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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. You might think that two and a half years into a pandemic whose economic impact pushed so many people to the brink, but in which we're now seeing a very robust jobs recovery, that food insecurity, and we talked about it so much in 2020 and 2021, wouldn't be the issue that it was in those two years. City Harvest, of course, one of the leading local organizations dedicated to fighting food insecurity, released a study this month that revealed visits to food pantries and soup kitchens in New York in the first half of this year. We're actually up almost 70% compared to the pre-pandemic year of 2019. There's some indication that these trends are persisting, in some cases even worsening, so we'll get into stats from this recent study and talk about and invite your phone calls with stories or questions about food insecurity in New York City for the next few minutes. Joining me now, Jilly Stephens, CEO of City Harvest. Hi, Jilly. Welcome to WNYC. Great to have you with us.

Jilly Stephens: Good morning, Brian. Good to be back. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: You want to just remind everybody, for a minute, for context, what City Harvest does?

Jilly Stephens: Yes, thank you. City Harvest is a food rescue organization. We've been in existence in New York City for-- This year will be our 40th anniversary. Food rescue means essentially that we're taking really great food that would otherwise go to waste and we distribute it often the same day or within a day or two to a network of around 400 soup kitchens and food pantries throughout the five boroughs of New York City. In a typical year, that is excluding any pandemic year, all of that food is donated to us and in any year, we don't charge anybody for the food that we deliver.

Brian Lehrer: When you talk about leftover food more or less being what you rescue and deliver to food pantries and soup kitchens, what food qualifies? An individual family with leftovers from dinner says, "This is such a shame. I hate to see this go to waste, but for whatever reason, nobody's going to eat it." They can't donate something like that, right?

Jilly Stephens: That's right. You won't hear me talk about leftover because it does lead people to think about that plate waste type of food. What we're rescuing is really great quality food. It's coming from wholesalers, retailers, manufacturers. About 60%, 65% of it is going to be fresh fruits and vegetables. That's really great produce that can't get to market for some reason. Perhaps the radishes have grown too big or too small, or the apples are too big or too small, or they're just too many of them for the grower to be able to bring them to market. That's food that they can donate to City Harvest. There'll be a benefit from their tax write-off. It's really great food that we can get out across the five boroughs, very fresh, very nutritious and I would say that's where the emphasis is for us.

Brian Lehrer: I guess it's really for another segment, but isn't it funny that an apple or radish, to use your examples, that grow too big aren't really sellable in the commercial marketplace? Somebody was telling me the other day about something in the conditions this year, maybe the heat and the drought locally from this summer made a lot of tomatoes from farms in the region come out not that kind of shiny red that people like to think of tomatoes as and yet they were perfectly good, but maybe they were harder to sell. It's so weird, right?

Jilly Stephens: It's strange. I do think we are becoming more aware of that as consumers and people are more prepared to buy those things that might look a little different, but the good news is there's an organization like City Harvest that can take anything that producers and growers don't feel they can bring to sell at retail and we'll get it out often the same day to people who need it.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Visits to food pantries and soup kitchens up 69% this year, according to your survey, compared to 2019. What does that 69% uptick represent?

Jilly Stephens: What I think is always important to remember is that even before the pandemic 2.4 New Yorkers were struggling to make ends meet and that means that they were struggling to get food on the table. Too many New Yorkers were having a hard time before the pandemic. Of course, numbers surged during the pandemic. We actually started to see the number of visits to soup kitchens, and food pantries begin to go down a little bit at the end of last year, but we saw them trend up again in January. What that means is that in 2019 the average number of visits to a food pantry or soup kitchen in the five boroughs was over 2 million. It was about 2,100,000 visits a month. Today--

Brian Lehrer: Today. Go ahead.

Jilly Stephens: Today we're seeing that number has climbed to an average of 3.5 million visits to these pantries and soup kitchens every month.

Brian Lehrer: What happened because unemployment has been going down in the city this year?

Jilly Stephens: I think there was definitely a cumulative effect of people who were out of work for long periods throughout those pandemic years. Debt will have accumulated during that time. Rents are rising, I know everybody's experiencing that, and so food is often viewed as an elastic expense. You cannot pay your utility bill, for example, but then when it comes to food, you can decide not to go to the supermarket. The prices are rising incredibly. We think the inflation is behind a lot of this increase in people coming to food pantries because if there's a good food pantry near you, you can do that rather than go into the supermarket in a given week or day.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe it's worth defining food insecurity. We use the term commonly these days, but when is the person or family considered to be experiencing it?

Jilly Stephens: It's when somebody doesn't have a reliable source of nutritious food. That's not the official definition. We can look it up. It'll get somewhere close to that, but it's the ability to know you can rely on a source of food that's good, nutritious and possibly culturally appropriate.

Brian Lehrer: How does City Harvest meet expanding and contracting demand? I don't know if there's expanding and contracting source material, the kind of available food that you were describing at the beginning that you bring to food pantries and soup kitchens. What happens at City Harvest when demand goes up and demand goes down by people who are experiencing food insecurity?

