The sprawling brick warehouse near Midway Airport that stocks Cook County’s food pantries bustles with activity as workers load 110,000 pounds of meat, vegetables and canned goods a day onto a fleet of 25 trucks. With demand up 12 percent this year, the Greater Chicago Food Depository has gone into overdrive to make sure enough food is delivered to nearly 600 pantries and other agencies.
Work has become more costly as the price of diesel for the trucks has surged to nearly $4.60 a gallon in Illinois.
And at a time when the food depository is struggling to make up for a drop in donations, it also has been forced to pay $34,000 more for fuel this year.
“These trucks have big tanks,” Kate Maehr, the executive director of the agency, said last week as she surveyed the loading. “It’s been a huge financial hit.”
Spiraling gas and fuel prices, along with rising food costs, are behind dwindling donations, which are at a four-year low. Feeling the impact of these costs, the federal government and food retailers, manufacturers and distributors cannot afford to donate as much to pantries as they once did.
The depository has been forced to use financial contributions to purchase food, shelling out $3 million this year, compared with $200,000 in 2002. Food pantries were heartened last week when Congress passed a five-year, $307 billion farm bill, which includes more funding for food banks. The Federal Emergency Food Assistance Program, in which the federal government buys surplus food from farmers and donates it to pantries, has been a crucial source for the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
But in the last five years, the program’s budget has remained flat, and with rising food prices, the amount of assistance for the depository has dropped from 13 million pounds of food in 2004 to 6 million pounds this year.
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Major supplier
The Greater Chicago Food Depository serves 600 member pantries, soup kitchens and shelters in Cook County. It anticipates distributing 44 million pounds of food this year, up from 40 million last year.
