies are locally based and rely
heavily on volunteers. The majority of them are affiliated with faithbased
organizations. (See Ohls et al., 2002, for more information.) Most of the
food distributed by food pantries and emergency kitchens comes from local
resources, but USDA supplements these resources through The Emergency Food
Assistance Program (TEFAP). In 2000, TEFAP supplied 422 million pounds of
commodities to community emergency food providers. Over half of all food
pantries and emergency kitchens received TEFAP commodities in 2000, and
these commodities accounted for about 12 percent of all food distributed
by them (Ohls et al., 2002). Pantries and kitchens play different roles,
as follows:
• Food pantries distribute unprepared foods for off-site use. An estimated
32,737 pantries operated in 2000 and distributed, on average, 239 million
pounds of food per month. Households using food pantries received an
average of 38.2 pounds of food per visit.
• Emergency kitchens (sometimes referred to as soup kitchens) provide
individuals with prepared food to eat at the site. In 2000, an estimated
5,262 emergency kitchens served a total of 474,000 meals on an average day.
If William Ryan is still alive he should update his 60's left classic, "Blaming The Victim, " and entitle it, "Lefties who blame the victim."
-- Michael Pugliese