Jilly Stephens: I think the pandemic is probably the best way to provide an answer to that. In the year before the pandemic, so 2019, we were on track to rescue and deliver around 65 million pounds of food. All of its donated with the exception of Thanksgiving turkeys which we can never get donated. The only food we buy any given year are those turkeys and we spend about $200,000. We have donors who like to buy the turkeys for Thanksgiving. In the first full year of the pandemic, City Harvest rescued and delivered 155 million pounds of food. That's incredible growth from the 65 million the previous year. We can't do that by donated food alone and so yes, we started buying food. In that same year, we spent about $30 million buying food. We're only able to do that because of the generosity of donors who made that possible, who saw immediately what was going on in the city. Our ability to ramp up and ramp down in a disaster really pivots on us being able to buy food and having the donor support to be able to do that.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your phone calls and tweets on food insecurity in the city. We want to spotlight this as we are doing because it's one of those things that it's too easy to ignore. As our guest Jilly Stephens, the CEO of City Harvest was saying, there was enough of it before the pandemic, there's more now, even if less than at the beginning of the pandemic and yet it's something that people can take as sort of background. It goes on. There aren't a lot of new headline developments around it, conflicts around it that are political and so it falls out of the news.

We're trying to put a spotlight on this now in conjunction with City Harvest's new survey. If you are experiencing hunger right now or even food insecurity or have at any time during the pandemic, help us tell the broader story here. You can also ask a question of our guest Jilly Stephens, 212-433-WNYC. 212- 433-9692, maybe for those of our listeners who are more comfortable and don't actually come in contact with people experiencing food insecurity, you can tell a story of doing just that even if you're not food insecure yourself. Who do you know? How do you see it? How do they express it? How did they try to hide it from you because maybe they were ashamed? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or Tweet @BrianLehrer. Does shame ever come into it? Are people reluctant to use food pantries and soup kitchens for that or any other reason even if they are hungry or food insecure?

Jilly Stephens: I think it can for some people when we spoke to those people coming to food pantries and our own distributions through something called a mobile market. During the pandemic, what we heard most from people is this expression of having resisted, having to come and then a sense of feeling very grateful that the food is there for them to come to. I think it can be a very long path for some people and we certainly saw that after the financial downturn in 2008, 2009. It can be a very long path where somebody will prefer to load up credit cards, borrow from family, borrow up from friends, do everything to avoid having to come to a food pantry.

I think once people get there, the overwhelming senses of great relief, the realization that the food is good, it's often fresh and so I think yes, that's a different path that individuals go down.

Brian Lehrer: Troy in Manhattan you're on WNYC. Hi, Troy.

Troy: Hi, good morning, it's a pleasure calling in, and I just want to underscore how virtuous and important City Harvest's work is. One thing I want to bring up working in the cafés a few years ago is that City Harvest had a minimum amount to pick up and it discouraged a lot of the smaller cafes who still throw 40, 50, sometimes 60 pounds of food every other day away. Working as a barista, I had to throw massive bags of food away and if I were even to take that food home, I would've lost my job. There's some big, big topics to talk about the ethics of different restaurants and how they contact, I know some services have changed in the years past, I know there's Too Good To Go now which a lot of smaller places are embracing they don't have a minimum order.

Definitely, from the server aspect, there is a lot of waste, it's very disheartening and people who are paid a lower wage who want to take that home are treated like criminals for doing so. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Troy, thank you. Any comment on that, Jilly?

Jilly Stephens: Yes. Thank you, Troy. I agree it's incredibly disheartening anytime we see food being wasted and I'm sure that policies change between organizations about whether their staff can take it. I hope that cafés and restaurants like the one you described would turn that food into staff meals. In terms of our minimum amount yes, a few years ago, we did change that. Many of your listeners, Brian, would have seen the, I think, iconic City Harvest trucks all over the city picking up food from retailers like the one that Troy was working at.

We had to make the decision to have a minimum pickup, we made it £100. The reason for this is we take seriously the fact that we have large trucks on the street and we need to maximize those trucks and collect as much food as we can. While £100 is a minimum, it doesn't make sense to send a large truck and a driver to collect maybe £20, £30 a day. For a while there, we had a fleet of tricycles on the road to make that type of pickup and it was relatively successful.

It turned out it was an expensive program for us to manage, but the good news is, as Troy started to talk about today, there are some smaller maybe app-based things that can connect restaurants or cafés with food to donate right to the hungry person. Technology is helping this evolve a little bit.

Brian Lehrer: Todd in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Todd.

Todd: Hi, Brian sorry for the delay.

Brian Lehrer: No problem.

Todd: I hope I can be more eloquent than I was with the call screener, but my question was a macro question about an issue that's more upstream, things happening at the agricultural level, for example. I've been reading this wonderful and terrifying book called Seeds of Diversity in the emerging lack of diversity in our agriculture, monoculture farming, farm consolidation, things like that which in the era of climate change may lead to more things like blight, entire farms being wiped out because of disease, flooding, et cetera.

I'm just wondering if that's on your radar, organizations like City Harvest, if we're worried about not being able to get enough food in the future if we have a huge corn blight like we did in Iowa in the '70s. Or even the potato famine in Ireland is a precedent that we could look at because that wiped out 400,000 I think primarily poor and indigent Irish and that's my question. I think there's a question in there [chuckles].

