Emergency Food Distribution Keeps Growing In Central Ohio

To say the  Mid Ohio Food Bank has grown in recent years is an understatement.   Food distribution has grown by about a third over the last five years.   The food bank now distributes 45 million pounds of food each year.  The head of the foodbank  says  the growth is fueled by exploding demand for  emergency food . The Holy Roasary-Saint John soup kitchen and pantry on Ohio Avenue is one of 500 such facilities supplied by the Mid Ohio foodbank.  At lunch time,  the former school cafeteria is full.  Otis Belser  sits at the end of one of the long tables. He rides his bicycle several blocks to the soup kitchen twice a day to stave off hunger. "Yeah it is, its very important to me. A lot of more of my friends too.  Because we come here for breakfast and lunch to eat. I ain't got nothing bad to say."  Says Belser. Last year, the east side soup kitchen served  95,000 meals to neighborhood residents.  Director Marilyn Oberting says breakfast  service was  added about a year and a half ago and a second feeding site was added earlier this year. "If you walked up and down the streets in this neighborhood, three out of every six houses is boarded up. That doesn't mean no one lives there. It just means they're boarded up, there's no electric, there's no gas, there's no water."  Says Oberting. Back in the cafeteria area,  Tereba Meyers and her ten year old son are the last in line to get lunch. Q) What brings you here today?  Meyers:   "I wanted my son to see this experience because in case times get rough for him he knows there's somewhere he can go and he doesn't have to steal or kill or do anything that's not good for him. He can get help." Says Meyers. Mid-Ohio foodbank Director Matt Habash says the spike in emergency food demand has expanded beyond poorer neighborhoods. "When you've got pantries in Dublin, three in Worthington, Westerville's pantry is clear up on county line. New Albany's talking about another pantry. We opened one down in Grove City at our warehouse and since January we've served 6,000 families." Says Habash. Habash thinks much of the suburban demand for food  is tied to job loss in homes with two wage earners. "One person in your family loses  their income and your whole budget goes out of whack in a hurry and you can't sell the house, you can't sell the car very easily.  So you can't downsize very quickly. So we're trying to stabilize those families." Says Habash. Making the spike in distribution easier is the food bank's new warehouse which opened  in 2009.  The Grove city facility tripled the food bank's  refrigeration and rack space.  Mid-Ohio foodbank is funded through individual and corporate donations of cash and food and some government grants. It 's budget in 2011 topped 54-million dollars.  The foodbank supplies 500 soup kitchens and pantries in 20 Central and Eastern Ohio counties.