St. Louis, MO (KMOX) - Food pantries are starting to feel a strain from the impacts of the coronavirus.
"We are seeing a very large uptick in people who are requesting support and services and we expect that to continue to increase," says Meredith Knopp, President and CEO of St. Louis Area Food Bank. The Food Bank serves 26 counties in MO and IL.
Knopp says they started the week with a mobile distribution to families in Pine Lawn, "we distributed over 36,000 pounds of food, over 500 families, in about three hours time and the sad part is if we would have had more food we could have fed even more families."
She says many families did not have the resources to purchase extra weeks of food. Knopp says she expects demand to increase as time goes on. She says her agency is working to increase supply lines to be able to access resources in coming weeks.