Millions of hungry Americans turn to food banks for first time

New York - As a year marked by coronavirus nears an end, millions of Americans are depending on food banks to stave off hunger

The deadly pandemic that tore through the nation’s heartland struck just as Aaron Crawford was in a moment of crisis. He was looking for work, his wife needed surgery, then the virus began eating away at her work hours and her paycheck.

The Crawfords had no savings, mounting bills and a growing dread: What if they ran out of food? The couple had two boys, 5 and 10, and boxes of macaroni and cheese from the dollar store could go only so far.

A 37-year-old Navy vet, Crawford saw himself as self-reliant. Asking for food made him uncomfortable. “I felt like I was a failure,” he says. “It’s this whole stigma ... this mindset that you’re this guy who can’t provide for his family, that you’re a deadbeat.”

Hunger is a harsh reality in the richest country in the world. Even during times of prosperity, schools hand out millions of hot meals a day to children, and desperate elderly Americans are sometimes forced to choose between medicine and food.

Now, in the pandemic of 2020, with illness, job loss and business closures, millions more Americans are worried about empty refrigerators and barren cupboards. Food banks are doling out meals at a rapid pace and an Associated Press data analysis found a sharp rise in the amount of food distributed compared with last year. Meanwhile, some folks are skipping meals so their children can eat and others are depending on cheap food that lacks nutrition.

Those fighting hunger say they’ve never seen anything like this in America, even during the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

The first place many Americans are finding relief is a neighbourhood food pantry, most connected to vast networks of non-profits. Tons of food move each day from grocery store discards and government handouts to warehouse distribution centres, and then to the neighbourhood charity.

The Crawfords turned to the Family Resource Centers and Food Shelf, part of 360 Communities, a non-profit 15 minutes from their apartment in Apple Valley, Minnesota. When needed, they receive monthly boxes of fresh produce, dairy, deli, meat and other basics — enough food to fill two grocery carts. If that runs out, they can get an emergency package to tide them over for the rest of the month.

Crawford’s wife, Sheyla, had insisted they seek help; her hours had been cut at the day care center where she worked. At first, Crawford was embarrassed to go the food shelf; he worried he’d bump into someone he knew. He now sees it differently.

“It didn’t make me a bad man or a terrible husband or father,” he says. “On the contrary, I was actually doing something to make sure that my wife and kids had something thing to eat.”

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The history books are filled with iconic images of America’s struggles against hunger. Among the most memorable are the Depression-era photos of men standing in breadlines, huddled in long coats and fedoras, their eyes large with fear. An overhead sign reads: “Free Soup. Coffee and a Doughnut for the Unemployed.”

This year’s portrait of hunger has a distinctively bird’s eye view: Enormous traffic jams captured from drone-carrying cameras. Cars inching along, each driver waiting hours for a box or bag of food. From Anaheim, California to San Antonio, Texas to Toledo, Ohio and Orlando, Florida and points in-between, thousands of vehicles carrying hungry people queued up for miles across the horizon. In New York, and other large cities, people stand, waiting for blocks on end.

The newly hungry have similar stories: Their industry collapsed, they lost a job, their hours were cut, an opportunity fell through because of illness.

Handwritten “closed” signs appeared on the windows of stores and restaurants soon after the pandemic arrived. Paychecks shrank or disappeared altogether as unemployment skyrocketed to 14.7 per cent, a rate not seen in almost a century.

Food banks felt the pressure almost immediately.

Feeding America, the nation’s largest anti-hunger organization, scrambled to keep up as states locked down and schools — many providing free breakfasts and lunches — closed. In late March, 20 percent of the organization’s 200 food banks were in danger of running out of food.

The problem with supply subsided, but demand has not. Feeding America has never handed out so much food so fast — 4.2 billion meals from March through October. The organization has seen a 60 percent average increase in food bank users during the pandemic: about 4 in 10 are first-timers.

An AP analysis of Feeding America data from 181 food banks in its network found the organization has distributed nearly 57 per cent more food in the third quarter of the year, compared with the same period in 2019.

There will be no quick decline as the pandemic rages on, having already claimed more than 280,000 lives and infecting 14.7 million people across the nation.

Feeding America estimates those facing hunger will swell to 1 in 6 people, from 35 million in 2019 to more than 50 million by this year’s end. The consequences are even more dire for children — 1 in 4, according to the group.

Some states have been hit especially hard: Nevada, a tourist mecca whose hotel, casino and restaurant industries were battered by the pandemic, is projected to vault from 20th place in 2018 to 5th place this year in food insecurity, according to a report from Feeding America.

In four states — Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana — more than 1 in 5 residents are expected to be food insecure by year’s end, meaning they won’t have money or resources to put food on the table, the report said.

