MANCHESTER, NH – A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people seeking food in New Hampshire remains high.
Case in point: On Friday morning, in the massive parking lot of Comcast on East Industrial Drive, cars – five across and 20 deep – were lined up waiting to obtain a 30-pound box of food at the state’s largest Mobile Food Pantry.
Since COVID-19, there are now about 1-in-7 men, women and children in New Hampshire who do not know where they will get their next meal, according to Feeding America’s annual Map the Meal Gap study and estimated projections of the local impact of the novel coronavirus.
In New Hampshire, a projected 55,000 more people are food insecure or more than 181,090 across the state. Of those, 21 to 23 percent are estimated to be children living in food-insecure environments because of COVID-19.
Eileen Liponis, executive director of the New Hampshire Food Bank which held the mobile food pantry, said the number of people seeking food during the pandemic has remained steady. No one from the food bank asks those seeking provisions about their circumstances but, she said, anecdotally they are seeing more people who never sought help before. She believes that is due to people being laid off and the reduction in unemployment benefits.
“Today we distributed 44,821 pounds to 291cars, 590 households, 2,139 people,” Liponis said in an email sent later Friday afternoon. “In 2020 we had 71 mobile food pantries serving just under 30,000 families just under 2 million pounds of food.”
Nearly 50 percent of N.H. adults reported someone in their household lost their job between March and July 2020, according to the U.S Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey. And, with people losing jobs, comes the loss of housing and the need to move in with other family members – parents, siblings, children. Thus, the need for more food per household.
She said the largest number of families they served at the Comcast location was 700. She said on Friday they had plenty of food to take care of that many families and if there were more in need, the food bank’s headquarters was just down the street so it would be a quick run to replenish the supply.
In the first 15 minutes it was open, dozens of cars had already had their trunks and/or back seats filled with 30-pound boxes of food, which included dairy products (milk, sour cream) vegetables, hot dogs, grain, along with eggs and black beans. As cars drove off with their food, more entered the lot to take their place in line.
Last year, the food bank ran into a problem when the U.S. Department of Agriculture switched its provider of the Farmers to Families Food Box, a program that began last May, to a supplier from Delaware. The result was sub-standard food. Liponis said they have a new supplier now and the food is better. It doesn’t match the best quality they were receiving but she believes that is because the USDA is paying suppliers less for the food.
It has been 27 years since the food bank opened. That first year it distributed 250,000 pounds of food to those in need across the state. Last year, it distributed 17.7 million pounds of non-perishable food, fresh produce and meats to more than 400 non-profit food agencies in the state.
If you would like to help end hunger in N.H., you can make a donation online at https://nhfoodbank.org/donation-hub.
If you’d prefer making a credit card donation over the phone, call: 603-669-9725.
If you’d like to mail your donation, please make your check payable to New Hampshire Food Bank and mail to:
New Hampshire Food Bank
700 East Industrial Park Drive
Manchester, NH 03109
.
