TEXAS: Food pantries run by Catholics across the country are helping the poor as America's highest inflation rate in four decades looms large.

Catholic food pantries serve millions of Americans across the country — Catholics and non-Catholics alike — every year. For people in need, they make the difference between having food on the table and going hungry.

“If it were not for this pantry, there would have been times when we would not have had food,” said LaShanda Davis, a security officer who receives help from the Guadalupe Center food pantry in Houston, Texas.

Now, under the weight of inflation, many pantries are struggling. Grocery prices jumped nearly 11% in July 2022 compared to the previous year. Those increases impact the food pantries themselves as well as their customers.

One food bank in St. Louis saw its monthly grocery bill more than double in recent months.

In Chicago, the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels food pantry said the number of families seeking help increased by 50% since last summer.

And one of Louisiana’s largest food banks is reporting that the number of needy people seeking its services is increasing by 5% every month.

Catholic Charities organizations in both Nashville and Gallup, New Mexico, also told that their food pantries have seen a substantial increase in demand since the start of 2022.

People are turning to these food pantries not only for food but also for help with other needs, a spokesperson for the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston told. These include clothing, school supplies, rental and utility assistance, employment guidance, and education.

While demand at the pantries does not appear to be quite as sky-high as it was during the initial COVID-19 crisis in 2020, inflation seems to have created a more sustained high demand.

Haley Calabro, director of the St. Augustine Wellston Center in St. Louis, told that they typically served 300-400 people before the start of the COVID crisis, and a record 1,400 in April 2020, but that number eventually went back down again to typical levels as the pandemic wore on. They are serving around 840 people a month now, she said.

Catholic Charities, whose agencies manage over 1,000 food banks and pantries across all 50 states and five U.S. territories, serves over 8.4 million individuals each year.

Jane Stenson, the vice president of poverty reduction programs and services at Catholic Charities USA, told CNA that “many agencies have stated that they are having difficulty keeping food on the shelves.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, food inflation in the United States hit 10.9% in July 2022, the highest since May 1979. Food-at-home prices — meaning the cost of food at the grocery store — increased by 13.1%.

Dave Barringer, national CEO of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, told that during the pandemic “we did not see an increase in food needs as much as a need to get food to people in different, safer, ways,” such as with contactless methods of food distribution.

SVDP mobilizes hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country, arranged into local groups called conferences, to provide various kinds of aid to the poor through personal encounters.