As much as I hate to write about hunger during hunger season, it’s a key moment in what’s becoming a growing crisis, with need on the rise and donations on the wane:

Just to dispel any misconceptions: There were no laid-off Lehman Brothers brokers lined up for the food pantry outside Mount Zion AME Church in East Harlem on Friday morning. The people lugging their empty shopping carts looked like any bunch of New Yorkers you’d see on the subway: old, young, and in-between, some good-humored, others griping about cutting in line.

Those lines are longer than ever now &emdash; the one at Mount Zion started forming three hours before the doors opened. But that has nothing to do with Lehman and its Wall Street ilk either… [read more]