KIM LAWTON, anchor: Joining me with more on all of this is Candy Hill, a senior vice president at Catholic Charities USA. Candy, it seems like this time of year, every year, we hear appeals from groups saying “Oh people are hungry, you need to give.” What makes this year different?
CANDY HILL, Catholic Charities: Well, we certainly are seeing such an increase, and new people that have never come to Catholic Charities for services before, some of them are even our donors, and some of them are our former board members, so we see a real crisis in the number of people coming, and who need assistance this year over the other years we’ve been in business.
LAWTON: And there’s been some talk of food insecurity, I mean we’re not talking about starving in the streets, but we’re talking about people who are just having a harder time feeding their families?
HILL: Yes, and I think when we talk about food insecurity we’re really talking about people not having food for three meals a day, so we find parents who are scrimping or not having a meal themselves in order to feed their children, and seniors who are making choices between whether they buy medicine or feed themselves, and a country as great as this country, we shouldn’t have people doing that.
In my dad’s neighborhood, Catholic Charities provides food for many of his Hispanic neighbors (most of whom are known to be illegal — his is a ‘sanctuary city’). Every garbage day, he sees bags of canned food, unopened, and frozen chicken in the trash cans. He doesn’t venture an opinion of WHY they just throw out the food, but expressed disgust that they DO just throw it out.
Frankly, I’d be interested in why, myself.
Often people donate food that is past the expiration date. They donate food to hispanics that they don’t eat. And frozen “food” is barely food. Once someone donated to my soup kitchen some vile weightloss frozen food. I tried a package and it was truly awful.
Cheap beans, peanut butter, broth. Somethings make sense.
Always easier to blame the ungrateful poor, though.