February is typically the slowest month of the year for the Eagan Resource Center’s food shelf. But this month, Eagan Resource Center Director Lisa Horn isn’t expecting any slowdown.

That’s because the number of users accessing the food shelf has grown explosively over the last two years, Horn said.

In a sign that mayors are going to get involved in the setting of nutrition policy in the farm bill, the U.S.

Recognizing the growing need for Minnesotans, particularly seniors, to eat nutritiously to maintain their health, Lt. Gov.

The number of Minnesotans who sought help to feed themselves and their families hit record levels in 2011. Never before have so many people visited food shelves or relied on food stamps. But there are signs the big spikes of recent years could be slowing.

Here’s the bad news: As of November, there are now 511,343 Minnesotans on food stamps — more people than live in Minneapolis and Duluth.

Truck after truck pulled up to the back door of Gethsemane Lutheran Church in North Minneapolis Wednesday afternoon, dropping off pallets of food wrapped in red plastic and packed with love.

“I wanted a miracle,” recounted parish minister Roxi Mork, who helps run the Camden Promise Food Shelf, while standing amongst a throng of volunteers carrying bags and boxes of donated food.

This is the home of the Waverly Food Stamp Center, one of eighteen such centers in New York City. On a recent Monday morning, it was choked with visitors—men, women and kids in strollers—heading to appointments, picking up applications and pressing to get cases reopened.

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that’s shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government’s safety net frays.

George McGovern’s impact on food policy could have been greater, but not through more effort on his part. The 1972 presidential candidate, now 89, was a bomber pilot at the end of World War II when the decision was made to distribute remaining medicine and food to Europeans before heading home.

Across the noisy lunchrooms of Minnesota schools, there’s a quiet but growing sign that the economy is taking a toll on families that have never needed help before.

More Minnesota students are signing on for free or reduced-price meals, as middle-class families coping with cutbacks and foreclosures are becoming first-time users of the subsidized National School Lunch Program.

Reflecting a su

Millions of American schoolchildren are receiving free or low-cost meals for the first time as their parents, many once solidly middle class, have lost jobs or homes during the economic crisis, qualifying their families for the decades-old safety-net program.

New York Times