A Day at the Food Pantry

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On a day early this fall, Nikita Stewart, who covers social services for The New York Times, and the Daily producers Annie Brown and Stella Tan spent a day at Council of Peoples Organization, a food pantry in Brooklyn, speaking to its workers and clients. As with many other pantries in the city, it has seen its demand rocket during the pandemic as many New Yorkers face food shortages. And with the year drawing to a close, many of New York City’s pantries — often run with private money — face a funding crisis. Today, the story of one day in the operations of a New York food pantry. Guest: Nikita Stewart, who covers social services for The New York Times; Annie Brown, a senior audio producer for The Times; and Stella Tan, an associate audio producer for The Times. We want to hear from you. Fill out our survey about The Daily and other shows at: nytimes.com/thedailysurvey For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Here are five key statistics that show how hunger is worsening in New York City.An estimated 1.5 million New Yorkers can’t afford food, and tens of thousands have shown up at the city’s food pantries since the pandemic began. But there is relief and hope when they are at home cooking.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I don't know. What's that? That must be it there. Yeah, the whole all food pantry.
0:07.4	All right, it's 7.04 on a Friday morning. The pantry doesn't open for another couple of hours
0:14.4	and people are already lined up down the block. They've brought baskets or little portable chairs
0:22.6	so they can sit down while they wait and they're waiting for it to open. Yes, so before the pandemic,
0:30.8	I had covered pantries and you know there would be a few people in line. If you were walking past,
0:38.8	you might not have known that it was a pantry. But when the pandemic hit, the need was just
0:46.6	unbelievable. You had job loss, but you also had this pandemic that made it difficult for a lot of
0:55.2	people to actually volunteer at the pantries. So a lot of smaller pantries have closed. And I'm not
1:03.7	saying like a few like hundreds closed because they were mainly run by elderly volunteers who
1:12.4	just could not be exposed to the virus. So as the number of people who need food assistance
1:20.7	is growing, the number of pantries has actually diminished. So these things are happening at the
1:26.1	same time. Yes. And one of the reasons you also see so many people in this line is because this line
1:33.8	serves a lot of immigrants. And so it's like what are you going to do if you've lost your job
1:42.3	and you have no public assistance getting in this line. You know, this is not a choice. This is a
1:50.4	necessity. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is a daily.
2:00.1	For the last eight months, all over New York City, I actually got up around 3 a.m. and when I looked,
2:12.5	I saw the line just already there. Lines have wrapped around food pantries. People are going to
2:18.9	wait like seven, eight hours just to get some groceries. As a million city residents face new food
2:26.5	shortages in the wake of the pandemic. Well, man, something else I've never seen anything like this
2:32.2	though. I never thought our food pantry would be something like this or there would be such a big
2:35.6	knee. COVID just changed a whole lot of things. It just changed the entire way of life.
2:42.5	Today, as we approach Thanksgiving, a holiday defined by food. Social Services reporter Nikita Stewart
	...

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