|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
(By Sara Miles) San Francisco’s reputation as a food mecca is well-earned: farmers’ markets spill over with the bounty of the region: dazzling arrays of fresh fruits, sparkling seafood, exotic vegetables. Creative chefs around the city offer everything from platters of spicy Afghan delicacies to French pastries, Korean ten-course meals and vegetarian feasts - not to mention the perfect burrito. Handmade goat cheese, artisanal olive oil, heirloom organic peaches - no wonder we’re proud to be seen as foodie heaven.
Yet access to food varies radically by neighborhood and income. Some poor areas are served only by corner liquor stores selling cigarettes, Slim Jims and potato chips. In the worst ghettos it seems easier to buy drugs than to find a fresh tomato. Often, the nearest supermarket is too far to walk to, and means a long bus ride for someone juggling toddlers and shopping bags; there’s nowhere to buy regular food at decent prices, nowhere to get a dozen apples or a sack of potatoes. Among the poorest communities, almost everyone is overweight, and suffering from diabetes. Most poor kids live on chips and ramen noodles from the corner store, and french fries when an older sibling with some cash makes a run to McDonald’s.
The 2005 Census shows that more than 150,000 people in San Francisco live with the threat of hunger. Most of the people at risk are the “working poor” and their children, who often have to choose between paying the rent and buying enough food. Astronomical housing prices mean that a minimum wage earner would have to work 61 hours a week just to pay the rent on a one- bedroom apartment in San Francisco, leaving nothing for other expenses. Many poor families, even with both parents working, rely on school lunches to feed their kids.
There are hundreds of food programs around the city - but they are not always convenient for working families. Since 1987, the nonprofit San Francisco Food Bank, in collaboration with a wide range of churches and community centers, has set up 159 neighborhood food pantries as a way to offer people the chance to choose their own groceries, and prepare healthy food at home to eat with their families. These provide people with a wide variety of free, nutritious groceries: fruits and vegetables, rice, beans, cereal, pasta, eggs, dairy and dry goods. Food pantries can help keep families together, and give them a sense of normalcy and dignity as they work to escape poverty.
Food pantries like the one at St Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, which serves more than 450 families each week, is an example. The great majority of our clients are working families with children, but we also serve day laborers, the elderly, veterans, and sick and disabled people. Our clients are from every ethnic and racial background, including immigrants and U.S.-born, Latino, African-American, white, Chinese, Vietnamese, African, Russian, Filipino, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern and Native American. St. Gregory’s Food Pantry is run entirely by volunteers, almost all of them people who came to get groceries and stayed to help out. We have trained and empowered over a hundred volunteers, giving them important work experience and helping them become active participants in the fight against hunger. The pantry is not supported by the church budget, but raises all its own money. We buy food for just pennies a pound from the San Francisco Food Bank, which collects donated food from growers, manufacturers and grocers and delivers it to our door each week. Astonishingly, the Food Bank can turn one dollar into nine dollars worth of food, because of economies of scale and soliciting donated food.
San Francisco Food Bank-supported food pantries like St. Gregory’s are amazingly cost-efficient: just $200 will provide healthy groceries for a family for an entire year. A pantry that serves 100 families each week can expect to spend about $5,000 a year on food with the remaining $15,000 underwritten by the San Francisco Food Bank. Most pantries require very little in the way of start-up capital: a few hundred dollars will buy folding tables, shelves for storage, a hand truck and some basic supplies (bags, twine, etc.) The benefits in nutrition and health, and in family stability, are remarkable.
And yet the need continues to grow. The model, as we see it, works beautifully: what’s needed is more locations, so that more hungry families can find healthy food in their own communities. In the last few years, St. Gregory’s and the San Francisco Food Bank have worked to support the Healthy Children Initiative, which uses public elementary schools as food pantry sites. The program distributes fresh fruits, vegetables, pasta, yogurt and other items every week to parents when they drop off or pick up their children at school. Parents volunteer, building links with the school; children learn about nutrition; families are able to eat meals together instead of resorting to fast-food on the fly, and children get the nutrition they need to succeed.
And yet the school district has been slow to embrace the model. Although several school-based pantries have managed to open and thrive, the city desperately needs to cut through the red tape that’s keeping every elementary school from having a food pantry. The cost is low, the logistics are simple, and the need is great. For a city so centered on food, the opportunity is compelling.
Note: Articles are posted for the purpose of generating ideas and honest debate on how San Francisco can live up to its full promise and potential. Posting of an article does not imply an endorsement by the author of Gavin Newsom for Mayor, nor an endorsement by Gavin Newsom for Mayor of the positions set forth in the article.
- : 9.0
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
February 24th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Now we’re talking!
This is (finally) an article to be proud of on this website.
While we’re at it, let’s find something for the now-housed-homeless to do during the day.
They are in supportive housing at night, but go back to doing aggressive panhandling wandering in traffic lanes during the day.
If they had some fruitful occupation to keep them off the streets, they could feel beter about themselves, we would feel better, and the City would be better for it.
It’d be a win-win-win situation!