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Jim Trotter keeps a $1 bill fastened to a clipboard in his van. A homeless man donated it at a food drive in downtown Des Moines last April.

“I guarantee that guy that donated that dollar is probably receiving food from us,” said Trotter, the director of the Des Moines Area Religious Council’s (DMARC) emergency food pantry. “He knows how important it is to help somebody else even in his own limited way.”

Never has one dollar meant so much. New strains are on the DMARC pantry, which distributed more than a million items of food in 2008 at its nine locations in Polk County.

In comparison to 2008, there has been a 43 percent increase in the cost of food, Trotter said, and they are helping more new families (a total of 400-450 per month) who had never relied on DMARC’s services. Trotter said his organization is seeing lots of people who used to be gainfully employed.The popular conception is that only the homeless are getting food, but Trotter gave numbers collected in February 2008 that showed fewer than 0.5 percent of those receiving food were homeless.

Of the food distributed, 30 percent is food that was donated, and 70 percent is bought with money from the 145-plus churches that belong to the interfaith organization, and countless other donors.

DMARC has bought $326,000 worth of food from the Iowa Food Bank and wholesale stores so far in 2009, and is trying to spread the message that donating money is better than giving food. A can of corn explains: One can costs 60 cents at the store, 40 cents from a wholesaler, and 13 cents from the food bank.

Donations of food are down, he said, but despite the economy, monetary donations are up and the pantry isn’t about to run out of food. Trotter cautioned it isn’t a bottomless well.

The program is called “emergency” because people can get a week’s supply of food once every 30 days. Sometimes that saves lives.

Trotter described a woman who approached a group of volunteers at a grocery store. If it wasn’t for DMARC, she said, she and her daughter would have starved – she was a professor at a local college.