It's lunchtime at the Wayside Soup Kitchen in Portland. On the menu? Chicken wraps, salad and pastries. "The food is just so awesome here, it really is. It's better than any restaurant I ever ate in my life--and I'm a chef by trade." Frank Frost, who started coming here for lunch and dinners two months ago, is one of the many new faces at Wayside, the state's largest soup kitchen. Wayside, like others around the state, is reporting a dramatic increase in the number of clients at each meal because of the worsening economy.

 

"People coming to the kitchen were approximately 170 to 220, and right about now, not even a year later, we're reaching 280 to 320, even 350 at certain times of the year. That's Tim Morse, a program director at the soup kitchen. He says it's not just the volume of clients that is changing. Where 60 percent of the clients used to be homeless and 40 percent were poor and working class, the mix is now 50/50. "And that's because they don't have the money to pay for the food, they got enough money to pay for mortgage payment, or the rent payment, the heating costs, or the medications. We also see single mothers coming here more often, and we see the elderly coming in here more often and they’re on fixed incomes, so they're using the resources out in the community and what better place than the soup kitchen."

 

It's the same story all across the state, says Rick Small. He's executive director of the Good Shepherd Food Bank in Auburn, which supplies 615 food pantries and shelters around Maine. He says there are about 150,000 Mainers who are in need of food -- roughly 10,000 more than last year. Donations to his food bank have stayed steady in that period, but he's worried that won't be enough. "We supply enough food to the agencies that it turns into about a 1.5 million meals per month and that's probably only half what the need really is. You know, a lot of people don’t think that we have that kind of a problem in this country, or in this state. And it certainly is here."

 

Maine, in fact, has more of a hunger problem than other states. The DC-based advocacy group Food Research and Action Center ranked Maine fifth worst in the country when it came to hunger. More than 13 percent of households experience so-called "food insecurity,” which refers to limited or uncertain access to food.

 

"Maine's overall hunger rate is worse than the national average and it's getting worse at a faster pace than other states so those are both deep concerns particularly going into the depths of a recession." Jim Weill is the president of the Food Research and Action Center. He says that Maine is doing a good job trying to combat the hunger problem by supplying eligible individuals with food stamps. But not everybody wants food stamps. "That's not exactly my kind of thing." Neither is relying on the Wayside Soup Kitchen for meals, says Nicholas Slater. But the 21-year-old Slater, who says he eats his meals at Wayside, in between surfing the web at the library, and looking for jobs, says that the soup kitchen is helping him out until he can find work and a place to live. "I'm used to fending for myself, so this is just kind of very temporary."

 

With Thanksgiving coming up, Wayside's Tim Morse is nervous about his project to collect turkeys for needy families so they can celebrate the holiday at home, rather than at the soup kitchen. Then, he gets a call on his cell phone notifying him of someone anonymously donating more than 100 turkeys. "I think everybody knows that the economy is going to be so bad, this winter is going to be bad, the holidays are going to be bad. I think the community's coming together. It makes me want to cry sometimes. It's a very good day, today. It's a very good day."

 

Fighting back tears, Morse does some math in his head. With this latest donation, the total number of turkeys donated by community members is verging on 500.