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A Northeast Philadelphia Pantry Is Running Out of Days

One Philadelphia food pantry now supports 6,425 households and can see about 1,500 in a month. The shortage is capacity, not food.

By Harry Hayman 6 min read
A Northeast Philadelphia Pantry Is Running Out of Days

The most important sentence about hunger in Philadelphia this August was not spoken at the press event. It was sitting on a website, under the opening hours, written in the flat tone people use for a phone number. Feast of Justice needs volunteers so it can consistently keep Wednesdays open.

A pantry does not fail the way a budget fails. It fails one Wednesday at a time.

The two numbers a mile apart

On August 11 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported from Feast of Justice in Northeast Philadelphia, where Pastor Tricia Neale, the pantry’s executive director, gave a figure that had been climbing for five years. The number of households the pantry supports has grown from 2,750 to 6,425, an increase of more than 200 percent. Since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act took effect, she said, an additional 1,850 families in Northeast Philadelphia have turned to the pantry for help. And, Neale added, the crisis is accelerating.

The second number is published by the pantry itself. Feast of Justice states on its homepage that it serves over 1,500 unique households each month and distributes an average of 82,000 pounds of food. Its impact page puts the fiscal year 2025 monthly average at 1,465 different households, a 61 percent increase on the year before, when the average was 903.

Six thousand four hundred and twenty five households registered. Roughly fifteen hundred through the door in a month.

That gap is not a food shortage. It is a calendar.

What August 11 looked like on Tyson Avenue

Joel Berg, chief executive of the New York based nonprofit Hunger Free America, used a pallet of canned beans and apple sauce as a lectern to address a small crowd inside the pantry. People throughout the region, he said, are facing a dangerous double whammy causing a skyrocketing hunger crisis.

Berg described Feast of Justice as one of the largest food pantries in the city, with probably the most diverse food pantry clientele in the nation, and offered that diversity as evidence that food insecurity reaches people from any background. The pantry, he said, is the food affordability issue in the flesh.

He was not speaking in the abstract about the law. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, carried more than 1.1 trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid and to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program administered by the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Roughly 4 million Americans are expected to lose benefits in 2026, many because they do not meet work or age requirements newly added to the program. Pennsylvania Department of Human Services estimates put about 144,000 Pennsylvania recipients in line for reduced benefits this year, an estimated 45,000 of them in Philadelphia and 12,000 more across the collar counties.

Berg reduced the mechanism to something a child could follow. When there is a drought and you take away water, he said, the drought is going to get worse.

What the cut actually did

The pantry has absorbed a 35 percent decline in the donated food it receives, in part because of cuts to federal and state food programs. That is a real and painful squeeze, and it deserves to be named rather than argued away. Donations matter. Two of the region’s largest food distributors, Philabundance and the Share Food Program, send Feast of Justice whatever they can.

But the ceiling is not on the shelf. The ceiling is on Wednesdays.

Loree Jones Brown, chief executive of Philabundance, was at the pantry that Tuesday and put the structural position exactly. If SNAP is the safety net, she said, then the food banks are “the safety net of the safety net.” Then came the part that matters: “But we can’t make up for the cuts.”

That sentence is worth reading twice, because it is a food bank chief executive publicly declining to accept a job the country keeps trying to hand her. Charity is not a substitute mechanism for a federal benefit. It is a smaller, slower, more human system with a hard physical limit, and the limit is measured in hours, doors, volunteers and refrigeration.

The pantry’s own year over year figures show how fast the room filled. In fiscal year 2024 it served 3,543 different households across Northeast Philadelphia, registered roughly 1,012 new guests and averaged 903 households a month. In fiscal year 2025 it served roughly 10,892 individuals, registered 1,771 new guests, a 57 percent increase, and the monthly average of different households climbed 61 percent to 1,465. Demand did not creep. It stepped.

Feast of Justice has been running since 2007 and is volunteer driven. It operates from 3101 Tyson Avenue and from a Northeast Services Hub on Castor Avenue. Guests take home roughly 50 pounds of food per visit. Eighty seven percent of the households it served in fiscal year 2025 make 25,000 dollars a year or less. Every one of those facts describes a real operation with real walls, and none of them can be scaled by wishing.

The people the arithmetic is about

Angie Bryant, 55, of Tacony, is a former phlebotomist who can no longer work. She recently lost her SNAP benefits because new age restrictions exclude her participation. In the body, she said, hunger is hurtful. “Without this place, I don’t know how I could make it.”

Anthony Morales, 27, of Mayfair, was laid off from a warehouse job and is responsible for feeding his seven year old daughter and his partner. When you fall, he said, this place lifts you up. You have a lot of fear and anxiety without enough food. It can give you hope and confidence that tomorrow could be better.

Neither of them is a policy failure in the aggregate sense. They are two people in Northeast Philadelphia who need a room on Tyson Avenue to be open on a specific day, and whether it is open depends on whether enough neighbours signed up to work that shift.

Why this is the documentary’s whole argument

Harry Hayman has been building I AM HUNGRY: The Many Faces of Food Insecurity around precisely this distinction, and his food justice work through the Feed Philly Coalition and his fellowship at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia has been pointed the same direction for years. The comfortable version of the story says that when federal support is withdrawn, charity absorbs the difference and communities take care of their own. It is a story that lets a policy decision look survivable.

The pantry on Tyson Avenue is what happens when that story meets a room with a fixed number of hours in it. The registrations went up 200 percent. The donations went down 35 percent. And the binding constraint turned out to be neither of those things. It was whether there were enough hands to open the doors on a Wednesday.

Harry Hayman keeps returning to the same civic point across food, music and film: the infrastructure people rely on is usually already there, running on volunteer effort and institutional habit, until somebody removes a support beam and everyone discovers how much weight it was carrying. Feast of Justice is holding. It has been holding since 2007. Holding is not the same as being able to take on the work of a federal program, and nobody at that pantry has ever claimed otherwise.

Sources and references

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