Thousands turn to food banks as prosperity takes holiday in Keys
BY TERRY SCHMIDA
KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER
Away from public view, an old and silent killer is stalking the Keys: hunger.
With the tourist economy in freefall, and state re-openings coming up stillborn all over the country, it has become even harder for low wage-earning families to pay high rent, fuel and health care – and still put nutritious meals on the table.
According to those working in the front lines, the problem is getting worse.
“Normally, we distribute food out of our food pantries located in Key Largo and on Stock Island. But the demand for food assistance started increasing dramatically in February. By mid-March, we had to move out of the pantries and start distributing food in large outdoor venues to accommodate the need for food and social distancing,” said Thomas M Callahan, Executive Director of the SOS Foundation, located at 5640 Maloney Ave. “So many people were desperate for food we conducted four of these distributions each week; two in the Lower Keys, on Stock Island, and in Old Town . . . one in Islamorada and one in Key Largo.”
Relief appeared to be on the way, with high profile bailout packages making their way through Congress, and movement towards reopening economies undertaken.
“But in April and May we were serving as many as 1,400 households at each Lower Keys food distribution and 400 at each of the Upper Keys distributions,” Callahan said. “Things started to slow down a bit in June, when people started to be recalled to work and we moved back into our pantries.
“Many of the volunteers that helped us with the large drive-thru distributions have gone back to work and still others were seasonal . . .By operating out of our pantries again we can distribute food more frequently with a better selection. The demand . . . continues at approximately double that of pre-COVID-19 levels and we fear demand will spike up again as businesses close once again and workers are furloughed.”
Over the past three weeks, Callahan said, the SOS food pantry at 105500 Overseas Hwy., in Key Largo, has been stable, with some 250-300 families served at each distribution. The Stock Island Pantry, is always the busiest location. With new demands, SOS distributes there Monday through Thursday, to 250 to 300 households daily.
This time around, it’s not just the working poor who are suffering.
“There has been a definite shift in our demographics since [Hurricane] Irma,” Callahan said. “Basically it knocked a whole group of people down a rung. A lot of the people that were already struggling at the lowest level left town. We’ve experienced the same thing with the pandemic, with as much as 50 percent more first-time clients as when the hospitality businesses first started to shut down.”
The mass drive-thru distributions had been designed to protect personal safety and blunt the spread, as well as to provide an efficient means to get food to hungry people.
“Households were instructed to pop their trunk as they drove through, and it was contact-less service because our volunteers simply deposited bags of food in the trunk of their car, based on the number of people being served,” Callahan said. “The biggest problem was the sheer numbers coming through the drive-thrus at Bernstein Park and at the Basilica School in Key West. We would have to stage as much as 35 tons of food at each location in order to ensure we had enough food.”
On the bright side, the quality of the food hasn’t been negatively affected.
“We had 125 pallets of frozen meat staged at a freezer farm in Miami before the pandemic began, so we never run out of meat to distribute,” Callahan said. “As far as healthy produce, there has been more than enough. thanks to a large-scale federal response called farm-to-trunk, that we were again able to capitalize on because of the enormous amount of refrigeration and freezer storage we were able to position in Monroe County thanks to the support of County and City government and St. Mary’s Basilica.”
For more information on SOS, call 410-703-8212, or visit www.sosmission.org
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