All the economic bad news is impacting food banks around the country, including one here in the District, according to the Associated Press. Says the AP: “Calls to the Capital Area Food Bank’s Hunger Lifeline, an emergency food referral system in Washington, D.C., increased 248 percent in the past six months, said spokeswoman Kasandra Gunter Robinson.”

As shocking as that sounds, I was more taken aback by these two paragraphs, which I think show you how deep the recession is hitting citizens:

The change is frightening for Cheryl Jackson, president of The Giving Movement, which runs Minnie’s Food Pantry in Plano, Texas. When she opened, she thought she was going to be serving people with “Will Work for Food” signs. People pull up in Escalades and Navigators, she said.

“It’s the corporate people,” she said. “It’s the employees that have been laid off. Those are the people who come in more emotionally disturbed than the others. They walk in thinking, ‘I never thought I would need to do this.'”