There's a plaintive note taped to the desk at the North East Neighborhood Pantry at Maple United Methodist Church.

"As of 9/11/07, we will no longer have toilet paper, bar soap, laundry soap or juice. With increase in people needing help along with increasing number of items we have to purchase locally, we cannot afford these items. Thanks for understanding, Archie."

Archie MacGregor, who runs the food pantry, said it came down to a simple choice.

"It was hand soap or the babies," MacGregor said. The North East pantry is the only area pantry that provides supplies for infants — formula, diapers, wipes, juice, cereal — and MacGregor wasn't ready to give up that assistance program.

The fact that he had to make such a choice shouts that the supply cannot keep up with the exploding demand for free food by area residents.

"In my 25 years of working with food banks, the challenge of feeding our neighbors has never been as difficult," said Bob Randels, executive director of the Food Bank of South Central Michigan.

Randels' organization is the main supplier of the five Battle Creek-area food pantries.

One of several first-time clients at the North East pantry on Friday was Bruce Vaughn, who's been living out of his pickup truck since July.

Vaughn said it was kind of hard to visit the pantry, but he needed more food than the $63 on his state-issued Bridge Card could provide.

"Sometimes people don't want to admit they have a problem and get help for it," Vaughn said.

He said he was unemployed and chose homelessness when he couldn't afford to make the payments on the house he had been renting.

"It's a struggle," he said. "I used to be married with four kids and a house for 27 years."

Now he parks his truck in a large apartment parking lot each night and sleeps hassle free. And he's working on getting into a truck-driving training school to turn his life around.

In the food pantry, MacGregor urged the volunteers who made up Vaughn's bag of food to select items that didn't need to be cooked or refrigerated.

MacGregor said his pantry saw 1,043 clients in September, 44 of them new. Those numbers were slightly above the annual monthly averages for last year.

But Macgregor and Randels said there is no question that demand for food has exploded this year, especially since August.

"We've reached a dramatic level of alarm in the last one or two months," Randels said Friday.

He said that he's taken solace that, while calls to Calhoun County's 211 help line always are heavy on emergency requests for food assistance, those needs are regularly met. Only in the latest 211 call report did food assistance rank among the significant unmet needs, he said.

Randels said the food bank, which acts as a clearinghouse for the five local neighborhood food pantries and other emergency food providers — 275 regionwide — is blessed with an increasing food supply this year. It simply can't keep up with the demand.

MacGregor said while he buys up to 65 percent of his supplies from the food bank, he uses cash from donations to buy food on sale at local grocery stores.

"When the Sunday paper comes, the first thing I do is scan the grocery store ads," Macgregor said. "My wife said, 'You never cared about it like that when we had kids.'"

When Meijer stores had a huge canned vegetable sale recently, MacGregor loaded up with 50 cases.

Still, on Friday morning, several of the shelves of the food pantry's cramped space on Capital Avenue Northeast lay bare.

Jane Marshall, executive director of the Food Bank Council of Michigan, said the problem is statewide.

In a news release, Marshall and other food bank officials noted Michigan's 7.5 percent unemployment rate, the highest in the nation; the 13.3 percent of state residents living below the poverty line; and the loss of more than 300,000 jobs in Michigan since 2001 as explanations for the problem.

And Marshall said much of the fresh produce supply has been cut off to food banks because Michigan Agricultural Surplus System grant money ran out in August and hasn't been renewed in the state's financial chaos.

The system grant subsidizes harvesting and delivery of marginal crops for food banks, Randels said.

In its "Annual Stakeholders Meeting" held Tuesday to mark World Food Day, the food bank honored its top providers, Kellogg Co. and Kraft Foods Post Division; noted numerous successful fundraising efforts during the past year; and celebrated food distribution totals up 25 percent through the first nine months of the year.

But Randels also warned, "Today we stand at a critical crossroads — and over the next four years it will become very important for us to be smart and efficient and wise in order for us to extend those successes that we've had in the past into the successes of the future."

Part of that will be adapting to the changing way that surplus food is made available, and from whom it is available, Randels said. Another will be preparing both his agency and its frontline providers for a new way of operating, and another will be keeping the public sector involved, he said.

Robert Warner can be reached at 966-0674 or rwarner@battlecr.gannett.com.