Food pantries all over Missouri will be saying "cheese" this month, thanks to a shipment of the dairy product made possible through federal stimulus money.

The infusion comes amidst a surge in Missourians seeking help buying food. Scott Rowson of the Missouri Division of Family Support says the number of Missouri residents on food stamps passed the 1,000,000 mark in January. That means nearly one in five residents now rely on government support to afford their food.

Food banks in St. Louis, Cape Girardeau, Kansas City, St. Joseph and Springfield will benefit from the program.

Meantime, the New York Times is reporting, "demand for food spiked with the unemployment rate, some food pantries have had to turn away people seeking help. Others are packing a little less food into each shopping bag they give out. But recently the nation's food banks received a $100 million windfall of extra food, as part of the federal stimulus law."

The grant is a big boost for the food bank program, which usually gets $250 million a year from Washington, and the amount of food it can buy seems supersize, even for a field that routinely measures servings by the millions of pounds.

The stimulus money has bought $15.8 million worth of poultry, $15.5 million worth of canned fruit, $13.3 million worth of peanut products, $25.2 million worth of cheese and $29.4 million worth of pork, according to the Department of Agriculture, which administers the program.

That last item - about literal pork in the stimulus - prompted sniggering earlier this month when the Drudge Report posted a $1.191 million federal stimulus contract for "2 pound frozen ham sliced" on its Web site.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack responded that the food would ease hunger and noted that the two pounds mentioned in the contract referred to the size of the packaging, not the amount of ham. "In fact," Mr. Vilsack said in a statement, "the contract in question purchased 760,000 pounds of ham for $1.191 million, at a cost of approximately $1.50 per pound."

The extra food is being welcomed by food banks, food pantries and soup kitchens, which say they are seeing big increases in the number of people seeking food. A recent survey by Feeding America, a nonprofit organization whose network of more than 200 food banks helps 63,000 local charities distribute food, found that requests for emergency food assistance were up by 30 percent over the previous year.

To see the Columbia Daily Tribune story, click here