“The summer of 2022 will be hungriest summer ever, because of the inflation costs – the price of gas and the price of food,” said Susan Diersen, the executive director of North Anoka County Emergency food shelf (NACE).
Diersen says that she has seen a change is who is coming for food and why.
“A couple years ago, we had a lot of folks who had never needed food before, but they did because they were laid off because of the pandemic,” said Diersen. “Now what we’re finding is a lot of the people who are new are working, but they don’t have enough to pay for the food.”
It’s new people and it’s more people. NACE had been seeing three to five new families come to them each month, but now that number is way up. In May, the food shelf welcomed 50 new families. A month earlier, they had 61 new families.
“Most food shelves have about twice as many families as they did a year ago. We are at 167 percent over the amount of people we served in 2021.”
While NACE is serving more people, it is also dealing with some food shortages, and coming up with creative ways to fill the gaps.
“We buy most of our food through Second Harvest food bank and at times in the past months they have not had certain items. For a month they didn’t have eggs. We just all had to go to the store and buy the five cartons they’d let us buy. Enough volunteers did that that we got
150 eggs cartons to give away. We had the same problem with cheese. We had some weeks where we didn’t have milk.”
The shortages are also hard to prepare for, so for Diersen, it’s about being flexible while keeping the staple foods in stock.
“But I just know every week okay we might be going to Cub or we might be reaching out to another vendor. You just kind of just go with it and smile and know that the bottom line is we’re feeding people and we’re going to do everything we can to feed them,” said Diersen.
NACE is open four days a week for people in need of food.
