Until
the pandemic struck the city, La Jornada food pantry used to hand out groceries
to roughly 1,000 families a week. Now, the figure tops 10,000.
The New York Post has revealed what will certainly be an embarrassment to President Donald Trump: a quarter-mile queue of hungry Americans in New York, waiting for free food.
“The
line stretched a quarter-mile before the sun was barely up Saturday, snaking
around corners like bread lines in the 1930s. But the hungry in Queens are
today’s New Yorkers, left jobless by the coronavirus”, New York Post reported.
And
volunteers serve lunch every day to 1,000 — many of them kids with growling
stomachs. Across the five boroughs, the hungry number in the hundreds of
thousands, the Food Bank of New York estimates.
“It
reminds me of the picture from the Great Depression where a man in a suit and
tie is giving another man in a suit and tie an apple. That’s all he had,” La
Jornada’s Pedro Rodriguez told The Post.
“We
give all we have, but that’s not enough.”
Seniors,
moms and kids, singles — many immigrants from China and Mexico — wait for
hours. They turn out in droves wherever, and whenever, the food pantry’s truck
shows up.
“We
feel like we are underwater, drowning in a tsunami of people,” Rodriguez, a
volunteer who acts as the food pantry’s executive director, told The Post.
“This
isn’t like a little rain coming down. The numbers are unbelievable.”
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