With many area food pantries reporting a jump this fall in the number of needy people seeking emergency food, the Greater Boston Food Bank said yesterday that it was able to collect donations of 38,216 turkeys for Thanksgiving, up nearly 8 percent from last year.
The increased contributions are timely. Several area pantries and antipoverty programs the organization supplies in 190 Eastern Massachusetts communities are reporting increases of 5 to 30 percent over last year in the number of people seeking food help, food bank spokeswoman Stephanie Nichols said.
Also, Massachusetts legislators cut by $1 million, or 8 percent, the funding for state-backed emergency food programs in the budget for the current fiscal year. Antipoverty activists fear that soaring prices for home heating oil - now averaging $3.17 a gallon in Massachusetts, up 35.5 percent from this time last year, according to a state survey - and a wave of mortgage foreclosures linked to the collapsing subprime mortgage market could force thousands more New Englanders to seek help getting enough food this winter.
"I think people all around are finding it hard to make ends meet, and I'm anticipating it getting worse through the winter as people have to choose between paying for food and paying for heat," said Pam Lamontagne, outreach coordinator for the St. Thomas Aquinas Parish Food
This month, facing growing demand and shrinking contributions, Lamontagne said, St. Thomas Aquinas decided to cut back its schedule from three days a week to two and ask that only residents of Derry, not surrounding towns, participate. A food drive last weekend led by local Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts yielded three truckloads of food, but Lamontagne said she anticipates a difficult winter.
"One other group that we find seems to be growing is grandparents who have taken in their grandchildren," but often "have their own issues of disabilities or being on fixed incomes" and need help to keep enough food on the table, Lamontagne said.
At First Congregational Church in North Adams, organizers of the Berkshire Food Project, which last year served 16,000 meals, saw enough chronic need that they increased their free lunch program last month to five days a week, from three. Berkshire welcomed 80 people Monday for an early Thanksgiving meal.
Ellen Parker - executive director of Project Bread/The Walk For Hunger, an East Boston organization that raises money for 400 food programs in 132 cities and towns - said solid annual figures won't be available before February. But she said it appears "the demand trend is upward."
"Programs are calling us that they are running out of food more often," Parker said.
Project Bread released a study earlier this month concluding that 7.8 percent of households in Massachusetts suffer from hunger or "food insecurity," meaning they lack money to buy an adequate diet of healthy and fresh food and often resort to cheaper, high-calorie, low-nutrient processed food. That figure was up from 6.4 percent two years ago.
"We still need to think about systematic change, how we work over the longer term to end hunger," Parker said.
But "it is wonderful that people make donations at Thanksgiving time," Parker added. "We really appreciate it, and it's an important thing to do."
A friendly competition between a supermarket giant and a Westwood charity helped the Greater Boston Food Bank handily exceed its goal of collecting 36,000 Thanksgiving turkeys.
Food bank president Catherine D'Amato said Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos. of Quincy gave the food bank 7,000 turkeys.
Last year Stop & Shop was nearly outdone by Turkeys4America.org, a Westwood charity set up by siblings Dan and Betsy Nally 11 years ago when they were just 8 and 6 years old respectively. Now the siblings, a Harvard College sophomore and a Westwood High School senior, have continued the campaign, which has provided over 3.5 million plates of Thanksgiving turkey since 1996.
This year,
That prompted Stop & Shop to raise its offer by several hundred birds.
