guardian | The first visit to the food bank is always the hardest. Michelle
Venus, 52, cried. "Not while I was there," she said. "But before and
after." Four years earlier, she'd been a homeowner in a $75,000 a year
job. She'd donated to the food bank's fundraising drives. Now she was
there to pick up food she couldn't afford to buy. "It was not what I'd
expected for myself or from myself. It was just a really hard day."
Mark
Weaver, 54, the former chairman of nearby Loveland chamber of commerce,
tried to avoid the gaze of acquaintances he'd met when he attended the
food bank's galas. "It was very humiliating," he says. "I used to take
clients to their events, and all of a sudden I'm living below the
poverty line." He used to earn a six-figure salary plus commission plus
benefits, and also chaired the Northern Colorado
Legislative Alliance, which lobbied local politicians on behalf of the
business community. He made up his mind to go after a friend, a
well-paid software engineer who'd also fallen on hard times, told him
to: "Get over being proud."
The queue at the Larimer County food
bank in Fort Collins, a town of 147,000 in northern Colorado, snakes out
of the door and is mostly silent. In line there are slightly more
people than trolleys. The number of families visiting here has increased more than 50% over the last five years. On average they also visit more often and need more food.
In the parking lot there are only two bumper stickers – one for Mitt Romney
and one for the US navy. Inside it is set up like a grocery store.
People take what they need, although there are limits for some items
such as bread. From the outside, if you didn't know it was a food bank,
you might think they were going to the cinema.
People often think
they know what poverty looks like until they end up here, and then they
realise it looks like them and many other people that they know. Weaver
lives in a nice area. The first he knew that his next-door neighbour was
struggling with his mortgage payments was when his house was foreclosed
on and he was moving out.
The official poverty rate in the US has risen 19% since 2000 with just under one in seven Americans now poor and one in five reporting they did not have enough money to buy food last year.
