BY ALFRED LUBRANO

Many of the hungry in this area are fed by elderly women with Jesus in their hearts and comfortable shoes on their feet.

The great surprise of the emergency food network - a system of (depending on the count) 500 to 900 pantries in the city, its suburbs, and South Jersey - is that much of it rests on the able shoulders of a feisty corps of volunteers born before television. They take their marching orders from Christ's teachings to aid the poor.

"They're precious, and if Philadelphia didn't have them, this city would be a disaster," said Steveanna Wynn, executive director of the SHARE Food Program, which supplies city pantries with food.

But lately the landscape of charitable feeding is changing. Depending on the pantry, the clientele has grown between 30 percent and 70 percent in the last economically tough year, antihunger advocates report. And almost half the pantries say they don't get enough food to meet the demand.

What began as a church-based, stopgap effort to help strapped families has morphed into an informal system that many depend on for food.

And now that system - a venerable but rickety patchwork of far-flung pantries run mostly by old people - could itself use some help.

"These pantry people are heroes and saints, but they are being taxed beyond their physical capacity," said Bill Clark, who runs Philabundance, the hunger-relief agency that distributed around 17 million pounds of food to pantries in fiscal 2009, much of it donated by corporations and individuals.

Advocates also worry about a problem that's existed since pantries began opening in the early 1970s: They have sprung up haphazardly, leaving some areas of the city with redundant food distribution and others with none at all.

That's why pantries have to better coordinate and fortify their efforts, advocates say. Both Philabundance and the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger are working toward that end.

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