The number of households that don’t have enough food to eat is growing. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggesting that more than 10% of American households experienced food insecurity in 2019. Since the pandemic started, that number is estimated to have doubled, according to research from Northwestern University. This lack of reliable access to food is even more severe for Black and Latinx households.
Food insecurity — defined as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle — has been connected to employment, wages, health care costs, disability status and poverty, among other factors. While the country’s network of food banks has been filling in the gap, the coronavirus pandemic has made that increasingly difficult, leading advocates and researchers to increase calls for a more permanent solution.
Jared Call is a senior advocate with California Food Policy Advocates, a nonprofit focused on food policy and increasing access to healthy food for low-income Californians. Craig Gundersen is the Agricultural & Consumer Economics Distinguished Professor in the department of agriculture and consumer economics at the University of Illinois. He works with Feeding America and concentrates on the causes and consequences of food insecurity, and on the evaluation of food assistance programs, with an emphasis on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Both men took some time to talk about food insecurity during the pandemic, and how they’d ideally like to see it addressed. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. For the full interview, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-lisa-deaderick-staff.html.)
Q: Food insecurity has long been an issue addressed in various ways, and the pandemic has increased the number of people in the U.S. who can’t afford enough to eat. Can you first talk about what some of the factors are that contribute to food insecurity in the U.S.? And how we’ve seen those factors show up during this pandemic?
Jared Call: Food insecurity is a symptom of poverty. In California, we have the highest rate of poverty of any state according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure. Inequities in access to resources also persist across California due to our legacy of systemic racism and exclusion.
Craig Gundersen: There are a wide number of factors that contribute to food insecurity in the United States. For example, low income, unemployment, food prices in an area; there’s a wide array of different determinants. The one thing that has received a lot more attention, but not nearly as much emphasis as it should, is disability status. Far and away the most important predictor of food insecurity in the United States is whether or not someone in the household has a disability, that’s probably the best predictor of whether a household is food insecure. So, fortunately, a lot more attention has been paid to disability status and food insecurity. So, that’s one of the determinants.
In terms of what’s happening during the pandemic, with respect to some of the other determinants, is the main thing that’s changed in the pandemic is the unemployment rate. In fact, you haven’t seen much movement in the poverty rate, but the unemployment rate has gone up quite a bit. That’s one of the major determinants that has changed during the pandemic.
Q: What are some of the barriers that individuals and families who experience food insecurity are facing in acquiring food during the pandemic?
Call: The COVID-19 pandemic is making it even more difficult for many Californians to safely access the food they need to live healthy lives. We are hearing about hardships across the state, such as an urgent need for economic relief, including through Pandemic EBT (food benefits for families with children who are eligible for free or reduced-price school meals through the federal School Breakfast or National School Lunch Programs), more CalFresh ( California’s supplemental nutrition assistance program) benefits, and direct payments for households with low income; limited operating hours and closures of meal distribution sites, including school-based sites, as well as limited availability of meals at some sites; and the exclusion of many immigrant Californians from existing, newly created, and recently expanded sources of support.
Gundersen: In terms of the narrow issue of acquiring food, I don’t think there have been that many challenges. Food stores haven’t been closing down a lot. If you’re talking about having enough money to acquire food, then yes, this is becoming a much bigger issue for those who have become unemployed. I want to emphasize one thing about this: COVID has had really disproportionate impacts on different segments of the population. For example, for people who are college educated, working in “white collar” jobs, COVID has essentially had almost zero impact if you look at unemployment rates or other measures of economic well-being. Rather, for those in service sector jobs, which tend to pay less, that’s who has borne the brunt of COVID. … When we talk about the lockdowns that have happened, people like you and me aren’t bearing the brunt of these, right? It doesn’t really affect our well-being that much at all; but for low-income families, if they work in a restaurant and those restaurants are closed, they’re not getting any money. Or if they’re working on a janitorial staff at an office building that’s been shut down, they’re not making any money. That’s where I think the main concern with COVID is, that the brunt of these lockdowns is mainly felt by low-income households.
Q: So many organizations, municipalities, and schools are providing food and resources to help people obtain food; however, according to data from the Household Pulse Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau over the summer, the ability of these programs and services to reach low-income households, has been a struggle. (A reported 23% of those households with children experiencing food insecurity but only 31% of those were reached by one of these programs.) What would help increase the reach of these programs during the pandemic, to the people who need them?
