You could say local food banks are in crisis mode right now.

"We do have a serious shortage right now, what we call a gap," Dave Karr said.

A gap that continues to widen said Karr, the director of the Mid Michigan food bank thanks to fewer state dollars this year and far fewer donations.

"People just can't give like they used to," he said.

Then another blow -- one of the last major grocery chains to donate salvaged food to the food bank recently changed it's business plan.

"They have streamlined their inventory and they're more efficient," Karr said. "So they just don't have the surplus like they've had in the past to donate to food banks."

All the while, the need out there, especially for families with small children has skyrocketed.

"We have more families we're trying to feed, that number has doubled, so it's created a much larger gap," he said. "So there's a sense of urgency and a sense of scale that this problem is bigger than we had in the past."

It might look like there's a lot of food in the Food Bank's warehouse, but Karr said because they feed 18,000 people monthly, the food in the warehouse is turned over every ten days.

Karr said to provide the same amount of service in 2010 as they did last year, they'd have to raise $2.8 million. So Karr is turning to the community for help.

"People have been very generous in the past, my role is let people know what is the issue and ask them to be generous again this year," he said.

**To Donate you can go to www.midmichiganfoodbank.org. You can call Dave Karr Directly at 517-702-3359. Or there will be an insert in Sunday's Lansing State Journal.