Many food pantries across the country say they are cutting the amount of groceries they give to needy families as demand for aid is outpacing supplies, reports the Associated Press.

Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual hunger survey, which was released last week, did not show an increase in the number of hungry people in the United States since 2006, officials at food pantries are certain that more working people are seeking their assistance. At the Society of St. Vincent de Paul food pantry in Cincinnati, for example, clients now get three or four days’ worth of food instead of six or seven.

Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks, said, “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I can’t believe how much worse it gets month after month.”

Rising costs of living coupled with cutbacks to food pantries in both donations and government support have some concerned about what the winter months will bring.

Mark Quandt, executive director of the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, said, “We’re bracing ourselves for a very tough winter, especially with home-heating fuel prices at record highs in the Northeast. People living in poverty or near poverty just can’t sustain those types of increases.”

Plus: City Harvest, a nonprofit group that delivers goods to food pantries and soup kitchens in some of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, is trying a new way to deal with the current food shortage at social-service charities in the city — pay upstate farmers for produce that would otherwise go unused, The New York Times reports.

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