Darlene Larson went to the Portland Food Bank one July morning to donate some clothes, and she left with a shopping cart full of food to share with her 6-year-old son.

Larson, 52, is like a lot of the new clients at Connecticut food banks and pantries these days - familiar faces who used to stop by with donations but are now forced to visit to meet their own needs.

Rising food and gasoline prices are hurting minimum-wage working families who now have to choose between a gallon of milk for the children or gas in the tank to get to their jobs, officials at the food bank say.

And the need is stretching beyond Connecticut's cities and poorer areas to more affluent towns along the shoreline and in the Farmington Valley. Patty Dowling is the executive director of The Shoreline Soup Kitchens and Pantries, which provides food to 11 shoreline towns including Old Saybrook, Clinton and others along the Route 9 corridor. She said that since January, more than 5,000 people have registered at the pantry - a 40 percent increase over 2007.

"It's difficult to see moms and dads coming in here a lot of times with tears in their eyes saying things like, 'I can't believe I'm here. I used to donate to this pantry. I had a life that meant I didn't need to come here,'" Dowling said.

"Some people think this is unbelievable that it's happening on the shoreline because they have this image of it being a wealthy, well-to-do area. However, it is very expensive to live here."

Dowling describes her new clients as "newly poor" or "people who were making it last year" but fell on hard times because of cost increases for food, gas and utilities. The need becomes even greater when clients become ill, get laid off from their jobs, go through a divorce or lose their homes to foreclosure, food bank officials said.

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