Q&A Jilly Stephens, from page 32
position here. Can you talk about the size and scope of hunger in NYC? I would say that hunger in New York City is consistently high. We saw the numbers spike around the time of the great recession, as did visits to soup kitchens and food pantries. In the year between 2008 and 2009 hunger shot up by 15 percent in just one year. And although we’ve never seen such a sharp increase since, we haven’t seen a decline in visits to soup kitchens and food pantries either. People are often surprised to hear that while there’s a large and visible homeless population in the city, that there is an even larger population of hungry New Yorkers. Many of the hungry have homes and jobs and a good education. It’s just a tough city and very expensive to get by. After paying rent, utilities, and any medical bills, it becomes a challenge to put food on the table.
heart of our founding and continue to be so today. Many chefs and restaurants continue to regularly donate to us. There are so many other City Harvest programs that chefs and restaurant owners get involved with that help us feed New Yorkers from all walks of life. We can then see many ways that
What do the statistics say about the size and scope of hunger in New York City? We know that almost 1.3 million of our neighbors just in the five boroughs are struggling. One in five children don’t always know where their next meal is coming from. That means they may no longer be eligible for food stamps or SNAP benefits because they earn too much household income, but they’re still the ones who are struggling to put food on the table. They may not be categorized as food insecure by the government’s categorization but they’re still struggling. What role do chefs and restaurants play at City Harvest? Chefs are really important to us and have been since those very first potatoes. Restaurants were at the
34 • April 2018 • Total Food Service • www.totalfood.com
the restaurants are involved today from a restaurant like LeBernadin, which does provide a steady supply of food to us. They have a dedicated City Harvest refrigerator that has asparagus, which is fantastic. Restaurants like Landmarc, from Marc Murphy who is one of our board members, donate a prepared meal once a month. An instance of
this is when they’ll cook lasagna for 600 people. That’s food we can pick up and easily move through our system. We pick up from them every day and distribute to agencies across the city that has two distribution partners. We work very closely with
continued on page 36