Chicago Meals on Wheels program cutting back deliveries amid growing demand without additional funds

Thousands of Chicagoans who depend on home-delivered meals, mostly seniors, will soon see less food coming to their door, and it will likely leave people scrambling to find enough food to eat.

The Chicago Department of Family and Support Services has notified people who rely on the city's Home Delivered Meals program that, starting Tuesday, its frozen meal program will go from providing 10 meals a week to only six.

City officials said the reduction is the result of growing demand for the Home Delivered Meals program – also known as Meals on Wheels – over the last three years.

Without the additional funding needed to provide 10 meals a week to the people the program serves, the city said it must reduce the number of meals provided to keep it going and avoid the need for a waitlist.

Now Dan Valentine, who relies on Meals on Wheels for healthy food, doesn't know how he'll get through the week.

While seniors are the largest recipients of the program, people with disabilities are also eligible, like Valentine, who has been diagnosed with cervical radiculopathy, a severe pinched nerve, which cause sharp pain and numbness from the neck down.

"For me, it's about the ability to make the meals," he said. "It is hard for me to use my arms to prepare food, and I rely on those meals in order to just have something I can throw in the microwave and eat simply without having to use my arms."

On the day after Memorial Day, Valentine and the vast of majority of 13,000 Meals on Wheels recipients in Chicago will go from 10 meals per week to 6 meals.

"There's more and more elderly every week, and we're not getting younger," Valentine said.

Margaret LaRaviere, Deputy Commissioner for the Senior Services Division at the Department of Family and Support Services, said lots more people have signed up for Meals on Wheels in recent years, but funding from the state and federal governments has not increased.

"So, in order to support sustainability and to prevent a waitlist – we do not want to have a waitlist in Chicago – we had to do a meal restructuring," she said. "No one is being cut from the program."

The city said the program provided 4.7 million meals last year, and 300,000 meals have been added annually for the past three years.

"These are very tough decisions, but again, we do not want to cut anyone from the program, and we want to make sure that it continues to be available for all as we are aggressively seeking additional funding," LaRaviere said.

But until additional funding comes, Valentine and other Meals on Wheels recipients will have to get by with fewer home-delivered food.

"We need food. We need the ability to eat. Every human being has the right to food, and this is the way some of us get it," he said.

The only people not seeing a cut in food delivery will be seniors who are home and bedridden.

It's unclear how long the cuts to the program will last.