Long lines at food banks across the United States have returned as America’s workers, overwhelmed by inflation, require assistance to feed their families.
With gas prices skyrocketing along with grocery costs, many people are searching for charity food for the first time, and more of them are doing so on foot.
Inflation in the United States is at a 40-year high, and gas prices have soared since April 2020. The national average cost briefly hit $5 a gallon ($1.32 a gallon). litre) in June. Rapidly rising rents and the end of federal COVID-19 aid have also taken a financial toll.
Food banks, which had begun to see some relief as people returned to work after pandemic lockdowns, are struggling to meet needs lately as federal programs also provide less food for distribution, grocery store donations are down and cash donations fall short.
Tomasina John was recently among the hundreds of families lined up in several lanes of cars outside the St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix. She said that her family had never visited a food bank because her husband had supported her and her four children with her work in construction.
“But now it’s really impossible to get by without some help,” said John, who traveled with a neighbor to share the cost of gas while they waited in the scorching desert sun. “Prices are too high.”
Jesús Pascual was also in line.
“It’s a real struggle,” said Pascual, a janitor who estimated he spends several hundred dollars a month on food for himself, his wife and their five children ages 11 to 19.
The same scene is playing out across the country, with food bank workers anticipating a tough summer.
The spike in food prices comes after state governments ended COVID-19 disaster declarations that allowed them to temporarily increase benefits from SNAP, the federal food stamp program that covers about 40 million people. Americans.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going to get better overnight,” said Katie Fitzgerald, president and chief operating officer of the national network of food banks Feeding America. “The demand is making the supply challenges really complex.”
Charitable food distribution has remained well above the amounts delivered before the coronavirus pandemic, even though demand slackened somewhat late last year.
Officials at Feeding America said official second-quarter data won’t be ready until August, but have been told by food banks across the country that demand is soaring.
The Phoenix Food Bank’s main distribution center delivered food packages to 4,271 families during the third week of June, a 78% increase over the 2,396 families served during the same week last year, according to Jerry Brown. , spokesperson for St. Mary’s.
More than 900 families line up at the distribution center every weekday to receive a government emergency food box filled with items like canned beans, peanut butter and rice, Brown said. Mary’s adds produce purchased with cash donations as well as foods provided by local supermarkets like bread, carrots and pork chops for a combo pack worth about $75.
Distribution from the Alameda County Community Food Bank in Northern California has increased since hitting a low earlier this year, going from 890 households served on the third Friday of January to 1,410 households on the third Friday of June, according to chief marketing officer Michael Altfest.
At the Houston Food Bank, the nation’s largest food bank, where food distribution levels early in the pandemic briefly reached a staggering 1 million pounds (453,000 kilograms) a day, now a half of 276,000 kilograms (610,000 pounds) daily.
This figure is higher than the 500,000 pounds (226,000 kilograms) per day distributed before the pandemic, spokeswoman Paula Murphy said.
Murphy said cash donations haven’t slowed, but inflation means they don’t go as far.
Food bank officials said the sudden spike in demand caught them off guard.
“Last year we were expecting a decline in demand for 2022 because the economy had been doing so well,” said Michael Flood, CEO of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. “This issue of inflation came quite suddenly.”
“A lot of these are people who are working and who got through the pandemic well and maybe even their wages went up,” Flood explained. “But they have also seen food prices rise above their budgets.”
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Video journalist Eugene Garcia in Montebello, California, contributed to this report.
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