This article originally appeared on Politico and was authored by Sally Goldenberg.
Don Pollard/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo
NEW YORK — The fast-spreading coronavirus is squeezing the city’s food pantries and soup kitchens, with dozens closing across the five boroughs and crucial delivery volunteers staying inside as the number of homebound people in need of meals skyrockets.
The Food Bank For New York City, which supplies more than 1,000 pantries and soup kitchens, said 118 of those in its network suspended service as of Friday evening.
A food policy official with the de Blasio administration said at least 40 of the nearly 600 facilities the city funds have closed — some of which overlap with the Food Bank’s count.
The mayor’s team is finalizing a plan to deliver 150,000 meals daily, a more than eight-fold increase from its current tally, but as a nervous public stockpiles food, supplies are tightening and prices are surging.
Late Friday afternoon, a produce vendor canceled a delivery of 400,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables expected to arrive at the doors of the Met Council on Jewish Poverty, a prominent philanthropic organization that supplies 40 food pantries throughout the city.
“We are now scrambling to find a different vendor, but there’s no question that that’s going to cost us significantly more,” Met Council CEO David Greenfield told POLITICO, shortly after hearing the news.
The decades-old organization provides free kosher food to people of all faiths and was gearing up for a Passover distribution ahead of the April holiday when the virus took hold in the city. As of Friday evening, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office reported the coronavirus had infected 5,683 people and killed 43 in the city, and the count has been increasing by the hour.
Greenfield has been sounding the alarm this week about the one-two punch of rising food prices that puts his buyers in competition with behemoth corporations like Walmart and Costco, and a shortage of volunteers as people heed directives about leaving their homes. So far, Met Council has closed four of its 40 pantries and more of the seniors it serves are sheltering inside, he said.
“These low-income New Yorkers who are living hand to mouth, they’re not able to stock up their pantries like you and I are,” he said in an interview Thursday. “It’s nothing short of a crisis.”
Met Council is planning to package and deliver food from its Brooklyn warehouse on Sunday, since its regular pantries are too small for the “social distancing” guidelines in place to mitigate the spread of the virus.
In the past two weeks the organization spent $1.1 million more than it normally would to accommodate a 32-percent increase in demand and higher food prices, such as a 50-percent markup for canned tuna, Greenfield said. And that was before the cancellation of the massive produce order.
“We have people calling us, begging us, desperate, saying ‘I just lost my job, please give me food.’ What am I going to say? No?” he said.
Food providers like Met Council are seeking additional funds from state officials as they finalize their budget and they’re likely to seek relief from City Hall next.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said finding a solution to the problem is a “top priority.”
“The situation is dire,” he said Friday evening. “Time is of the essence.”
Lisa Hines-Johnson, chief operating officer at the city Food Bank, said Congress “took a much-needed step by passing the Families First Act,” which requires paid sick leave for certain employees isolated because of coronavirus. “Now we need them to focus on providing a strong safety net for low-income Americans,” she said.
Kate MacKenzie, who oversees food policy for the de Blasio administration, said City Hall is in talks with transit and delivery companies, such as Uber, Lyft and FedEx, to potentially get more meals delivered to low-income, homebound New Yorkers.
She said facilities that shut were lacking volunteers, and stressed she has seen no evidence of a food supply shortage.
“It’s a very fragile network in the best of times, and certainly this is taxing it,” she said in an interview Friday.
The challenge, she said, is getting food to people who are holed up in their apartments to avoid crowds, in keeping with city and state guidelines that have intensified over the week. While food shopping is considered a permissible outing, seniors and those with underlying health conditions are more vulnerable to the illness, for which there is no vaccine.
Governments generally set up large food distribution points in times of disaster, but MacKenzie said that is “out of the question right now.”
“Every time we think we’re close to a solution there’s another wrinkle that we need to solve for,” she said. The city will have a plan finalized early next week for ramping up home deliveries, she vowed: “We are sleeves rolled up thinking creatively to get people fed in ways that just we have never had to imagine before.”
