Challenging times bring new faces to free meals

Valerie Dahlquist and her 14-year-old son had turkey and all the trimmings Thursday at the Salt Lake City Mission — but they are not part of the homeless or transient population that the mission typically serves.

They live in Salt Lake City, but the prices of food, rent and other goods got so high, Dahlquist couldn't afford the gas bill. The gas got turned off, and she couldn't fire up the stove and whip up a Thanksgiving meal for her family. So they decided to try dinner at the mission.

"It's hard right now," she said. "I'm on Social Security, and it's a tight budget."

Volunteers of Utah churches and organizations that provided free Thanksgiving meals saw new people this year, undoubtedly because of the tough economic times.

The story was the same in other cities across the United States.

The food bank for Chicago has seen a 33 percent increase in demand from July to September 2008, compared to the same period last year. Donations to the Salvation Army in the Washington, D.C., area have dropped 20 percent while the agency grapples with a 30 percent increase in requests for assistance. The Food Bank of Alaska in Anchorage handed out turkey dinners Monday to 5,787 people at eight sites, about one-third more than last year's 4,237. Since the beginning of 2008, the Fred Jordan Mission in downtown Los Angeles experienced a 15 percent increase in the number of people seeking food or transitional housing.

The Salt Lake City Mission dinner lasted from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., said Chuck Simonson, who coordinates the daylong event and did not have a plate count to assess the number of people served.

Lewis Stages buses picked up folks at places like the Veterans Medical Center and the St. Vincent de Paul Resource Center and took them to Centro de Vida Cristiana Assemblies of God Church on Redwood Road, northwest of downtown. In addition to food, people were offered clothes, blankets, jackets and Bibles.

Jim Hollan was among the guests at the Salt Lake City Mission dinner. He currently lives at the Road Home, a program that helps people overcome homelessness, after having been laid off from his truck-driving position in September. The trucking company was based in Salt Lake City, and although Hollan had previously lived in Indiana and Ohio, friends and family members warned him not to return to the Midwest because there were no jobs.