Taking Aim at Hunger

Charities turn slain deer — and sometimes road kill — into food for the needy, but critics say programs are a publicity ploy

Big Island, Va. Sharon L. Cash, director of the Lynchburg Area Food Bank in Virginia, recalls the day her daughter called her at work, distraught from what she had witnessed in the family’s driveway. A deer carcass, she informed her mom, was lying in the family’s carport.

Ms. Cash was not at all bothered by the report. She knew that a disaster had not occurred: A hunter was just dropping off his latest donation to help the poor.

The Lynchburg Area Food Bank is one of the beneficiaries of Hunters for the Hungry, a non-profit group in this tiny southwestern Virginia town that provides wild game to the poor. Since Ms. Cash received the home-delivered donation seven years ago, Hunters for the Hungry has grown in both sophistication and scope. Last year, the program provided more than 140,000 pounds of venison and other meat to Virginia food banks, soup kitchens, and food pantries — enough for 560,000 meals.

The program is a natural for Virginia, where about 200,000 deer are killed by hunters each year. But similar efforts are popular throughout the rest of the country, too. The National Rifle Association — which helps raise money for many such programs — estimates that hunger-relief efforts led by hunters are providing six million meals to the poor each year.

Food-bank officials say the programs are a boon to hunger-relief efforts because red meat is rarely donated. What’s more, declines in corporate food contributions, coupled with food-stamp cutbacks brought about by recent welfare legislation, have left many anti-hunger groups struggling to do more with less.

“Food banks across the nation have a problem obtaining enough protein, and meat is protein,” says Jack Doyle, executive director of the Food Bank of Alaska in Anchorage, which started “Alaskan Hunters Fighting Hunger” last year. “Any way we can pick up meat, we jump at the opportunity.”

Programs vary widely from state to state, but most are in their nascent stages and continue to see donations of game increase each year.

In West Virginia, for example, the “Hunters Helping the Hungry” program, which is coordinated by state officials but paid for with private contributions, attracted 969 donations of deer this hunting season — almost double the number collected the previous year. In Anne Arundel County, Md., police officers have started a program to transform road kill into soup-kitchen cuisine, collecting almost 2,000 pounds of meat this year for the hungry. And in North Carolina, Governor Jim Hunt has declared a statewide “Hunters for the Hungry” day and helped serve “ven-a-roni” to about 200 poor people. The North Carolina Hunters for the Hungry program has collected more than 125,000 pounds of meat in the last five years.

Not everyone can stomach the self-proclaimed altruism of hunters. Animal-rights activists say that the programs are nothing more than a clever public-relations ploy aimed at distorting what hunters really do: kill animals for sport. They also worry that deer meat, which is not required to be inspected by the United States Department of Agriculture, is potentially dangerous.

“It’s a very unhealthy situation they’re creating for people,” says Anne Muller, president of Wildlife Watch, an anti-hunting group in New Paltz, N.Y. “They’re using the poor to help their killing scheme.”

The proliferation of programs run by hunters is being spurred in part by the growing deer population. At the beginning of this century, according to some estimates, there were fewer than 500,000 deer in the United States. Today, that number has increased to more than 15 million.

“Managed hunts,” in which the government kills off deer in areas where they are deemed to be a nuisance, have become a fixture in many suburban neighborhoods. And each year, 500,000 deer are struck by automobiles, according to the Insurance Information Institute, a non-profit group in New York.

“We’ve gone from deer being an animal that’s desirable to have around to where they’re a nuisance in some situations,” says Dave Beffa, an official at the Missouri Department of Conserva tion, which helps run a statewide venison-donation program called “Share the Harvest” that brought in more than 20,000 pounds of meat last year.

Anti-hunger efforts led by hunters — which many program officials say could be expanded if more money was available to pay for transporting and processing the meat — could soon get a lift from the federal government. Presi dent Clinton’s budget proposal for next year includes $20-million for “gleaning” efforts aimed at recovering crops and other foods that often go to waste. According to a study last year by the United States Department of Agriculture, more than a quarter of all edible food in the United States is wasted.

“I don’t know if I can convince them that this is gleaning,” says David H. Horne, director of Hunters for the Hungry in Big Island. “But I’ll surely try.”

Even without government support, hunters are proving to be an invaluable source of food for financially strapped charities. In Winchester, Va., about 90 miles west of Washington, the Lord Fairfax Area Food Bank now spends more than $200,000 a year on food — largely because it is getting fewer product donations from food manufacturers at a time when more and more clients are turning up for help. Last year, the food bank distributed 911,832 pounds of food, an increase of 6 per cent over 1996.

Standing among stacks of jumbo-sized boxes of Frosted Flakes and bags of marshmallows, Sally C. Coates, the charity’s director, says that although the group does receive some donations of chicken and fish from local producers, it also receives a lot of cookies, candy, and other food she calls “junk.”

