In 1967, a program involving the gathering of food for a
cause was founded by the late John van Hengel in Phoenix,
Arizona in an abandoned bakery that had been willed to the
Franciscans of St. Mary's Church. We know that program today
as the "food bank," under the umbrella of America's
Second Harvest (founded by van Hengel in 1981), the
nation's Food Bank Network of more than 200 local food banks
and food-rescue organizations and their approximately 50,000
hunger relief member agencies across the country.
Van Hengel got the idea for creating a clearing house for
unwanted food from grocery stores after a social worker
introduced him to a mother of 10 whose husband was on Death
Row. The woman said she had no problem feeding her children
because she got food daily from the refuse bins of a grocery
store.
Upon investigation, van Hengel found food in the bin that
was frozen but still edible, loose carrots, stale bread,
etc. After talking to the store manager, he found less perishable
castoffs such as dented cans and bags of leaking rice and
sugar. Van Hengel immediately recognized the irony in the
fact that while millions of pounds of food were being wasted
in this manner, millions of Americans were going hungry.
Within a year of this discovery, van Hengel had turned the
abandoned bakery into a collection point for food from several
Arizona cities that grocery companies could not sell.
The name "food bank" was coined when a grandmother
who was one of van Hengel's initial helpers drew a cartoon
of a building where food was being deposited for the hungry
and called it a bank of food. Upon hearing this, van Hengel
said, "That's it. We'll call this place St.
Mary's Food Bank."
In it's first year of operation, St. Mary's Church collected
250,000 pounds of food and distributed it to 36 charities.
During the year ending June, 2005, St.
Mary's Food Bank had distributed 60 million pounds of
food to 900 agencies.
Currently, the agencies of America's
Second Harvest routinely provide emergency assistance
to more than 23 million hungry Americans each year, including
8 million children and 4 million seniors. However, disasters
such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita can cause substantial
and immediate growth in the number of people in need of
emergency food assistance.
| 
St.
Mary's Food Bank
Original Site in Phoenix, Arizona
|
Entrance
sign outside the
Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank |
