The USDA survey took place before the 1996 federal welfare-reform law cut welfare, food stamps, and child nutrition programs. Even before these cuts, increasing numbers of people were turning to soup kitchens and food basket programs. Charlene Tschirhart is director of justice education and donor services at the St. Anthony Foundation, which runs a dining hall in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Many of St. Anthony's clients, says Tschirhart, are the working poor. We serve temporary workers, laborers, and workers with three jobs who sometimes can't feed themselves.
Clients are of every ethnicity, both female and male, elderly and young, sick and well.
I go from hotel to shelter, barely getting by. More than 21 million people are turning to emergency food programs like St. Anthony's, according to Second Harvest National Food Bank Network. Meanwhile, emergency food providers were turning people away because they didn't have enough food. In California, food banks reported that they were short by millions of pounds of food. Recent cuts in welfare benefits, especially the ban on food stamps to legal immigrants, have made hunger worse, according to a national survey by Physicians for Human Rights.