Food Pantries Race To Fill Growing Need on East End

Every Wednesday, at about 1:30 p.m., the traffic begins.

One by one, the cars form a queue starting at the Springs Presbyterian Church, joining a line that often winds down Old Stone Highway and turns onto School Street — sometimes stretching a quarter mile long, if not more.

They will be waiting for at least an hour and a half; the church doors won’t even open until 3 p.m. When they do, and the drivers take their turns making their way inside, they can breathe a sigh of relief.

Greeted by a crew of friendly volunteers, they each receive three large bags of food — one filled to the brim with fresh produce, one stocked with dairy products, and one full of pantry staples, enough to last their family until the next pick-up.

For many who visit the Springs Food Pantry, that’s the following week.

“We are looking at the busiest year that we’ve had,” reported Chairperson Holly Reichart-Wheaton, who acts as the director of the pantry. “I’ve not seen a decline in our numbers.”

Food insecurity on the East End is at an all-time high, reported several officials of local food pantries and outreach organizations, and as the cost of living only continues to increase, there’s no end in sight.

As the winter months approach, they need more help than ever.

“We’re grateful for the holidays, because there’s always still that giving concept toward humanity,” explained Catherine Andrejack, director of St. Rosalie’s Parish Social Ministry in Hampton Bays. “But after that, it becomes a desert, where we’re scrambling to keep our shelves stocked. Thank God we have never run out.”

The same cannot be said of Heart of the Hamptons. A recent Wednesday distribution cleaned out the Southampton Village organization’s pantry, leaving staff and volunteers scrambling to restock in time for Friday’s recipients, recalled Executive Director Molly Bishop.

It was sad and overwhelming, she said. And, quite simply, the pantry is not prepared for this high of a demand at this time of year.

“We started to see, in August 2022, this trend where every month was 40 to 50 percent higher than that same month the year before,” she said, “and that has kept up now for over two years.”

In 2023, Heart of the Hamptons distributed about 346,000 meals. By this past October, the pantry had already reached 376,000 meals — with its two busiest months of the year left.

By December, Bishop estimates that number will top 500,000.

“It really is shocking, in that the spotlight that was put on food insecurity during COVID, and then so quickly to see people go, ‘Oh, no, I don’t think that that’s really still a thing’ — and it’s, like, no, it is. And even worse, because of the economic situation that we’re in,” she said, “where food got so much more expensive, and everything got so much more expensive, and wages just haven’t kept up.”

Reichart-Wheaton sees a direct correlation between rising food pantry attendance — “We’re just climbing, climbing, climbing,” she said — and skyrocketing housing costs. Last year, between January and mid-October, the Springs Food Pantry had served 10,670 households, totaling 40,741 people.

Year over year, the food pantry had seen 12,347 families and 47,639 people, she said —a difference of nearly 2,000 and 7,000, respectively.

“I don’t know how they survive,” she said. “I don’t know how they pay these exorbitant rents when they’re only making just above minimum wage.”

Minerva Rojas and her husband, Francisco, live in a modest home in Springs with their three children, ages 18, 8 and 7. She’s a stay-at-home mom, while her partner works for a landscaping company in Amagansett.

Every month, they pay $4,500 — plus utilities — in rent. For them, the Springs Food Pantry is critical to help make ends meet.

“We are very grateful and blessed to have the food pantry,” Rojas said. “If the food pantry closed, I don’t know what we would do if we still lived here, or we’d need to move somewhere else cheaper.”

As a token of her gratitude, she volunteers for the pantry on Wednesdays, packing produce bags for recipients not unlike her own family. The vast majority are Latino — to the tune of 86 percent, Reichart-Wheaton said — and the grocery list reflects that where it can.

“I know the children are Americanized because of school, but the adults still enjoy yuca from their country,” Reichart-Wheaton said. “We’ll order yuca, we’ll order chayote. Yesterday, we gave out plantains. There’s not a lot of Americans who will go and buy plantains, but Latinos love them.”

When unpacking his own produce bag at home in Springs, Doug Pitches said he sometimes does not recognize the vegetables, which he then looks up, alongside his wife, and they learn how to cook them together.

They are a family of seven, with five sons ages 18, 15, 10, and a pair of twins who are 8. They own their home — “I don’t know what we’d do if we had to rent,” Pitches said — but, even still, he is disabled and works a part-time job with a mortgage to pay and young children to feed.

“We’re cutting it pretty close to the edge, you know?” he said. “Financially, it’s rocky, and getting that food every week, we know we got that food, you know what I mean? And we can work with that.

“With the boys, they eat a lot now,” he laughed. “They’re getting bigger, and they eat a lot. They’re active. So we manage, but the food pantry is essential for not only our health but financially, too. It gives us that support.”

The stories that Bishop hears on a weekly basis can be “heart-wrenching,” she said, particularly of those about children.

“We’ve had teachers reach out to us and say a high school student emailed them over a snow day and said, ‘Hey, there’s no food in my house and I haven’t eaten since yesterday,’” she said. “Even doing this every day for a living, I sometimes feel that gut punch.”

She took a deep breath. “Then we try to do whatever we can to make sure that family becomes part of our program, and that never happens again,” she continued. “But you think, what about the kid that didn’t feel comfortable to email their teacher, or doesn’t know anybody they feel like they can reach out to?”

Public awareness is key, Reichart-Wheaton said, for recipients, donors and volunteers alike. Advocacy was high during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, but has died down in recent years, even as need continues to rise.

“We get some good donors, don’t get me wrong, but unless you’re in their face, they don’t think about it — and I understand that,” she said. “But it’s a constant, constant struggle to raise money.”

On average, the Springs Food Pantry needs to fundraise nearly $1 million to stay afloat. At Heart of the Hamptons, the annual budget is $3 million. While some pantries accept food donations, most prefer monetary gifts to better purchase groceries in bulk.

“Whatever the individual can offer and give to the other, I hope that they have an opportunity to really act on that,” Andrejack said, “because whatever your abundance is, if you give some of that abundance to those in need, you have made their life abundant.

“So I just encourage whatever abundance you’re blessed with, if you could share it with the other.”

On any given Wednesday at the Springs Food Pantry, by 5 p.m. the line hasn’t slowed — and won’t until 6:30 p.m., when a volunteer stands behind the last car in the church parking lot, forced to turn any late arrivals away.

Some have been waiting in line for over an hour. And, every week, that breaks Reichart-Wheaton’s heart.

“There’s a lot of people, they say, ‘Not in my backyard — this can’t be happening,’” she said. “Well, it is happening. It is happening. And without these people — and this is what the public doesn’t understand — without the service workers who are making just above minimum wage, I don’t think East Hampton could survive.

“We need those people,” she continued. “We definitely need them.”