The holiday time of year is wrought with frustrations between family members but also full of good cheer and all that nice stuff. However, not everyone worries more about crazy Uncle Henry or Aunt Caryn. For many families, the big concern is having a Thanksgiving dinner at all. Food pantries and soup kitchens have always helped out those in need in the past. Now it is a different story. Thanks to the cuts from the Dept of Agriculture (within the Bush Administration of course) for 'discretionary spending' and an overwhelming amount of people that need assistance, many will go hungry this Thursday.
From The NYT Cityroom:
This is a week for turkey lotteries for the city’s food pantries. Though with declining federal support, some pantries are finding they have no turkeys to ration.
Demand at New York City food pantries and soup kitchens jumped by 20 percent in 2007, which together with diminishing federal resources, forced about half of surveyed food pantries and soup kitchens to ration their supplies this year, according to the annual survey released by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger today.
This year there were going to be no turkeys to lottery off at the Transfiguration Lutheran Church food pantry in the Bronx, because the amount of federal supplies they received dropped to about only a quarter of what it had been previously and turkeys was not part of their allocation from the Food Bank, a distribution hub for about 1,000 of the city’s food pantries.
“We’ve gone from a pantry which has given out very generous amounts of food to struggling to get a full bag to people,” Paul Block, the pastor said.
These heartbreaking tales go on all over New York and across the country. Thanks to our government that wants to drown itself in a bathtub, people are going hungry. Thats enough harping on Bush for the moment. The important thing is that if you have some items to spare, please bring them down to your local food bank so that all Americans can have something to eat this Thanksgiving.
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