As Face of Poor Changes, So Do Food Baskets
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

For years, public and nonprofit food assistance programs have been reporting a sharp rise in the number of working families using their services. But now, as working families are becoming as common visitors as the indigent elderly at the city's soup kitchens and food pantries, many program officials say an ambitious shift is under way in how food for the needy is delivered.

The conventional answer of a box full of donated canned fruit, rice and beans, and the odd piece of eggplant is being supplemented, and in some cases replaced with new options: complete premade meals for takeout, for example, or frozen family-size portions of chili and spaghetti sauce.

Driving the shift in strategy, experts and providers say, is a familiar social and economic phenomenon: the growing numbers of working poor turning up at the soup kitchens and pantries, in most cases single mothers with children, are so busy juggling jobs, commuting and child care that they have little time to cook the food they are given. "The face of poverty is a working woman with two children," said Robert Egger, the founder of D.C. Central Kitchen and an advocate for rethinking what goes into a charity food basket. The options most of the nation's poor have, he says, are to stand in line for a meal at a soup kitchen or to go to a local church to pick up a box of groceries assembled from donations.

Mr. Egger is running pilot projects with the United States Department of Agriculture and American Food Services Associates to create programs that would provide meals for families to pick up at high schools and colleges. A project that provides bag lunches to working mothers is already in operation.

Right now, few food pantries in the city could offer such women that convenience, but that is changing. Community Food Resources Center, which operates a soup kitchen and food pantry on West 116th street, just received a grant to buy an industrial-size flash freezer. The group hopes to expand food production at its soup kitchen and freeze some 440 meals daily that it will either give to families at its food pantry or deliver to other food providers across the city, according to Hiram Bonner, the center's director of programs.