Photo taken by Giovanni Dainotto
“Take what you need, leave what you can,” Elle Mangano of Deer Park wrote on an easel next to a table of food, cleaning, supplies, and toilet paper. With Long Island having the highest unemployment rates in New York State, it was a way to help those unable to pay for food and house supplies.
The week of March 28, 2020, ended with unemployment rates jumping from 80,000 claims to a colossal 238,000. On Long Island, rates soared nearly 3,000 percent. The New York State Department of Labor has been flooded with people trying to apply for unemployment. “It keeps crashing because you literally have hundreds of thousands of people at any time trying to get on the site,” Gov. Cuomo stated at his daily press conference. This can be challenging for families who strain to make ends meet and put food on the table.
While Americans are finding it difficult to feed their families, others are creating makeshift food banks in their driveways. In Deer Park, New York, The Mangano family took it upon themselves to help their fellow neighbors. “I got the idea from a video online of a girl whose mom is a single parent and couldn’t afford to have a bunch of food in the house,” 11-year-old Barbara Mangano, said. “So, I just thought, why not help people who are less fortunate than us and can’t get food in the stores because people are hoarding it.”
The table is generously stocked with a wide variety of non-perishable food and cleaning supplies including soup cans, ramen noodle packs, peanut butter, mac and cheese, pasta, and rolls of toilet paper. A large portion of the table came from their own pantry, with contributions from the Deer Park Community Facebook group as well as people passing by. In addition to food donations, Elle stated that people have given back to the family with thank you notes and candy, but one individual attempted to pay for the goods they were taking. The children’s mother, Elle, is also the owner of a Deer Park small business, Family Florist. Having to close up shop, Elle was able to contribute a bucket of flowers to the table to raise morale.
Giving tips on where to find plentiful food options during the pandemic, Gaetano, 13, and Barbara suggest visiting a local foreign market. “We got most of our ramen and rice at a Spanish bodega,” said Gaetano “If you need food, try your little food market stores, they are always overlooked.”
For anyone struggling to purchase food, there are Long Island food banks available. Island Harvest and Long Island Cares both have detailed websites providing directories for food pick-up locations, instructions for whom to call, and hours of operation. As of April 3rd, Long Island Cares has served over 7,000 people with 65,000 meals via home deliveries and food trucks. For more information, visit licares.org and click on “Locate Food.”
