By Jim Kinney | jkinney@repub.com
CHICOPEE — Lorraine’s Soup Kitchen and Pantry serves 1,000 dinners a week, and about 300 families use its pantry shelves to supplement their groceries.
That’s up about 40% from where it was a year ago, but still less overwhelming than the crowds who came back in October when the government shutdown stopped SNAP benefits, said Kim Caisse, the pantry’s executive director.
It’s a spike she doesn’t want to see again. Neither do U.S. Reps. Richard E. Neal and James McGovern, nor do any of the other public officials and hunger-fighting professionals gathered at Lorraine’s on Thursday.
Rent and grocery bills are still high. And health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act and many cuts passed this summer as part of President Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill are still scheduled to go into effect after the November election.
“We live in the richest country in the history of the world, and we ought to be ashamed that we have hungry kids who go to school on Mondays,” McGovern, D-Worcester, said. “We ought to be ashamed that we have veterans who don’t know where their next meal is going to come from.”
Most SNAP recipients work, he said. And the country has enough food.
Hunger, McGovern said, is political.
McGovern, the leading Democrat on the House Rules Committee, visited Lorraine’s as part of a statewide “End Hunger Now” tour. He did so with Neal, D-Springfield, whose district borders McGovern’s across Central and Western Massachusetts.
“I’ve been a lifelong champion for ending hunger. And I can tell you right now that we are going in the wrong direction,” McGovern said. “Nearly 100,000 people in this state are at risk of losing food assistance because this president and House Republicans passed their big, ugly bill. And when they did that, they stole nearly $200 billion in food assistance, the largest cut of food assistance ever in American history.”
GOP leadership in the House is coming out with a new farm bill, giving Democrats an opportunity to reverse the cuts, McGovern said.
Neal said there is political blowback building against the domestic policy bill but warned its effects will be felt in the fall.
“(Republicans) didn’t address any of the shortcomings in the legislation that they offered, but said, ‘We’ll kick it past the November election,’” Neal said. “That’s the challenge that we’re going to have.”
Neal promised to reverse the cuts. He said 17 Republicans crossed party lines to vote for the American Care Act subsidies, a change that is still pending in the Senate. And there is an election pending, which might swing votes.
McGovern said he wants to do that by bringing stories to light from places like Lorraine’s.
“We know what the facts and the figures and the statistics are. Sometimes I don’t think that they move members of Congress, but real-life stories coming to places like Lorraine’s kitchen?” he said. “Repeating those stories in Washington, D.C., to our colleagues in Congress hopefully will move them. If they’re listening to their constituents, they’re hearing similar things in their districts.”
The congressmen met with a volunteer crew of women from St. Anne Church as they cooked, the air filled with the savory scent of lemon-pepper chicken with rice and broccoli.
Andrew Morehouse, executive director of The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, said pantries and soup kitchens across the region are seeing crowds. They’ll get busier as people lose their ACA subsidies.
“That is a whole new category of people who are going to be going to the food pantries, some for the first time,” he said.
And also on Thursday, The Gray House in Springfield warned that its supply of food is very limited because of storm-related disruptions; it was handing out only canned goods.
Morehouse said the storm can be dealt with. But with food prices higher, the Food Bank has less buying power.
All the more reason to change the conversation in Washington.
“Keep on fighting,” Morehouse said.
