By Judy O’Gorman Alvarez
At the start of the pandemic, Lunch Break in Red Bank shifted from indoor dining to grab-and-go meal service resulting in a 22 percent rise over 2019.
As many of us awaken from this year of COVID-19 quarantine, lost time, takeout meals and social isolation, we line up for vaccinations, patronize businesses and restaurants that are reopening and we stand ready to greet spring.
But there are those among us who are still grieving for loved ones lost during this pandemic, so many who have lost jobs or businesses, even their residences. No 5-star Yelp review is going to help them put food on their tables. Lunch Break, the social service organization providing food, clothing, fellowship, life skills and employment training, has lived up to its motto to “never miss a meal” as a result of generous community members, partners and dedicated volunteers.
“It has been some year,” said Gwendolyn Love, executive director of Lunch Break. “Despite the many, many challenges that we had to face in terms of retrofitting the building so it’ll be safe and working double with less staff in the building, there were concerns about shortages of supplies that everyone was feeling.”
All along the food supply chain – from food banks to soup kitchens – the concern was the same: will there be enough? “It worked out,” Love sighed. “We were able to meet the need.” But it’s not over.
Last year, Lunch Break saw an unprecedented demand for groceries – 111 percent more food pickups over 2019. The same holds true for grab-and-go meals – continental breakfast and lunch served six days a week – with a 22 percent rise over 2019.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, Lunch Break quickly adapted to modified food and grocery services, offering grab-and-go meals and contactless grocery pickups with help from frontline staff and volunteers.
Lunch Break’s accomplishments over the past year have been plentiful and include nutritional meal planning and grocery options for preventive health care and accommodations for health-related dietary restrictions; homebound delivery of meals provided six days a week; Thanksgiving grab-and-go meals as well as deliveries to homebound clients; and over 100 hot meals delivered to displaced individuals in a local motel.
“The demand was there,” Love said. “People who never knew we existed came to us for help. We were taking care of people who lost their jobs or had them cut back. And we still are.”
According to Love, the community is as important to Lunch Break as Lunch Break is to the community. Throughout the pandemic, Love said donors delivered. “Even though people were afraid to go out and shop themselves, they found ways to donate.”
Food deliveries arrived from Amazon, checks poured in and support was there. “Regardless of what people were doing – the seniors afraid to come out – they found ways to help. Even people who lost their jobs gave money so Lunch Break could pay bills for other people.”
A COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund was established with agency partners for the payment of utilities, car payments, cable bills and rent assistance. To date, Lunch Break has distributed more than $800,000 directly to vendors to help clients keep these critical services.
Food insecurity refers to the USDA’s measure of “lack of access, at times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members and limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate foods.”
Food insecure households are not necessarily food insecure all the time. Instead, it may reflect a household’s need to make trade-offs between important basic needs, such as housing or medical bills, and purchasing nutritionally adequate foods.
According to Community Foodbank of New Jersey, 13.5 percent of residents are projected to be food insecure because of COVID-19; 8.7 percent were food insecure before COVID-19. The numbers for children are even more disturbing: 19.7 percent projected because of COVID-19, compared to 11.3 of children prior to the pandemic.
Fulfill, formerly the FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, has been providing food for families in Monmouth and Ocean counties for more than 30 years. According to the nonprofit’s website, it feeds children, seniors, veterans and the working poor. It serves pantries, shelters and soup kitchens, provides hot meals for children after school and sends food home for those same children over the weekend.
Pre-pandemic, Fulfill was feeding 136,000 people, including 50,000 children. Today, Fulfill is feeding 215,000 people, including 70,000 children. Fulfill has served 3.3 million more meals since the coronavirus crisis affected the Jersey Shore.
In addition to food pantries, shelters and places of worships, some restaurants are helping to feed the hungry. No Limits Cafe, a lunch eatery in Middletown that provides meaningful employment for adults with intellectual disabilities, is introducing “Help for Hunger,” a program to provide meals.
The program was inspired by a $30,000 grant the café received from Marcus Lemonis’ Lemon-Aid Foundation aimed at keeping the café’s employees working while helping to feed people dealing with food insecurity in Monmouth County. During the 10-week program, they were able to feed, twice each week, 86 homebound seniors, 20 residents of a homeless shelter and 50 residents of a nearby motel.
“We are seeing, firsthand, that despite the positive developments of the vaccine and the reopening of the economy, the level of food insecurity is staggering,” said No Limits Cafe co-founder Mark Cartier. Now the café is appealing to the community to help; donations will not only help keep the adults with intellectual disabilities employed at the restaurant, it will also help feed people in the area who might otherwise go hungry.
As Lunch Break logs its 38th year caring for the well-being of hundreds of families and individuals living at or below the poverty line in Monmouth County and beyond, Love said, “People always rise to the occasion when there’s a need, when someone is hurting.”
“We saw this in (Super Storm) Sandy, in 2007 and 2008 with the big financial downturn and even now we’re seeing people are still being very generous.”
But it’s not over. “We’re still in the fight,” she said. “There are thousands of people right here in Monmouth County who still don’t have jobs.”
“Food insecurity has been with us forever,” she said. “This is not new. it’s just dramatically increased in a short time.” Whereas the issue was always a se-rious problem, she noted, the pandemic forced it to become an instant crisis.
“But,” she said, “there’s hope and opportunity coming out of this pandemic.”
For more information or to contribute, visit lunch- break.org, fulfillnj.org or no- limitscafe.org.
This article originally appeared in the March 18, 2021 print edition of The Two River Times.