Brian Lehrer: Yes it's a little off topic of what we're more narrowly speaking about which is immediate food insecurity in New York City and getting food to those people. Obviously, it's a great longer-term point. Maybe it's for one of our climate story of the week segments. I guess Jilly from a macro perspective, the question that Todd is getting at is maybe something like might climate change be leading us to a world where food insecurity is not just from the demand side but from the supply side?

Jilly Stephens: Thank you, Brian. I think all of us should be worried about the scenarios that Todd laid out and it is something that we are worried about at City Harvest. You were quite right, Brian. Our focus, however, is the more immediate, how are we feeding people today? To do that, we're working more with smaller local farms in the tri-state area as much as possible. We like to work in that area and not add to this climate disaster by trucking food from Texas, for example. We could get a lot of food donated from Texas free of charge, but we always want to be very thoughtful about how we're getting that food here, so we wouldn't go for that load if we can get loads of food closer to home.

Brian Lehrer: Todd, thank you for thinking a big thought. Call us again. Lisa in Maplewood you're on WNYC. Hi, Lisa.

Lisa: Hi, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Lisa: [laughs] I just wanted to add some information to that, so it was appropriate that the last caller proceeded me. I work for MEND, New Jersey, Meeting Essential Needs with Dignity. We're a hunger relief network in Essex County, New Jersey. Definitely climate change is already affecting what we're able to do. Some of the growers that we rely on local farms within New Jersey had a lower yield, the harvest was low and so we had less food to deliver to our clients.

We also have MEND on the Move, we also have mobile markets now as part of our network. We have 22 food pantries and about 15 MEND on the Move partners. The other thing I wanted to mention that is affecting us and I wonder if it's affecting our colleagues in New York, it's the lack of food drives. Because of COVID, this has been one of the fallouts of people not being in offices and even communities not being able or willing to do food drives because it meant people coming together. That's another piece for us in food delivery, one of the challenges that we're facing. Thank you for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Jilly, I think you're above the food drive level with the quantities that you've talked about before that City Harvest deals with, but that's troubling and interesting from Lisa in Maplewood.

Jilly Stephens: We do still run an annual food drive or a couple of them, we are a very fortunate city to have very long-term partners like the New York Daily News, the FDNY, NYPD are all strong partners for food drives. Schools love to get involved, it's a really fantastic way for children to get involved, even children who maybe their family are depending on a network of food pantries or soup kitchens for them to build, bring a can or something from home lets them participate. It's a really nice way for schools to get involved and then one thing we see a lot of people doing and I'm sure if Lisa wants to reach out, we can tell her what we know about this is the conversion to a virtual food drive. You can do it from wherever you are and still help.

Brian Lehrer: Julia in the Bronx. You're on WNYC with Jilly Stephens, the CEO of City Harvest. Hi, Julia.

Julia Hi. My question concerns how they measure the distinction around need versus habit. Meaning, if you have, during the pandemic, people who are participating in food pantries, when the need diminishes, they're still there, probably. It seems there would be some distinctions amongst who's going and I always think about this because I passed 27th Street where every day there's a long line and people have shopping carts and it occurs to me, how would one know when, let's say, you're a senior citizen? Now the need has diminished and I have my income, but you're going to keep going to the food pantry because why not? I would. Without judgment, I'm curious how you drill down into who is using these and why?

Jilly Stephens: City Harvest is bringing food to a network of pantries. If the pantries are doing any determination as to need then that's what they'll do. We don't do that at City Harvest. I do know however that it's not a straightforward thing to get food. As you've noted, Julia, you might be standing in line for hours. What I know about people and the people we serve is they really value their time. Oftentimes, people have more than one job and standing in line to get food, if they didn't have to, I believe is not what most people would do.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, Jilly, one of the stats from your report, at least as attributed to City Harvest in a New York Times story last month, was that the number of children visiting food pantries was up 55% this year compared to 2019. I wonder if you have a take on what the most significant factor in this rise in child hunger has been and specifically whether the end of the Child Tax Credit which has gotten so much credit for reducing child poverty at the beginning of the pandemic but Congress let it expire. That expiration has exacerbated the issue, perhaps. What do you see in terms of child food insecurity?

Jilly Stephens: Let's start with there should not be child food insecurity to the extent we have to live with this as a society, it's too high. You're right. The child tax credit was a fantastic policy. Its expiration in January was a very difficult thing. I have to connect that we are seeing a rise and increases of 14% to food pantries just since January. We know that more than 55% of New York City families were receiving the child tax credit and 79% of recipients of that benefit reported using it on food. It was a fantastic provision that so many people in the country made use of. I think it's estimated that nearly 4 million children were kept out of poverty because of this credit. We were very, very disheartened to see it go away in January.

Brian Lehrer: Jilly Stephens, CEO of City Harvest, the New York City organization that fights hunger locally by taking food in great quantities that would otherwise go unused and distributing it to food pantries and soup kitchens. Thanks so much for joining us this morning.

Jilly Stephens: Thank you very much, Brian. Good to be with you.

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