America's Hidden Hungry Struggle to Get By

The nation that feeds the world has trouble feeding itself.

Few places know this as well as the CAMBA emergency food pantry on Church Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. The pantry is down the street from a pawn shop and a Kennedy Fried Chicken, across the park from posh Park Slope, and miles away from Manhattan, where, it's said, the food donations are better.

National food insecurity rates went virtually unchanged from 2012 to 2013, the latest available figures from the USDA, at 15.9 percent and 15.8 percent respectively. The number, a measure of whether all household members have access to enough food for an active and healthy life, hasn't returned to its pre-Great Recession levels of 11 percent.

"While we're starting to see some improvements in the economy, food insecurity stays at stubbornly high levels," said Elaine Waxman, head of research for Feeding America.

At the Church Avenue food pantry, patrons scramble as a bag of potatoes breaks. A volunteer uses a bullhorn to keep the line of mostly black retirees, single mothers, low income housing tenants and homeless in check.

They enter CAMBA in small groups at a time, up a hand operated elevator, to a small storeroom halfway lined with a corridor of wireframe shelves. Today they can choose from the donated spaghetti, rice, juice, canned sardines, cereal, onions, beets and potatoes. The other half houses tables and lights for a hydroponic garden for fresh vegetables for the clients, but a leak in the roof has caused all the plants to be removed.

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