THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

As many of us look forward to stuffing ourselves into a stupor on Thursday, The New York Times takes a moment to tell us about the New York City Food Bank.

There is virtually no more immediate way to affect the lives of the poor than to give to the agencies that help feed them, especially now when need has so greatly escalated. As a result of cuts to SNAP, the federal food stamp program, which went into effect on Nov. 1 (and precede further potential reductions of $4 billion to $40 billion), food pantries are already experiencing mounting burdens. One of the city’s largest, the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger in Brooklyn, has seen more than a one-third increase this month in the number of people coming in, compared with November of last year. Another, the New York Common Pantry in East Harlem, was seeing a 25 percent rise during the five months before the cuts.

Even before the cuts went into effect, matching supply with demand presented wounding challenges. According to a study of emergency food program participation released by the Food Bank last month, there are 100,000 more New Yorkers relying on these services today than six years ago, while there are fewer pantries to serve them. In another sign of distress, the term “emergency” now seems misapplied.

When the Food Bank was created in 1983, its founders foresaw a life span of merely a decade or so, in which the organization would primarily serve homeless men. Instead it functions today largely to assist working families, Margarette Purvis, its president, said, and 60 percent of those surveyed for the Food Bank’s study reported that they had been coming to a particular soup kitchen or pantry for more than a year. This notion that hunger has come to exist as the status quo is reflected in a 2010 analysis conducted by the national organization Feeding America, which supplies food to local food banks. The study revealed that the majority of clients in the group’s network were visiting food pantries not for temporary assistance but for continuing sustenance.

And sustenance is broadly defined. If you visit the New York Common Pantry on a Wednesday morning, you are quite likely to find men lined up for haircuts, as pantries find themselves forced to evolve into purveyors of more than groceries and sandwiches. The poor have come to depend on pantries for diapers, shampoo, paper towels, toothpaste — the sorts of products that are costly, necessary and typically not covered by food stamps...

In this country at this time of year, many of us are called to the food drive, the ritual of delivering canned cranberries, or turkeys or breads to a designated location from which they must be transported to a warehouse and then sorted, edited and so on. This, too, isn’t quite as simple as it may seem, presenting the problem of what Ms. Purvis calls “high touch,” the involvement of too many hands driving up costs and reducing efficiency.

As it happens, there is little to surpass the efficiency of money. While it may feel more intimately virtuous, more morally instructive, to tell a small child that you’ll be packing up food for the needy and taking it to school, it may ultimately be more effective just to have that child sit and watch you write a check.

This is about New York City, but the problems are the same all across the country, only the scale is different. If you want to help and don't know how or where, FEEDING AMERICA.org can help you.