Hunger in America: People Waiting at Food Banks

In the heart of a depression that has taken 36.5 million people off of the work rolls, against the backdrop of news footage of seemingly endless lines of people waiting at food banks, when we see nightly telethons and charity drives to feed our neighbors, our children, the nation is relatively quiet.

No media outrage. No impassioned calls for change. Just quiet, desperate hunger creeping across America like a punishment, reaching places and households that were often close, but never quite there before.

Food Insecurity

The makers and promoters of the statistics have gotten their marketing all wrong. You hear that “food insecurity” is rising beyond the already unacceptable levels to something approaching apocalyptic, and if you have no history with the phrase, you shrug and move along.  It conveys none of the urgency, the terrible pain that is behind the numbers.

A study by the Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institute defined the problem as follows:

“By the end of April, more than one in five households in the United States, and two in five households with mothers with children 12 and under, were food insecure. In almost one in five households of mothers with children age 12 and under, the children were experiencing food insecurity.”

That seems bad enough, but without knowing what the term food insecurity means, it lacks the gut punch that it deserves. We’re all insecure these days, aren’t we? It’s hard to find the pork chops that we were looking for; will today’s delivery be missing a bunch of items?

This is not that.

To qualify as “food insecure” a family agreed with the statement:

“The food we bought just didn’t last, and we didn’t have enough money to get more.” 

There’s the payoff: they ran out of food, and even if they had access to a store, they simply had no way to buy more. Enter hunger. How about the kids? Here’s the definition of childhood food insecurity:

“The children in my household were not eating enough because we just couldn’t afford enough food”.

We are used to guilt-inducing commercials of third-world children looking bug-eyed into the camera. The survey found that one in five households in America — one in five! — felt compelled to admit to an anonymous questioner that they could not feed their kids what they needed to.

Food insecurity is an institutional definition. It probably made sense when it was created — a definition for people who had periodic access to food, who would get a check at the end of the month, and restart the stretching process. To an academic, sure, it works.

We have hungry children by the tens of millions, and we are quiet about it. We have desperate families searching for food, and we’re not astonished, not hastily revising our internal definition of our country.  We have churches and charities and good men and women hauling boxes of food out to lines of waiting cars they were never meant to serve, and we are somehow unmoved.

Perhaps it is too soon.

A recent poll found that 77% of the unemployed believe that this will all be over soon, that they’ll get their old jobs back as soon as the lockdown is lifted. Maybe we’re not screaming because we think that this will all be over as soon as we simply stop quarantining everyone, let the kids go back to school, and reopen the country. We can handle a week or three of struggling when we know that the cavalry is around the corner. Maybe we simply haven’t accepted what is happening. We’re not suffering, after all, we’re “Transitioning to Greatness”.

And while we’re busy transitioning, our children don’t have enough to eat.

If that’s the case, that we are quiet because we believe that we’re about to be rescued by a resurgent economy and unbridled prosperity, there’s a question that we have to ask:  What if the cavalry doesn’t come, at least not for everyone? At what point will the combination of shattering disappointment, partisan blaming, persistent illness and death force millions of Americans to give up that hope? What then?

The Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago just published a scholarly paper.  In it, they offered a prediction:

We find 3 new hires for every 10 layoffs caused by the shock and estimate that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job loss.

Let’s see… 42% of the 36.5 million recent unemployed won’t get rehired, but 77% of the same population believe that relief is imminent. That gap is around 7 million workers, and their families, who are going to be hit with reality just as their unemployment checks wind down. That’s millions of families that will see the cavalry ride into the fort, and fly right on by them out the other side. As they listen to their leaders proclaim the arrival of greatness, how will they react to not being able to provide enough food to their children?

By the time June comes to pass, we will have authorized between $5 and $7 trillion through a variety of federal programs to deal with the impact of the pandemic. The Federal Reserve will have put up another $4 to $6 trillion, or perhaps double that, in fresh, new money to prop up large businesses and banks. The stock market will remain elevated, at prices even its admirers acknowledge are inflated and full.

In that world of gushing money, the federal government denied requests to expand SNAP (food stamps) by 15%. It denied requests to waive the 20-hour work minimum for college students to receive SNAP aid. When a court blocked the start of regulations requiring greater work requirements set to begin this April, the administration went to court to reverse that ruling in spite of the economic contraction, protecting a program estimated to purge 700,000 families from the SNAP rolls. This is how the Department of Agriculture explained their position:

“While we’re currently in a very challenging environment, we do not expect this to last forever,” the department said Wednesday. “America’s best days are ahead, and we must prepare our workforce to rejoin the economy when our nation reopens.”

Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has noted that he has unlimited trillions in resources at his disposal for the support of the economy. Steven Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury, has stated that now is not the time to worry about deficits; historically low-interest rates make them irrelevant, something to be dealt with in the future.

Millions of parents can not afford to buy enough food to feed their families, to satisfy their children. The administration has gone to court to stop a judge’s decision to not take food stamps away from 700,000 families, because “our best days are ahead”. The juxtaposition is deafening.

This is not a partisan issue. This is not a conservative versus liberal issue. This is, pure and simple, a litmus test of our collective humanity, and of our definition of what America is. We will be fairly judged, and should judge ourselves, by our response to this basic assault on our national identity…

Our children don’t have enough to eat.