NEWS BRIEF: Food banks expand as need increases

Demand for stocked food remains far above pre-pandemic levels, and food banks in Atlanta are doing what they can to meet the need. The Toco Hills Community Alliance, a food pantry on LaVista Road, served twice as many people in 2020 as it did the previous year, and the Atlanta Community Food Bank is now billed as the world’s largest such facility after moving into a 345,000-square-foot warehouse in East Point. ACFB boasts of a storage area equal to five and a half football fields that was able to distribute 96 million meals during the fiscal year that ended in July 2021. “There’s just a large number of our neighbors, who, by virtue of rising housing costs, rising health care costs and other pressures that they face, need help meeting all their basic needs,” said ACFB president Kyle Waide. “And we think that pressure is going to be here indefinitely even without the pandemic.” newsweek.com