NEWBURGH – On a sunny somewhat warm Saturday morning, food insecurity had a bright presence as a line formed around the block in the center of the city for Loaves and Fishes annual Thanksgiving distribution in the parking lot of Sacred Heart School.
“We buy some of the food. We buy turkeys from the food bank, and we give it out to all the people on line,” said Irma Bahr-Madrid, chair of Loaves and Fishes. “It’s a lot of people.”
Bahr-Madrid anticipated 500-700 people seeking food five days before Thanksgiving, and she didn’t want to run out of birds as turkeys were distributed along with eggs, fresh vegetables and other canned goods.
“Hopefully yes,” she said, when asked if she had enough turkeys. “We have about 700 turkeys, so we should be OK.”
Loaves and Fishes, a Mid-Hudson-based ministry, has been doing this since 1998, and Bahr-Madrid has been helping out for five years. And Saturday’s distribution, during a year of a pandemic and a subsequent economic collapse, is not the largest she has been a part of.
“More people have decided they have to distribute turkeys, also,” she said. “It’s kind of shrunk a little bit, but not a lot.”
Five years ago, 1,000 turkeys were given away when Bahr-Madrid started to help. But with other distribution sites, the greater need has been exposed since the middle of the last decade.
“There’s more people than ever because if we are doing 700 and somebody down the street is doing 700, and somebody else is doing 300,” she said, “there’s a lot of people with a lot of need.”
