A map of the meal gap by community in Brooklyn provides perhaps one of the most striking illustrations yet of the connection between gentrification and poverty. Some of the neighborhoods with the highest rates of increased privation are those where the external impulse to transform and refurbish has been the most dramatic (Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens), and those where the displaced have then been exiled (Canarsie, East Flatbush, Brownsville, Ocean Hill), driving up rents, in a reverberative effect. With unemployment lower in Brooklyn than in the Bronx and no meaningful difference in the growth of food costs between the two boroughs, researchers found, housing cost was the primary cause of food sacrifice.

The Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger, one of the city’s most active food pantries, sits at the center of the storm, at the junction of Bed-Stuy, where the price of a single-family home has nearly tripled over the past decade and where rents have soared, and Brownsville and Ocean Hill, two of the poorest areas in the city. Founded in 1998 by Melony Samuels, a former insurance executive who imagined her mission might be temporary, the pantry was serving approximately 5,000 people a month in 2006 from its site on Fulton Street and serves three times as many today. (The organization’s mobile units reach another 15,000 around Brooklyn and the Bronx.)

Because the Campaign Against Hunger keeps detailed records of its clients, works intimately with them and assists in tax preparation as part of its self-assigned duties, it knows a lot about those who come to the facility. About 15 percent have some form of higher education — that trend has been swerving upward since the recession. Some of them teach in public schools or are otherwise employed by the city.

On a recent morning when I visited, the lines were long. One woman, Veronica Logrande, who comes regularly (clients are permitted to use the pantry once a month), lives with her husband and only child in a shelter. Their income, including all benefits, totals just under $700 a month, she told me. She had a hard time allowing herself to get walnuts when she saw them, which she liked to toast and drizzle with honey as a snack for her son, because she regarded them as an extravagance. The amount of food, tallied in dollars, that a client can take home depends upon the specifics of individual or familial need.

One relatively positive change over the past three years, Ms. Samuels said, is a shift in shopping patterns that now has those who visit coming early in the month, rather than later, after Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program dollars, which have been subject to cuts in recent years, run out. People will come in to get fish and chicken and then deploy their SNAP benefits more broadly and efficiently in the marketplace.