in Washington

On the surface, Heather Ryan app-eared to have a solid middle-class life. With a decent enough job that paid the bills, she had a tidy rental house in a good school district, and a car to ferry her family around her hometown of Eugene, Oregon.

But she also had three hungry kids. And so one day, Ryan, a Master's degree graduate with a city government job, rounded up her children, put them in the car and drove to the local soup kitchen for dinner.

She had no other choice.

Recently divorced, Ryan received just $470 child support a month from her ex-husband and earned $30,000 a year at her job. After paying the $1,800 a month for summer child care for her kids, there was hardly any money left over to put food on the table.

Going to the soup kitchen was a traumatic decision for Ryan and a mortifying experience for her eldest child Chloe, then nine years old.

"I felt like I must have failed," Ryan told the Review. "I must have done something so wrong because I had tried so hard in my life to become educated, and to be a good mother, and to make choices that I thought were the best for my family."

As the recession deepens and unemployment levels creep towards 10 per cent, thousands of middle-class Americans like Heather Ryan are turning to soup kitchens and food pantries across the country to stave off hunger and -- ultimately -- to keep a roof over their heads.

Many, like Ryan, have advanced degrees. Some have lost their jobs in the service industries, in retail, and in the administrative and high-tech jobs arena. Others are still employed but because of sky-rocketing living costs are unable to pay their rent or mortgage and put food on the table at the same time.

Experts say that there has been an estimated 30pc increase in the number of Americans who now rely on soup kitchens and food pantries in the past year, and that many of these people are middle class.

"What we have seen is that people who would be classified as middle income, the number of them who are having difficulty affording food, has tripled between 2003 and 2008," said Aine Duggan, a native of Enniskeane, Co Cork, and vice president of research, policy and education at Food Bank for New York City, Manhattan's major hunger relief organisation.

"So what you begin to see is that it's really people who are not poor, who are really in that middle strata that have started to rely on emergency services," Duggan told the Review.

"When the cost of living shot up over the last four or five years, their incomes didn't keep pace, and they just weren't able to make ends meet any more."

The statistics are horrifying, says Duggan. In a recent study conducted by her organisation, 43pc of New Yorkers with annual incomes between $50,000 and $70,000 reported difficulty finding food last year.

And faced with the impossible choice of choosing between food and keeping a roof over their heads, most people, says Duggan, decide that it's better to go hungry than confront the reality of homelessness.

"People generally stop paying for food when they're struggling to make ends meet before they stop paying for rent," she says. "So you're going to see people go without food and relying on a soup kitchen or food pantry, long before you're going to see them ending up homeless. "It's a choice that makes perfect sense considering that quite a lot of them have children.

"You're obviously going to keep a roof over your kids' head before you go out and pay for food, especially if there is some way of getting that food cheaply or for free."

Ensuring that her kids would not become homeless was Heather Ryan's primary motivation when -- faced with her bare cupboards -- she decided to drive to the soup kitchen that hot July day in 2007.

"I quickly realised that the thing that was easiest to cut out was food," she says. "It's crazy to think about, but it quickly became apparent that I'm not going to get rid of the house, and it was food that we had to cut, unfortunately."

Too poor to keep her kitchen stocked but too rich to seek government assistance, Ryan felt trapped within a confused and unforgiving welfare system.

"I had tried to live really frugally but it was really a schizophrenic experience because I had this full-time job with the government and it wasn't enough, no matter what I did. No matter how I figured it out," she says, "I felt trapped in a lot of ways by the system."

A week earlier, Ryan had swallowed her pride and driven to a local food bank where some kindly older women loaded her car with a box of canned tuna and packets of pasta.

But back home Ryan realised that this emergency food box -- despite whatever culinary miracles she could perform -- would last only a couple of days.

"You can only get one box a month, but it lasts maybe four to five days at most. Maybe seven if you can stretch it," she says.

"I figured out I have this food box but it's not going to be enough." And so the next Tuesday, Ryan took her kids, then aged 9, 7 and 5 to the soup kitchen -- ambiguously dubbed the 'Dining Room' -- where her nine-year-old hung her head in shame while cheery volunteers heaped their plates full of steaming hot food.

Filling out paperwork while her kids ate, Ryan was embarrassed to disclose her seemingly middle-income salary to the soup kitchen coordinator.

"But you'd be surprised about the people that come in here," he told her. "Lots of them are like you."

Sitting there watching her kids eat day-old pastries, Ryan saw her American dream crumbling before her eyes.

"It's earth-shattering. It shaped my worldview," she says. "I don't know how it is in other countries, but particularly in America, we just believe that if you work hard enough you will always be OK. And I had bought into that, in some ways, despite having known better. And it was really hard."

The shame many people, of all classes, experience when seeking food assistance is well known to Aine Duggan, who has watched the weary and humiliated faces of hundreds of new 'guests' as they turn up to eat for the first time at soup kitchens across New York City.

"We are living in a country where there is quite a lot of stigma around needing any kind of assistance from the government or from charities," she says. "You really see that stigma in action when you visit a soup kitchen or pantry."

These new soup-kitchen patrons -- many of whom are middle class -- hang back, avoiding eye contact and wait out the long lines.

"They don't want their faces to be seen. There is a lot of shame for people in going through that experience," says Duggan.

For Ryan, that one visit to the Eugene soup kitchen turned out to be her first and last. When her friends found out about her plight, they stepped in to help -- sending her money and gift vouchers for local supermarkets.

Her job prospects improved too. A writer by training, she now lectures at the University of Oregon and says that things are a little better financially.

But her brush with hunger changed her perspective on life, and made an indelible mark on her eldest child Chloe, now 10.

The Christmas following their summer soup-kitchen experience, Chloe's class decided to have a cake sale and adopt a couple of needy kids in the neighbourhood. Chloe, who had begun to tell people that "it's really hard to be poor" jumped in to lead the charitable efforts.

"And her teachers told me afterwards," says Ryan, "that the other kids liked the idea. But Chloe understood what it meant".

- Caitrion Palmer