The first time Kelly Wilcox drove her 2017 Dodge Grand Caravan to the food donation bank near her home in Payson, Utah, she noticed something that surprised her: newer models of Toyota and Honda sedans and minivans. “I’ve seen a lot of other people with cars like mine, and with kids.”
A mother of four young children, she didn’t know what to expect when she made her first trip to Tabitha’s Way Local Food Pantry this spring. She knew she needed help. Her husband had lost his job—he soon found a new one as an account manager, but with inflation, it wasn’t enough.
“We still can’t pay the bills,” says Wilcox, 35. To keep her children fed this summer, she has visited the donation site regularly and says that barring a change, such as a drop in food prices or a pay raise for the husband, this will be necessary in the near future.
Tabitha’s Way in Spanish Fork, Utah, a town of about 44,000 on the outskirts of Provo, used to serve about 130 families a week, offering essentials like fresh vegetables and baby food. This year, catering to people like Wilcox and his family whose paychecks aren’t enough, the number has risen to more than 200.
The increase in food insecurity is not a sudden wave of unemployment, as occurred in 2020, in the first wave of the pandemic. It has to do with inflation – higher prices for housing, gas and especially food. According to the latest consumer price report, the cost of food rose 10.4% year-on-year, the biggest 12-month increase since 1981.
Food banks are trying to meet these needs while dealing with dwindling donations.
Census data showed that last month, 25 million adults sometimes didn’t have enough to eat in the previous seven days. That was the highest number since just before Christmas 2020, when the pandemic continued to hit the economy hard and the unemployment rate was nearly double what it is now.
A survey by the Urban Institute found that food insecurity, after falling sharply in 2021, rose in June and July to roughly the same level as in March and April 2020: about 1 in 5 adults reported feeling food insecure in the last few years. previous 30 days. Among employed adults, 17.3% said they experienced food insecurity, compared with 16.3% in 2020. The most recent survey had 9,494 respondents and a margin of error of 1.2 percentage points.
These trends are reflected in what Wendy Osborne, director of Tabitha’s Way, sees in Utah. “There are more people who have jobs, are working, but just aren’t earning enough.” She says most of the families who picked up food from Tabitha’s Way were working one or more jobs.
Queues of thousands of cars around banks and food pantries were among the iconic images of the first phase of the pandemic, when the economy contracted after nationwide shutdowns. The federal government helped with extra funds and food.
“There was a big charitable response early on. There was also a very robust response from the government,” says Elaine Waxman, an expert on food insecurity and federal nutrition programs at the Urban Institute in Washington.
But the end of rising unemployment, stimulus checks and monthly child tax credit payments, combined with inflation, mean problems are starting to surface again. This time donations have dropped, just as the need is rising again.
Feeding America, the nation’s largest chain of food banks that helps supply smaller front-line pantries where customers get food, said 65% of member organizations reported a May-June increase in the number of people served. Only 5% reported a fall.
At the same time, cash donations, a big help at the start of the pandemic, have declined. In the first quarter of the year, national office revenue dropped by nearly a third from a year earlier, from $151 million to $107 million.
“You’re in the middle of a battle, and people are leaving the field,” says Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, director of Feeding America.
Feeding America’s network includes 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs. In the four months for which recent data are available, from February to May, 73% of Feeding America food banks surveyed said food donations have dropped, with 94% saying the cost of food shopping has increased and 89% saying are paying more for transportation to acquire or deliver food.
In the first three quarters of fiscal 2022, the chain said it received 517,000 tonnes of food from federal programs, compared with 1.1 million tonnes a year earlier.
“There was a lot of national attention during Covid, rightly so, but unfortunately things haven’t changed and are getting worse now, especially with all this inflation,” says Wendy Osborne.