In New Orleans one recent Saturday morning, Donna Duerr was waiting to pick up food in a drive-through donation — something that has become part of her routine since Covid-19 swept in last spring.

Her husband was laid off from his job as a pipefitter and she’s unable to work, having undergone two surgeries — one on her spine, the other on her arm — in the last two months. She also has two grown children who’ve moved home since the pandemic began.

“This is a hard thing to accept that you have to do this,” says a weary-sounding Duerr, her throat covered with bandages as the result of a recent operation. Every morning she monitors the local news for announcements of the next food donation; she tries to attend as many as she can, sometimes sharing the food with less-mobile neighbours.

Duerr, 56, faces painful choices. “I either pay bills or get food,” she says, though these donations have brought some relief.

Norman Butler is another first-timer. Shortly before Thanksgiving, he and his girlfriend, Cheryl, arrived at 3 a.m. at a drive-through food bank in a suburban New Orleans sports stadium. They joined a pre-dawn procession of mothers with their kids, the elderly and folks like him — unemployed workers.

“You can see the look of uncertainty on their faces,” he says. “Everybody’s just worried about their next meal.”

Before the pandemic, Butler, 53, flourished in the tourism-dominated city, working as an airport shuttle and limousine driver, a valet and hotel doorman. Since March, when the bustling streets turned silent, jobs in the city have been scarce.

“A lot of people are in limbo,” he says. “The main thing we need is to get back to work.”

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Low-wage employees, many in the service industry, have borne the brunt of economic hardship. But the misery has reached deeper into the workforce.

A September report commissioned by the Food Research & Action Centre, an anti-hunger organization, found 1 in 4 of those reporting they didn’t have enough to eat typically had incomes above $50,000 a year before the outbreak.

In Anchorage, Alaska, Brian and Airis Messick were coasting along in full-time jobs for companies that support the state’s oil industry. They were moving toward buying a house.

When March arrived, everything unravelled.

Brian, 28, the newest hire at an electrical wiring company, was laid off. Within a week, Airis, an office worker at an oil well testing firm, lost her job, too.

Then it became a monthly game of deciding who gets paid first with their unemployment checks — the landlord or one of the many bills. They kept their car filled with gas in case they had to move.

The Messicks and their 9-year-old son, Jayden, tried to survive on $50 to $75 a week because, she says, “that’s all we could squeeze.” They turned to a food bank for only the second time — they’d sought help after Hurricane Irma hit Florida in 2017.

After that devastation, the Messicks, who’d met in Florida, decided to get a fresh start and move to Alaska, where Airis had grown up.

Airis, who just turned 30, found work in August, ironically, at the state unemployment office. “I hear people’s stories all day,” she says. “I listen to mums cry about not having money to take care of their kids. My heart aches for the people who get denied.”

Brian stays home with Jayden, who is autistic, helping him with school and driving him to appointments. Also part of the family are Cleo, a pit bull-lab mix, and Daisy, a bearded dragon.

Airis earns too much for the family to receive state financial aid. Anchorage’s high cost-of-living, partly fueled by the expense of shipping goods to the nation’s most northern state, makes it harder to economize even with coupons and careful shopping.

She says the family will continue to go to the food bank until the economy improves, which she expects won’t be soon.

There should be better systems in place, she says, to help families.

“I feel great knowing that we’re not alone, that we’re, you know, not out here being the only one suffering but,” she says, “it makes me mad to know my government failed us.”

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For communities of colour, the pandemic has been a compound disaster with Blacks and Latinos reeling from disproportionately high rates of deaths, infections — and joblessness.

Unemployment surged among Latinos to 18.9 percent this spring, higher than any other racial and ethnic group, according to federal statistics. Though it has since fallen, many are still struggling.

More than 1 in 5 Black and Latino adults with children said as of July 2020 they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat, according to the commissioned report. That was double the rate of white and Asian households. It also found that women, households with children and people of colour are at greatest risk of hunger.

Abigail Leocadio, 34, first approached the non-profit Society of St. Vincent de Paul in Phoenix, Arizona, during hard times about a decade ago. Her family rebounded and she completed training to become a phlebotomist, landing a job drawing blood specimens for a local lab.

Leocadio was just 7 when her family brought her to the U.S. from their native Cuernavaca, Mexico. She currently is protected from deportation and has a work permit through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

When her husband, a restaurant cook, was laid off earlier in the pandemic, her income — barely more than the $11 state minimum wage — wasn’t enough to cover their expenses.

Though they own a two-bedroom trailer, they pay $500 a month to rent the lot. Add to that as much as $450 in monthly electric bills and internet service so their four kids, 9 to 15, can attend class remotely. Before schools closed, the kids received free breakfasts and lunches on campus.