Celebrity chef and restaurateur Marc Murphy is on the front lines of an alarming New York economic trend.
Some of his food is prepared — more than 50 pounds at a time — expressly for the expanding ranks of New York’s hungry.
In a seeming paradox, the more the official unemployment rate has dropped lately, the greater the rise in local hunger.
In July, New York City’s unemployment rate held firm at 8.7 percent — down from 9.4 percent a year ago.
Yet the average demand for emergency food assistance, by one measure in New York, skyrocketed by 5 percent in the same period.
Clearly, as some experts have noted, the rate does not account for the many thousands of New Yorkers presumed to have left the work force, who have exhausted their benefits, or who can’t make ends meet on lower paychecks.
“You can invite [skeptics] to a food pantry or two, and they’ll see it immediately,” said Murphy, owner of the popular Landmarc and Ditch Plains restaurants.
Murphy and other local restaurateurs are responding by donating mountains of food to charities like City Harvest for distribution to local food programs.
“There’s no tax write-off for me,” he said. “We’re just helping them out.”
City Harvest estimates that 3.7 million pounds of donated food annually is now coming directly from operators like Murphy. All told, City Harvest will collect some 30 million pounds of donated food this year, feeding more than 300,000 hungry New Yorkers weekly.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Murphy said of his efforts.