Hunger in America

In society at large, precautions – lockdowns, social distancing, limits on festive gatherings – necessary to keep Covid-19 at bay have increased loneliness and social isolation. Contrary to early expectations, reports of abuse and violence within families haven’t actually spiraled, but experts suggest that may be because the victims, confined to their homes alongside their tormentors, are finding it harder to seek help and fear reporting what's happening to them. As for children, teachers are no longer seeing their pupils in person as regularly and so are less able to spot the typical warning signs of mistreatment.

Thankfully, the pandemic has yet to increase this country’s already alarming suicide rate, but the same can’t be said for levels of stress and depression, both of which have risen noticeably. School closures and the move to online learning have forced parents, particularly women, to scramble for childcare and to work less, even though many of them were barely getting by while working full-time, or stop working altogether, often a genuine disaster in poor families.

Not surprisingly, people who have been laid off or had their work hours reduced have fallen behind on their mortgage and rent payments. Although various federal and state moratoriums on such payments, as well as on evictions and foreclosures, were enacted, such protections will eventually end. And the moratoriums don’t negate renters’ or homeowners’ obligations to settle accounts with their bankers and landlords somewhere down the line (which for many Americans may, in the end, prove an impossibility).

Apart from the illness and death it causes, perhaps the most poignant consequence of Covid-19 has been the way it’s increased what’s called ‘food insecurity’ across the United States. That ungainly term doesn’t refer to the chronic food scarcity and undernourishment, which afflicts more than 800 million people in poor countries, but rather to the disruption of people’s typical food-consumption patterns. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) distinguishes between what it calls low food security (“reduced quality, variability, or desirability of diet”) and the very low version of the same (“multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake”).

Surveys by the USDA and the Census Bureau show that both variants have risen steeply during the pandemic. Just before the coronavirus struck, 35 million Americans, 11 million of them children, experienced food insecurity, the lowest figure in two decades. This year, those numbers are projected to reach 54 million and 18 million respectively. In 2018, 4 percent of American adults reported that at least some members of their family did not have enough to eat; by July 2020, that figure had hit 11 percent, according to a study by Northwestern University’s Food Research and Action Center, and will only increase as the pandemic worsens.

Income supplements provided by the $2.2 trillion CARES Act that Congress passed in March in response to the economic problems created by Covid-19, increases in the government's Supplementary Nutritional Program (SNAP), and the Pandemic Electronic Benefit (P-EBT), which helps parents whose children no longer get free or subsidized school lunches, have made a difference – but not enough to make up for lost or reduced income, lost homes, and other disasters of this moment. And sadly, any follow-up to the CARES Act, assuming Congress reaches some kind of agreement on its terms before the current legislation expires at the end of December, will almost certainly be far less generous than the original law. The SNAP increases already excluded the poorest seven million households that were then receiving the maximum amount, and the new increases now under discussion in Congress would add less than one dollar to a four-person family's maximum daily benefit. P-EBT expired in most states at the end of September, in some as early as July.

That food insecurity has ‘skyrocketed’, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities puts it, during the pandemic despite government assistance shouldn’t come as a surprise. Millions of people have lost their jobs. Some have seen their earnings diminished because of furloughs, wage cuts, freezes, or reduced working hours. Others have looked for jobs in vain and finally given up (but aren’t included in official unemployment statistics). Millions of adults have children who no longer receive those free or subsidized lunches because of the switch, in whole or part, to online teaching.

Worse yet, as pandemic-induced firings, layoffs, and wage cuts have reduced incomes, and so consumer purchasing power, food prices, especially for meat, fish, and eggs, have only risen. Such costs have increased for other reasons as well. The pandemic has disrupted supply networks, national and international. Leery consumers, anticipating shortages or seeking to reduce trips to grocery stores to avoid being infected by Covid-19, have also resorted to panic buying and the stockpiling of food and other necessities.

Of course, not everyone has been hit with equal force by rising food prices. Americans high on the income ladder can absorb such extra costs easily enough and, in any case, spend a substantially smaller portion of their income on groceries. According to the USDA, adults with incomes in the top fifth of society spent 8 percent of their income on food last year; for the bottom fifth, it was 36 percent. The first group also obviously has a lot more money available to stock up on food than that bottom fifth, so many of whom have also become jobless or seen their paychecks diminish since the pandemic started. In March, for example, 39 percent of those making less than $40,000 had already lost their jobs or had their paychecks reduced, but only 13 percent of those who earned $100,000 or more, and that gap continued into the fall.

Not surprisingly, then, the bigger the hit people took from the Covid-19 recession, the more likely they were to experience food insecurity, which is why aggregate statistics on the phenomenon and other societal problems attributable to the pandemic can be misleading. They tend to mask the reality that its effects have been felt primarily by the most vulnerable, while the others have been touched much more lightly, or not at all.

Excerpted: ‘Covid-19 and the Nightmare of Food Insecurity’

Commondreams.org