Call: Providing state fiscal relief. Without more funding from Congress, California will be forced to cut critical health and social services at the worst possible time. Congress must temporarily increase the Medicaid matching payment to 14% and provide direct, flexible grants to states. Then, targeting state investments to give more students access to universally free breakfast and lunch. Also, establishing options to give our youngest children access to universally free meals in preschools and child care settings. Providing nutrition assistance to all immigrant Californians who are struggling to make ends meet, is another way to help. And, building on what works: effective solutions harnessed during the COVID-19 crisis should continue as long-term efforts to mitigate hunger and poverty across California. For instance, permanently remove unnecessary CalFresh reporting requirements and streamline the application process to be fully completed online or over the phone.
Gundersen: … These challenges were present pre-COVID, and in the absence of changes, they’re going to be here in the present and the future, post-COVID. It’s an ongoing problem where children can’t access these things. Let me emphasize two of the things I think can be done to address this whenever children are not in school, whether that be over winter breaks or summer breaks. The first thing is that the Trump administration and Congress approved the Pandemic EBT, which gave households with children temporary SNAP benefits to cover what they were not getting in the breakfast and lunch programs at school. So, that was a nice thing. Another thing is having home delivery of meals, sending boxes of food to children over the summer as a way to get around these problems of low participation. That’s another option that could be pursued on a larger scale. So, both of these would help. Anything that makes it easier to get food to children is better, whether that be through the Pandemic EBT program or through these meal delivery programs.
Q: Can you talk briefly about how food insecurity and poverty are connected?
Call: Food insecurity stems from a lack of resources. People living on low- and fixed incomes often have trouble meeting their basic needs. This is especially true in California with our high cost of living and sky-high housing costs. When a household needs to allocate scarce resources to pay for the basics like rent, food and medicine, it’s often food that is sacrificed in order to meet the other needs. You can’t “cut back” on rent or life-saving medications, but you can go hungry. It’s an impossible choice that no one should have to make, especially in a country and a state with so much abundance.
Gundersen: One of the common misconceptions is that all poor people are food insecure, and all food insecure people are poor. That’s just false. Seventy% of poor families in the United States are food secure. In other words, it’s hard being poor in the United States, but despite this these families are able to be food secure for a few different reasons. In some cases, it’s this great set of food assistance programs we have in our country. SNAP. SNAP is, by far, my favorite program because that raises a lot of people who are poor out of food insecurity. Also, a lot of poor persons are better able to manage the system in terms of figuring out where to get the cheapest food, and a lot of survival skills that other groups don’t have. So, poverty does not equal food insecurity. The other thing is that approximately 15% of non-poor households are food insecure. So, in thinking about the solutions to food insecurity, even if we eliminated poverty tomorrow, that would have a small dent on food insecurity. The ways that we address food insecurity are in many ways different than the ways that we would address poverty.
Q: Do you think that relying on charitable sources (i.e., food banks) is enough to address food insecurity long term? What kind of response would you ideally like to see?
Call: We often say that hunger is not an issue of charity, but an issue of justice. While the emergency food network has gone above and beyond to meet the surging need for food during the pandemic, it will never be able to meet the true level needed as long as poverty and inequities persist.
All people and communities deserve fair access to nutritious, affordable food. State and federal leaders should take bold action to provide the most support to Californians experiencing the greatest need, including individuals living in chronically under-resourced communities harmed by systemic racism.
Gundersen: Absolutely not, relying on food pantries and things like that are not enough to address food insecurity, long term. I say that, but I love Feeding America and its network of food banks, so this is not a criticism of them. I know Feeding America would come across this and say the exact same thing, “No, we can’t handle all of this,” right? However, this network of food banks is critical over two main dimensions. First, for SNAP recipients who don’t have enough money for food the entire month, they can go to these food pantries to get more food to eat. A second group is a lot of Americans who are not on SNAP, they really have nowhere else to turn during their times of need, and food pantries serve a critical role in this. I can’t say enough great things about our network of food banks in the United States.
So, what’s the response I’d like to see? The first thing I would do is increase the maximum SNAP benefit level, such that families are getting more in SNAP benefits each month. Second, set the eligibility thresholds higher for SNAP, such that more people will pass both the gross and net income test, bringing more people into the program, because there are a lot of what we call “near eligible households” that are food insecure, and bringing them into the program would reduce their food insecurity by quite a bit. Overall, if these two things were implemented, we would find roughly a 60% decline in food insecurity in our country. In other words, what that means is that if we implemented both of these, 25 million fewer Americans will be food insecure. The cost of this is about $60 billion, so it’s not cheap, but if we care about food insecurity and the consequences of food insecurity (the higher health care costs associated with food insecurity), from my perspective, it’s a bargain. When we say how do we solve food insecurity, it’s easy: just expand SNAP in both of these dimensions.
Lisa Deaderick is a reporter and columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune.