This week, 74-year-old Melba Maxwell went to the Longview Dream Center’s regular food pantry distribution on Gilmer Road.
She lives in the Upshur County area and finds help at the Dream Center with a problem affecting people across the country — the increasing price of food.
“Oh Lord, yes, absolutely,” she said, explaining that the food prices have affected what she can buy at the grocery store. “You go to the grocery store and it’s just … you think, can I afford it or do I need something else worse? You put it back. And this helps. I go to this place, and I go to another place. This helps you. Everything’s so expensive. I’m the only one in my family, but it helps me a lot.”
The agencies helping East Texans deal with that problem are feeling the pinch themselves — with more need, higher costs and a decrease in food donations.
“We’ve been seeing incredible numbers over the last two months,” said Shae Hight, operations manager for the Longview Dream Center. The nonprofit organization provides free food and clothing and other items to East Texans in need. “In saying that, donations are down.”
Sam’s Club, Walmart and Aldi, for instance, donate a variety of produce, meat and other items in daily pickups by the Dream Center, but Hight guessed it’s supply chain issues that have made those donation “super low.”
The Dream Center also purchases food from the East Texas Food Bank in Tyler. The Food Bank is the umbrella food distributor in a 26-county area for more than 200 food pantry or feeding programs. It’s an almost 20,000-square-mile area. The food programs purchase food from the food bank and then distribute it for free.
Hight said families can get a food box from the Dream Center once a month, with a supplemental food box available for seniors. Hight said the Dream Center is considering cutting back some of the amount of food in a food box — it’s about $200 worth of food right now — to be able to stretch the food to provide for more families.
The organization relies heavily on monetary donations and food donations to provide its services, she said.
“We’re looking at a lot of costs we incur along with the purchase of food,” she said. The large truck the Dream Center uses to pick up donations from grocery stores, for instance, runs on diesel gas. “$100 of diesel gas doesn’t go very far. We really depend on those monetary donations along with donations we’re getting from our regular pickups.”
The East Texas Food Bank is seeing increased need for the emergency food services it and its partner agencies provide “across the board,” with 17% of them reporting all-time highs in demands for service based on households served, Tim Butler said. Butler oversees food distribution services as the chief impact officer at the East Texas Food Bank.
The food bank distributes food in more than one way, to eliminate barriers to accessing emergency food, he said. That includes working with partner agencies that operate food pantries, for instance, and drive-thru distributions the organization started when COVID-19 first emerged.
“Those are certainly up compared to previous months,” Butler said. “We just did a distribution in Longview on the 8th in April and that was the most we’ve seen really since the beginning, since fall 2020.”
He sees a lot of reasons for that, but he said inflation is the main culprit. Inflation was at 8.5% in March specifically for energy, shelter and food costs, he said. Those are all challenges for people the organization serves.
“If all those things are high across the board, it’s just going to be exacerbated,” Butler said.
The organization isn’t cutting back on the amount of food it provides, but it is costing more.
In March, the East Texas Food Bank distributed 2.14 million pounds of food — the most since April 2021, Butler said.
“We’re still distributing quite a bit of food, just at a higher cost,” Butler said, which is why monetary and other donations are important.
He encouraged people who need help to visit easttexasfoodbank.org to find either food pantries or food distribution sites near them.
Kristi Buckrell, executive director of Longview Community Ministries, said the organization’s Food Box program is always in need of donations — monetary and actual food — but especially now that more Longview residents are needing assistance because of increasing food prices. In March, Longview Community Ministries served 828 households, including 74 that had never used the Food Box’s services before, for a total of almost 2,000 people.
“It’s just been a steady increase,” she said.
The organization served 574 households in the program in March 2021, so the 828 served this March was an increase of almost 300 households.
And she expects prices will rise for what her organization pays for food through the East Texas Food Bank as food prices continue increasing.
Starting in April, the organization went back to allowing clients to choose the food packed in their boxes.
“Hopefully that will reduce waste,” by not providing food in the boxes that a family doesn’t want, she said. “That will help us also keep a better inventory and better count on what items are most requested and things like that.”
Like other organizations, Buckrell said Longview Community Ministries is experiencing a decrease in food donations from retailers that donate to the various food pantries.
“Just because of the supply chain issues, we’re not getting the donations of produce and meat like we have been prior to COVID. With that, we’re going to have to purchase those… or find alternative ways to get produce to help feed our clients. It’s hit and miss.”
More than 200 volunteers help at Longview Community Ministries each month, she said, in all of the organization’s programs, including the Meals with Love program that delivers meals to elderly people.
“We’re just glad the … the churches and the community that supports LCM are able to keep it running,” Buckrell said.