“The deer meat adds good variety,” Ms. Coates says. “It’s a good, lean, and wholesome product.”

Today, just a little after the close of the hunting season, the food bank’s freezer is stocked with about 1,500 pounds of venison — about a quarter of what it receives from Hunters for the Hungry each year.

Besides the participation of hunger-relief groups, another key to making programs such as Hunters for the Hungry effective is the involvement of meat “processors” — more commonly known as slaughterhouses. The Big Island charity works with 58 different slaughterhouses across the state. Many of those businesses give Hunters for the Hungry discounts on deer processing, which can cost $50 or more for a whole animal.

Green Valley Meat Processor in Monroe, Va., is one such operation. On one February day, owner Earl Stinson is overseeing the butchering of 60 emu — an ostrich-like bird — that will eventually find their way to the hungry. As Mr. Stinson talks, one employee cuts the fat from the emu carcasses and slices off the meat while another sends the meat through a grinder.

“The average man will kill five deer,” says Mr. Stinson, noting that before Hunters for the Hungry was started, 40 to 50 deer that hunters failed to pick up from his business each year would go to waste. “He’s not gonna use that much meat. He needs some place to go with that meat, and Hunters for the Hungry is the place.”

The Hunters for the Hungry program in Big Island is probably the largest charity of its kind, but it is not the most creative in securing donations of meat for the hungry.

In Anchorage, the Food Bank of Alaska realized that it could take advantage of the many sport hunters who travel to the state for the lure of big game. Those hunters are often more interested in moose- and caribou-head trophies for their living-room walls than in meat.

Mr. Doyle, the executive director, says that the Food Bank of Alaska faced a formidable obstacle in setting up a meat-donation program: geography. He notes that the group covers an area twice the size of Texas and that most hunting is done far from Anchorage. To solve that problem, the food bank sought help from airlines.

“We took on the air carriers one at a time to see if they, on a space-available basis, would bring the meat back into Anchorage,” Mr. Doyle says. Four airlines agreed, and the program brought in 9,000 pounds of meat in its initial year. Mr. Doyle says that the soup kitchens and food pantries to which his organization provides food were “tickled pink” to receive the meat.

Some charity officials in Anne Arundel County, Md., were a little less enthusiastic about a program started by local police officers to provide them with road kill from local highways.

“It sounds terrible, trying to feed those in need with road kill,” says Bruce C. Michalec, executive director of the Anne Arundel Food Bank in Crownsville. But Mr. Michalec has been reassured by the efficient work of the officers. “The minute there’s an accident, they’re right there,” he says, noting that it typically takes 15 to 20 minutes for officers to arrive on the scene. “That deer’s not laying around.” Started in 1996, the program provides almost 2,000 pounds of deer meat to area charities each year.

Most donation programs have shied away from salvaging road kill because of concerns about rotten meat — and because so much of the meat is damaged that it’s not cost-effective. But even with animals that have been shot, some state officials have expressed concern about the safety of eating wild game. Deer meat is not required to be processed at slaughterhouses that have been inspected by the U.S.D.A., as is the case with cows, chickens, pigs, and other animals that are commonly found in grocery stores.

“Deer, when they are harvested out in the field, there’s no standards under which they have got to be handled,” says Mr. Beffa of the Missouri Department of Conservation. “There’s no control over how the meat is handled, whether it’s handled in a sanitary manner or not.”

To deal with such concerns, most states, including Missouri, require that deer processors used in donation programs meet U.S.D.A. standards. Some states have had to pass special laws to allow for the donation of wild game. In New York State, legislation was passed in 1993 allowing venison to be donated for a trial period of six years. Other types of meat, such as bear, were excluded because of concerns about food poisoning. A bill to make the law permanent is currently pending in the New York State Assembly.

For most hunting programs, the main limiting factor is not health concerns or the number of deer but a lack of money. In West Virginia, the Hunters Helping the Hungry program needs $40,000 to get the 969 deer that were donated ready to feed the hungry, according to Marshall K. Snedegar, an official at the state Division of Natural Resources who oversees the program. The manager of 10 West Virginia Wal-Mart stores donated $10,000, but Mr. Snedegar says that the program is still about $18,000 short.

“We have a disadvantage in raising money in West Virginia,” he says, noting that few corporations have headquarters in the state. “Even the coal mines are owned by people in St. Louis, or the Netherlands, or Chicago, or some place like that.”

Here in Big Island, the story is much the same. Hunters for the Hungry has steadily increased the amount of meat it provides to charities each year, from 34,000 pounds in 1991 to almost 142,000 last year. But Mr. Horne says he believes that deer hunters could provide 250,000 pounds each year — enough for a million meals.

“We just need more money,” Mr. Horne says. “There’s a lot more need and there’s a lot more deer.”