Minneapolis-St. Paul food shelves struggling to keep up with need, as Thanksgiving looms
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Area food shelves are bracing for an increase in need with Thanksgiving now less than three weeks away.
Food insecurity has always been an issue, but it was heightened even more by the pandemic. In 2022, Minnesotans made more than 5.5 million trips to food shelves, which is up almost 2 million from the year before, and the problem only seems to be getting worse.
The Foodmobile, a mobile food shelf through Keystone Community Services, makes a stop every first Friday of the month at M Health Fairview's Roselawn clinic to help dozens of people with free fresh produce, meats and dairy products.
The organization has two Foodmobiles that make stops in 28 communities on a monthly schedule.
Keystone leaders said the need really started to grow last year when inflation started sending grocery prices soaring and pandemic assistance programs were ending.
Keystone serves about 40,000 people each year through its food shelves, two food mobiles, a grocery delivery program and free farmers markets.
They say they're doing their best to keep up with the holidays around the corner.
"November is typically a very busy month for people seeking food assistance, and so we just try and keep up," said Julia McCarthy, director of programs for Keystone Community Services. "Often the food that we get every day is all gone by the afternoon so we serve as many people as we're able to but it's hard. There's capacity we only have so much food and so many staff."
Parts of St. Paul are home to a significant number of immigrant and refugee families, so the Foodmobile also works hard to have culturally specific foods, including rice, sesame oil and bamboo shoots, as well as Kosher foods.
"We try to stock foods that are culturally specific as much as we can," said McCarthy. "Those foods tend to be more expensive for us and so we can't always get everything that people might want."