Who Is Actually Showing Up at Pennsylvania's Food Pantries

Picture the person standing in a food pantry line right now. I mean actually picture someone, before you read another sentence, because I think most of us are picturing the wrong person. We picture someone who lost a job. We picture someone between things. What the newest Pennsylvania numbers show is a pantry line growing fastest among people who are not currently receiving SNAP at all, and a food bank director in Allentown who will tell you flatly that most of the new faces walking through her door have jobs.

The Central Pennsylvania numbers

The Central Pennsylvania Food Bank serves 27 counties across the middle of the state, and its internal numbers, reported by The Daily Item as part of the Pennsylvania Capital Star network, show something specific. Between February and April 2026, compared to the same months a year earlier, total pantry visits across the network rose 5.2 percent. Visits from households not currently receiving SNAP rose 6.5 percent. Visits from households currently on SNAP rose only 2.8 percent.

Zach Zook, the food bank’s chief strategy officer, is the one who put those three numbers together, and I want to be honest about what he said they mean, because it complicates the tidy version of this post before I even get to make my argument.

The objection I have to concede

Here is the tidy version I could have written: the fastest growing group at the pantry is people who never needed SNAP in the first place, and that is the whole story. It is not the whole story, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Zook’s own explanation for the gap between non SNAP visits and SNAP visits is that people are losing SNAP. In his words, the food bank can “attribute that to folks losing SNAP benefits.” A person who had SNAP in January and lost it in March shows up in April as a non SNAP household, statistically speaking, even though a month earlier they were counted the other way. That is a real mechanism, it is the most direct reading of Zook’s own data, and I am conceding it outright rather than building a post on a claim the source itself does not support.

What that concession does not do is hand the comfortable story back to anyone. Because losing SNAP and never having qualified for it turn out to point at the same underlying problem from two different directions, and Allentown is where I saw the second direction most clearly.

What Allentown is actually seeing

The Allentown Area Ecumenical Food Bank is, by its own description and by WFMZ’s reporting, the only daily food bank in Lehigh County. Summer is normally its slowest stretch of the year. Not this year. New clients are up 55 percent over the last two months, during what should have been the quiet season.

Anne Eagan, the food bank’s executive director, described who those new clients are in language I have not been able to stop thinking about. Most of them, she said, have had their SNAP either cut or taken away completely. And separately from that: “Most of them are working, and they just can’t make ends meet between their income and the price of gas.”

Read those two sentences side by side and you get a fuller picture than either one gives alone. Some of Eagan’s new clients lost a benefit. A lot of them are also working people whose paycheck was already stretched thin before anything got cut, and gas and grocery prices did the rest.

Why get a job was never the right question

Pennsylvania’s own SNAP enrollment fell from about 1.96 million people to about 1.74 million over the past year, a drop of roughly 11 percent that The Daily Item’s reporting connects directly to the same federal changes. Some of the people who came off those rolls stopped needing help. I have no reason to believe that describes most of them, given what Eagan is seeing walk through her door every day.

The stereotype behind “get a job” has always assumed the person in the pantry line does not have one. Zook’s numbers and Eagan’s numbers do not support that assumption this year. A household can have full time work in it and still lose the arithmetic against rent, a grocery bill, and a tank of gas, especially the same month a benefit gets cut or an age or work requirement takes someone off the rolls entirely. Working and still short is not a contradiction. It is most of what these two food banks are describing.

I keep thinking about the word “still” in that sentence, because it is doing a lot of quiet work. Still working. Still short. Nobody in either data set stopped trying. The households behind Zook’s 6.5 percent and the clients behind Eagan’s 55 percent did not change their effort. What changed around them was the price of gas, the price of groceries, and in a meaningful share of cases, a benefit that used to fill part of the gap between a paycheck and a full refrigerator. Take away one input in a household budget that was already balanced right at the edge, and the household does not fail quietly. It shows up somewhere, and this year it is showing up at a pantry counter in Allentown and at food bank distribution points across 27 counties of central Pennsylvania.

What this has to do with Philadelphia

I want to be precise about the geography, because precision is the whole point of a post built on numbers. The Central Pennsylvania Food Bank’s 27 counties and Lehigh County are not Philadelphia. I am not going to blur that line just because it would make a tidier argument to pretend this is a Philadelphia study. It is not.

But the mechanism described here, SNAP losses and thin wages landing on the same households at the same time, does not stop at a county line. I AM HUNGRY: The Many Faces of Food Insecurity exists because I believe hunger in this city is a policy and infrastructure story, not a personal one, and Philadelphia’s own numbers make the same argument these two food banks are making. Roughly 312,000 Philadelphians, about one in five of us, are food insecure according to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap research. My work with the Feed Philly Coalition and my fellowship at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia both keep landing on the same conclusion Zook and Eagan reached from a different direction. This was never only about people who stopped working. It is increasingly about people whose work stopped being enough.

The question I would actually ask

So stop asking why someone is standing in a pantry line. Start asking what their paycheck covers once rent and gas are paid. Ask someone you know doing hourly work whether their hours got steadier or shakier this year. I think that answer tells you more about where this is headed than the unemployment rate does, and it is certainly closer to what Zook and Eagan are both describing from the two ends of Pennsylvania’s food bank system.