frozen ham, bacon, potatoes, a bag of pinto beans, pasta, cereal, and cans of green beans and sliced pears.
    Often, Franco said, he'd eat one meal a day, sometimes French toast because it's inexpensive and filling. Other times, when there was nothing to eat, he would visit a friend's house.
    "I wonder, 'How am I going to do it this time?' '' Franco said. Putting away his Community Pantry groceries, Franco said, "I hate going over to friends' houses."
Growing need
    A single mother of two, 29-year-old Sandra Chavez, said she lives with her brother in Deming, collects $360 a month in welfare and about $170 a month in food stamps.
    Despite that government help, Chavez also visited a federal commodity distribution site at the National Guard Armory in Deming recently to get a box of groceries.
    "I just barely make it with everything I get," Chavez said.
    While the state's food stamp rolls have shrunk from 89,000 cases in March 1996 to roughly 65,000 last August, there are indications that the need for food has not declined.
    Melody Wattenbarger, director of the Albuquerque-based Roadrunner Food Bank, which supplies donated food to emergency food pantries, soup kitchens and day-care centers for poor families, said the amount of food Roadrunner distributes has tripled since 1995.
    Wattenbarger estimates Roadrunner Food Bank is serving only about two-thirds of those in the state who worry about not getting enough to eat.
    "The need is going up faster than

the supply," Wattenbarger said.
    At the Storehouse, a private Albuquerque food pantry that might be the city's largest distributor of free food boxes, volunteers provided groceries for about 32,000 in 1996. In the year that ended Sept. 30, that volume grew sixfold.
    "The bulk of our people (clients) are single or married parents, and they are just not making it," said Storehouse director Carolyn Hughes. "I consider that we have gone from a smoldering tragedy to a full-blown crisis in Albuquerque. Somebody needs to deal with that."
    In addition, the amount of food distributed statewide by The Emergency Food Assistance Program, the largest of the federally funded commodities programs, more than doubled from 1996 to 1999.
    Federal welfare reform passed by Congress in 1996 has led to a substantial drop in the use of food stamps.
    While more people have entered the work force and left welfare and food-stamp rolls -- food stamp participation fell 40 percent nationwide over the past three years -- poverty rates have dipped only slightly, said J. Larry Brown, director of the Boston-based Center on Hunger and Poverty.
    "That's why we are seeing a strong economy but more hunger," Brown said.
Work  not  enough
    Albuquerque resident Elizabeth McDonough, 30, works a full-time, $6-an-hour job at a nursing home and her husband does occasional woodwork. But the couple and their 3-year-old son, Joshua, still occasionally eat lunch -- tamales one

crisp December day recently -- at the Noon Day Ministries soup kitchen.
    "We don't do it often, but just once in a while," McDonough said. "We're not as hard-pressed as some people, but we are like everyone else. We still have our ups and downs."
    Albuquerquean Robert Warren, 34, works part-time -- 25 hours a week making $6.25 an hour -- as an auto mechanic for his parents' business. But, with $400-a-month rent for an efficiency apartment, Warren said, "All my money goes to paying the rent."
    Warren does not have car payments; he rides a bicycle around town. But even with food stamps of about $125 a month, Warren said being strapped for cash led him to seek a box of groceries from the Storehouse food pantry.
    "Usually that (food stamps) is enough, but this month, I got caught off guard," Warren said.
    Gregory Kepferle, executive director of Catholic Social Services in Albuquerque, said that, as many families move off of welfare, "their whole income base drops and their poverty level increases because, even though they have jobs, it's still not enough to provide a living wage."
    Businesses and citizens are being asked to make up the gap, Wattenbarger said.
    "In a country of such enormous abundance, there should be no hunger ever," Wattenbarger said.