This blog was written with the help of Jon Rice, our Senior Marketing & Creative Services Strategist.
How many meals does Second Harvest Food Bank of East Tennessee and local food pantries distribute in a month or a week?
Second Harvest distributes about 436,000 meals a week across East Tennessee. In the past fiscal year, we distributed more than 27 million pounds of food (or 22.7 million meals) through our 18‑county service area. That works out to about 1.9 million meals per month, or 436,538 per week.
Each month we serve 195,000 people on average. These meals are delivered via partner food pantries, mobile drive-thru distributions, area schools, senior-serving programs, and nutrition classes.
Do you generally have enough food to provide consistently, or do you frequently run out?
Our goal is to keep an ample supply of food in our warehouse for our pantry partners and food distribution programs year-round, but spikes in need sometimes strain our inventory.
For example, we activated a contingency plan to deal with sharply rising demand due to the government shutdown. With the support to the community, we were able to add extra shelf-stable food to our holiday meal boxes, send additional staples to area food pantries, and create emergency food boxes for families who stopped by our warehouse in need of groceries.
How many people are reaching out to food banks? What are the general demographics? We hear people who have jobs also are facing food insecurity? Why do you think that is so?
Visits to our website’s Find a Food Pantry page jumped from 587 in September to 10,133 in October, an increase of over 1,600%. That surge mirrors what our pantry partners have been seeing at their brick-and-mortar locations, and what we’ve been witnessing at our mobile pantry distributions this season: more people than ever needing extra assistance to make it through the month without skipping meals.
The population of neighbors needing assistance is fairly diverse: about one in six East Tennessee children (or 50,460 kids) struggle with food security. Many neighbors are families with children, but also seniors on fixed incomes, veterans, and people with disabilities.
Notably, half of the food-insecure households earn too much to qualify for SNAP — these are working families above the income cutoff who nonetheless cannot afford enough food at the grocery store due to rising inflation and lack of a living wage.
In practice, our pantries see working parents and individuals coming needing assistance. They may miss a meal so their children can eat, or they rely on our Food For Kids program to help get their families through the weekend or during holidays. For too many of our East Tennessee neighbors, a steady paycheck no longer guarantees food when rent, utilities, and healthcare costs have soared.
What are the number of meals provided during the winter and the number of meals in schools Monday through Friday? What about during the summer and school breaks?
During the school year, eligible children receive free breakfast and lunch at school each weekday through federal programs. Outside of school hours, Second Harvest provides extra support: for example, our Food for Kids backpack program sends home extra meals on weekends during the school term to more than 15,000 students every week. We continue offering the program during the summer months to participating schools, and are looking to add new schools when we can, at no cost to the family or the school.
We’ve also heard about new restrictions on SNAP (formerly known as “food stamps”), hindering people from getting food. How is that impacting Second Harvest and food pantries? Do you know what some of the new regulations are that are causing problems for people seeking SNAP benefits?
Recent SNAP policy shifts are starting to create even more demand on food banks. Nearly 700,000 Tennesseans rely on SNAP, including about 34,000 in Knox County alone. And proven by what we just witnessed during the shutdown, when federal or state benefits lapse, thousands more turn to food banks.
Meanwhile, new SNAP regulations will make it harder to get assistance. Under a recent federal law, work requirements were sharply expanded. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that around 2.4 million people will no longer qualify for SNAP on average each month because of the new provisions, and food banks all across the country are bracing for the impact. For every meal provided by food banks, SNAP delivers nine. It’s the most effective tool we have to fight hunger. Food banks simply cannot replace SNAP at the same scale.
To learn more about Second Harvest, read more of our blogs, or explore how you can contribute to food security in East Tennessee, please visit the following links:
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