As need rises, McHenry County food pantries find ways to keep up

When Lou’s husband was diagnosed with cancer, everyday bills became insurmountable. Living on a limited income, combined with the rising costs of food and living, left the two unable to manage.

Her husband, a truck driver, is still finding hours where he can between chemotherapy treatments. Lou doesn’t have a job but has filed for Social Security benefits, she said, though that won’t come for another month.

To help their circumstances, Lou, 65, of Cary, said she began going to the Crystal Lake Food Pantry two months ago to make up the gaps. As she walked with a volunteer gathering her basket of food Wednesday morning, she said she talks with people visiting. Everybody has a story, she said.

“There’s many issues,” she said. “Nobody really wants to go to the food pantry, but you come here because you need to have food.”

Lou asked her last name be withheld to maintain her privacy on the matter of her personal finances.

She was one of many visiting food pantries in recent months due to the recent upsurge in the cost of groceries.

Despite the inflation, food pantries in McHenry County are carrying on.

In Woodstock, the pantry is stocked “with a lot of food,” Woodstock Food Pantry Manager Bob Pierce said. Donations, both in food and money, have increased and helped the pantry keep up. Some donations come from the Aldi grocery store, he said. They buy food from there and see Aldi donate food the store can’t sell.

“We have no problems,” he said.

While pantries up to this point have managed both the increasing cost of food and supply shortages, residents across the area are feeling the pain, prompting many to either return or visit the pantries for the first time.

With grocery bills climbing higher by the month, more and more families are unable to afford the prices, Crystal Lake Pantry Manager John Stefani said.

This was a sentiment also shared by Melody Stanko, president of the board for the Cary-Grove Food Pantry. Many who are going to Cary-Grove’s food pantry are both new or returning visitors, she said. Despite this, their food pantry remains full as well, she said.

The end of government assistance, including stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits, combined with inflation is driving many people to their local pantries, said Julie Yurko, president of the Northern Illinois Food Bank.

“Our neighbors are hit with a double-whammy,” she said.

Currently, the Crystal Lake pantry sees about 40 people coming in each day, Stefani said, up from the earlier pandemic numbers of about 20 and 25 people. Each family takes out about 150 pounds of food, which they can come in twice a month for.

Before the pandemic, Crystal Lake would have anywhere from 50 to 70 people come in per day, he said.

In Woodstock, about 20 to 30 people are coming in a day, which has more than doubled since the start of the pandemic, Pierce said. The food pantry serves everywhere covered by Woodstock School District 200.

“It’s increased quite a bit,” Pierce said. “All we ask when people come is where they live. … We don’t care what their situation is. If they’re here, it’s because they need food.”

The Cary-Grove food pantry noticed an increase in need of about 35% in the past two months, Stanko said.

Food in many places is getting harder to come by too, but officials with food pantries said they’re keeping up.

“We have enough. It’s just tighter,” Chicoine said.

The Northern Illinois Food Bank, which serves 13 counties across the northern Illinois region, saw about 37% more people visit its partners last month compared to last summer, Yurko said. Last month brought more than 427,000 visitors to its partners, she said.

Due to supply shortages, donations from manufacturers were reduced in an effort to stock grocery shelves more, Yurko said.

To make up for it, the food bank began buying more food and as a result, spending more than twice as much money on purchasing compared to before the pandemic, up from about $7 million to $16 million, she said.

The food bank also saw rising prices hit them. Produce is up from 29 cents per pound before the pandemic to 40 cents now, Yurko said. Potatoes are up 5 cents per pound and apples are up 15%. Pasta is up 20%, and protein has become “very, very expensive.”

“We are spending more money at the grocery stores,” she said. “It’s the same for us.”

Across the U.S., inflation saw the price of food people buy for their home go up 10% in March compared to the prior year, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For meat in general, the increase was 14.8%. Fruits and vegetables came in at more than 8% in that period, while flour and prepared flour mixes were up 14.2%. Dairy, one of the tamer increases, was up 7%.

In the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin area, total food at home costs were up 10.2% from March compared to the prior year, while meat, poultry, fish and eggs were up 13%. Fruits and vegetables climbed 12.4%, while dairy was up 8.1%, data from the bureau shows.

One of the biggest factors contributing to inflation is the rising cost of energy, said Steve Reed, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Higher energy and gasoline prices make it more expensive to transport food and other goods.

General inflation is something economists would have different opinions on, he said, but supply interruptions related to the pandemic have also contributed.

“We’re seeing increases pretty much across the board in a way we haven’t seen since the early 1980s,” Reed said. “Virtually every time we’ve had really bad inflation in the United States the past 60 or 70 years, a big part of it has been a spike in energy prices.”

With current conditions, many expect the need from residents to increase even further. Stefani said he expects the Crystal Lake pantry to see its users increase, perhaps to between 50 and 60 people per day.

“There is a need out there,” he said. “I’d like to see the number [of people coming in] go up.”

Stanko said Cary-Grove is prepared for any increase in need.

It has some food still stored courtesy of donations from this past holiday season. A surplus of food allowed Cary-Grove to save some of its money, which it will be able to use to deal with any increased need, Stanko said.

“It’s one of those things where you keep moving forward and figure out how to get the food if we need it,” she said.

Even with an increased need and food becoming harder to get, officials with both the food pantries and food bank aren’t worried.

Stefani, for example, said Crystal Lake has always been helpful as a community. Food drives and donations from residents are a constant.

”We are blessed to be in a community that has not only supported us, but extra supported us during COVID,” Cary-Grove’s Stanko said. “If we say we need x, y or z, we get it.”

Even with things getting tighter, Yurko said she wanted to stress that both the food bank and pantries in the area have “thousands and thousands of pounds” of food, and if someone is in need, they should come in.