Food Pantries Turning People Away (bink, Daily Kos)

From the New York Times, we hear today that food pantries in Connecticut are turning the hungry away:

Amid this holiday season, food pantries in lower Connecticut are reporting a surge in the number of residents seeking a decent meal.

...

"I have had to turn people away," said Joyce Gumbus, who oversees the 164 Wilson Memorial Food Pantry in Stamford. The pantry is providing groceries for up to 400 people a week, compared with 200 a week last year, Ms. Gumbus said.

...

For the Food Bank, the clearinghouse for some of the pantries’ food, that translates into some difficult challenges, like providing Thanksgiving turkeys for 6,000 families this year, versus 3,000 in 2006. It means handling about 500 tons of food annually, 161,000 pounds of which were distributed in November alone, Ms. Lombardo said.  "The need has doubled in the last year," she said. "And we don’t expect it to get better anytime soon."

Read More: Daily Kos 

Editors note: This Daily Kos blog entry is a lengthy compendium of newspaper articles from all  over the nation, regarding the growing and double-barreled problems of nutrition insecurity and dwindling supplies at our nation's food banks. The growing problem of hunger, in the US, is not one that we should be seeing in the most prosperous nation on earth. In fact, in light of the growing wealth of the top 1% of wage earners in the US, ithe situation could be called scandalous. Hungry people are desperate people and those that forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. Two hoary nostrums it would be wise for the gentle reader and/or the plutocratically-inclined to bear in mind.

Massive and expensive new domestic surveillance intitiatives will only get you so far.