S.F. Food Bank struggles to keep up with crush

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They begin lining up two hours in advance, armed with empty cloth bags, suitcases and metal dollies waiting to be filled. At exactly 10:30 a.m., a volunteer stands at the entryway, her arm outstretched to prevent a mad rush.

They crane their necks past her to see their target: long wooden tables stacked with ears of corn, onions, potatoes, cans of diced tomatoes, cabbage, plums, rice, cartons of orange juice, and plastic bags filled with bread, hot dog buns and bagels.

Desperation has become a Thursday morning staple at the Ingleside Community Center, which hosts a weekly food pantry run by the San Francisco Food Bank. Last year, 120 people used the pantry, a number that has recently climbed to 154 and continues to rise.

Monique Martin, executive director of the center, has had to ask a police officer to stop by regularly because food fights - and not the fun kind found in elementary school cafeterias - have occasionally broken out as people push past each other to grab the goods.

"There's a lot of anxiety in people - a lot of fear," she said.

More people are relying on the Bay Area's food pantries, soup kitchens and free meal delivery services as the price of stocking their refrigerators with grocery store goods spirals out of reach.

Pei Zhen Zan, 40, visited the Ingleside food pantry for the first time on a recent Thursday. Her husband works in construction while she stays at home with their 2-year-old daughter, Tammy.

"We don't have money to buy food right now," she said, looking down at her haul, about the size of a full grocery bag. "This will help a little."

The San Francisco Food Bank served 118,000 people in 2007 and now serves 124,000 - the biggest jump in years. And most clients are not down-and-out homeless people. Sixty percent of households that use the food bank have at least one working adult.

"No longer is it an issue of employment. It's becoming an issue of working hard, but not having enough to meet the basics," said Marguerite Nowak, advocacy and education manager for the food bank.

She added that when money is tight, food is often the first to go. You can skip breakfast and have a skimpy dinner, but you can't pay half your rent or utility bills if you want a place to live.

"Food is the one place where there's wiggle room," she said.

But there's little wiggle room in the food bank's operations. It is getting less food from the federal government's commodities program because its money isn't stretching as far, and corporate food donations are also down in this struggling economy.

So the food bank is trying to get creative: driving to the Central Valley to collect discarded produce that's perfectly fine but not pretty enough for grocery store shelves; accepting the tops of carrots that are normally thrown away when bagged "baby carrots" are made; buying seven truckloads - 280,000 pounds - of rice at a discount; buying a 2,000-pound bag of beans and assigning volunteers to divide it among the 188 food pantries around the city.
All backgrounds

At Valencia Gardens, a public housing development in the Mission District that also includes affordable and market-rate housing, people of all socioeconomic backgrounds have begun lining up at the facility's Wednesday afternoon food pantry.

Gloria Santa Maria, 71, lives with her 73-year-old sister in a Valencia Gardens apartment and gets a bag of groceries at the food bank every week.

Her Social Security check doesn't go as far as it used to at the grocery store.

"Everything is so expensive now," she said. "The meat, you know? And the milk. Eggs. Vegetables, too. And the fruit. Everything. I like steak, but I can only buy chicken now."

Michael Love, 40, volunteers at the food bank each week and gets to take home leftovers. But first he has the unpleasant job of fending off people desperate for more food than he's allowed to give them.

"They want three or four bags of bread, but you just get one," he said. "They say, 'It's hard times,' but I have to say, 'Talk to my boss.' "

Food squeeze

The food bank isn't the only organization dealing with more mouths to feed.

-- San Francisco's Human Services Agency is handling 660 more food stamp caseloads than last year, bringing it to a total of 15,363.

-- Nationally, Meals on Wheels, which delivers food to homebound seniors, has lost volunteers who can't afford the gasoline. The San Francisco chapter doesn't rely on volunteers but uses vans to deliver 805,000 meals to 1,450 seniors. The agency is struggling to cover rising fuel costs while also meeting a 10 percent increase in demand, said Ashley McCumber, executive director.

-- Glide, the only San Francisco organization that serves three meals a day, has seen demand rise 13 percent this year. Bruce McKinney, the free meals program manager, said he can rarely serve salad and sometimes cuts vegetables and rice. "It's getting scary right now," he said. "The back half of the year is going to get real ugly."

-- Project Open Hand, which delivers meals to chronically ill people and runs a grocery center where people can pick up bags of food, has cut bananas and margarine because of costs. Director Tom Nolan has eliminated five positions and all staff raises this year.

E-mail Heather Knight at hknight@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle