The first time Kelly Wilcox drove her 2017 Dodge Grand Caravan to the soup kitchen near her Payson, Utah, home, she immediately noticed something that surprised her: newer model Toyota and Honda cars and trucks. “I saw a lot of people with cars like mine that had guys in them,” she said.
Wilcox, a mother of four young boys, didn’t know what to expect when she made her first trip to Tabitha’s Way Local Food Pantry this spring. She yes she knew that needed help.
Her husband I had lost my job. He soon found a new one as account manager, but with inflation the salary was not enough. “We still can’t pay the bills,” says Wilcox, 35. In order for her children to be fed this summer, she went to the dining room regularly and said that if there is no change, such as a drop in the price of food or a raise in her husband’s salary, that will continue to be necessary for the foreseeable future. .
Tabitha’s Way’s branch in Spanish Fork, Utah, a city of 44,000 outside of Provo, used to serve about 130 families a week, offering basics like fresh food and baby formula. This year, attending people like Wilcox and his family, whose salary is not enoughthat number exceeded 200.
A line for food donations outside the headquarters of a humanitarian organization in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in December. Photo: REUTERS
The blow of inflation
The increased food insecurity it is not due to a sudden wave of unemployment, as happened when the economy ground to a halt in 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic.
It is due to inflation: the increase in the prices of housing, fuel and, above all, food. According to the latest consumer price report, the cost of food increased 10.4% year-on-yearthe largest increase in twelve months since 1981.
Food banks are trying to meet those needs while dealing with declining donations and, in some cases, increased awareness among people in need of help that food banks are an option.
Data from the Census Bureau shows that last month 25 million adults have sometimes not had enough to eat in the previous seven days.
This is the highest figure since before Christmas 2020, when the pandemic continued to have a high economic cost and the unemployment rate was almost double what it is today.
Sales at a supermarket in Alhambra, California. Food prices skyrocket in the US Photo: AFP
Crisis figures
A survey by the Urban Institute found that food insecurity, after falling sharply in 2021, increased in June and July of this year to roughly the same level as in March and April 2020: about 1 in 5 adults reported experiencing food insecurity food in the previous 30 days.
Among working adults, 17.3% said they had experienced food insecurity, compared to 16.3% in 2020. The most recent survey included 9,494 respondents and had a margin of error of 1.2 percentage points.
At the municipal level, those trends are reflected in what Wendy Osborne, director of Tabitha’s Way, sees in Utah. “There are more people who have jobs, who are working, but who don’t earn enough,” she said.
Osborne noted that most of the families who receive food at Tabitha’s Way have one or more jobs. “I hear this a lot: ‘I’ve never had to use a soup kitchen. I was the one helping people, not the one needing help,'” she said.
food banks
the queues of thousands of cars in front of food banks and soup kitchens they were one of the emblematic images of the first phase of the pandemic, when the economy contracted after the nationwide lockdowns. The federal government helped with additional funds and food. Private donors contributed money.
“There was a big charitable response early on. There was also a very strong government response,” said Elaine Waxman, an expert on food insecurity and federal nutrition programs at the Urban Institute in Washington. But the end of the increase in unemployment benefits, stimulus checks and monthly child tax credit payments, coupled with inflation, means that the problems are starting to appear again. This time the donations are reduced just as the need increases again.
“We are efficient in crises. We rise to the occasion,” Waxman said. “But we don’t know what to do if the crisis persists.”
New Yorkers receive milk and food outside a mosque and cultural center in Brooklyn, in May 2021. Photo: AFP
Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of food banks, which helps supply the small front-line kitchens where people receive food, reported that 65% of member organizations surveyed had reported an increase in the number of people served from May to June. Only 5% reported a decline.
fewer donations
At the same time, cash donations, which were a boon early in the pandemic, have dwindled. In the first quarter of the year, the national office’s revenue fell by nearly a third from a year earlier, from $151 million to $107 million.
“We’re in the middle of a battle, and people are giving up the fight,” said Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America. On visits to food banks, she said, “I walk into cold rooms that don’t have a lot of food in them.” its interior”.
The Feeding America network comprises 200 food banks and 60,000 soup kitchens and meal programs. During the four months of recent data, February through May, 73% of Feeding America food banks surveyed said they food donations had decreased94% said the cost of food purchases had increased and 89% stated that they paid more for transportation to purchase or deliver food.
In the first three quarters of fiscal 2022, Feeding America said it received 517,000 tons of food from federal commodity programs, compared to 1,116,000 tons a year earlier.
The multiplicity of pressures on emergency food systems are evident in Tabitha’s Way. In the first half of 2022, food donations fell by nearly two-thirds compared to the same period a year earlier.
Grocery store and restaurant donations were less than a quarter of what was received the previous year. Cash donations fell to less than $700,000, down from nearly $1.1 million.
The wait outside a soup kitchen in Santa Ana, California, in 2020. Hunger soared in the pandemic. Photo: EFE
Like consumers, the canteen spends more on the food it buys. Fuel to collect donated food costs more, even though it’s down slightly from recent peaks. And with unemployment at 2% in Utah, labor costs for drivers and skilled labor have also risen.
Osborne said the average salary for his staff was $20 or more an hour, up from $16 a year ago. “We don’t want our employees to be food insecure too,” she explained.
“There was a lot of attention paid nationally during Covid, and rightfully so, but things haven’t changed sadly, and unfortunately now they tend to get worse, especially with the inflation that’s going on,” Osborne said.
Ask for help
The long lines in front of food banks at the beginning of the pandemic, and the cataclysm suffered by all at once, may also have contributed to remove some of the stigma of emergency food systems.
“I thought I would get a lot of low-quality food or prepared foods,” said Antazha Boysaw, 24, a nursing home aide at a nursing home in the Hartford, Connecticut area. Instead, Boysaw, a mother of two young children, found that local soup kitchens offered squash, shrimp and brown rice.
“You can eat fancy meals in the community kitchen,” Boysaw said. “It’s not like they give you the bare minimum of leftovers and expired food.”
She started going to a soup kitchen in 2021 after learning her income was too high to qualify for SNAP benefits, but she still needed help feeding her children.
“I wore a hat, a big sweater: I didn’t want anyone to see me,” he said of the first time he went to a dining room.
Now that inflation continues to drive up prices, depends on food assistance to have healthy meals and encourage others in need to seek help as well.
Boysaw began posting videos on TikTok about his positive experience. He told a friend: “Don’t be afraid… I received food! Don’t forget the documents.”
Other first-time dining attendees made it through the worst of the pandemic lockdowns without needing this kind of help, but now find inflation harder to navigate.
Iliana Lebron-Cruz, 44, a health coach who also works at a kennel, lives an hour west of Seattle with her husband, a Costco supervisor, and their three children. Family income is about $120,000 a year. “We spend all our income on living, with no chance to save,” she said.
Recently, Lebron-Cruz had to search for free food options in his area after he unexpectedly spent hundreds of dollars on a trip to Oregon for a family emergency.
When he returned home after that trip, he looked at his empty fridge. “I get paid on Thursday. It’s Tuesday. I don’t have any money,” she said to herself upon realizing it. She called a soup kitchen.
“If there’s one thing that’s clear from how high inflation is, it’s that it’s a double whammy,” he said. “Six months ago, if the same thing had happened, it wouldn’t have been so bad,” she explained.
As Lebrón-Cruz said in a TikTok video viewed more than 390,000 times: “There is no stigma: there is no shame, friends!!!” He said that he had received some negative responses to the video, but that he had also heard from mothers in need.
“I say, ‘Definitely go feed your babies,'” he said.
The New York Times
Translation: Elisa Carnelli
CB