A steady stream of cars turned into the Gaithersburg Middle School parking lot Thursday afternoon, each to pick up two cardboard boxes of free groceries to keep a household from going hungry.
“I started when I lost my job cleaning houses,” said Esmirna Garcia Flores, 24. She still finds some work, but her monthly income has dropped from about $2,000 to $600. The food pantry allows her to feed her two daughters, ages 7 months and 4 years.
“It’s more for my daughters. I just think about them,” she said.
Victor Young, 54, an unemployed Air Force veteran with lupus, needs the help to provide meals for his two grandchildren, ages 7 and 8. He’s caring for them while their mother, who also has other children, is at risk of being homeless.
Young was working in retail until the store closed during the pandemic. His unemployment checks ran out three months ago.
“I use a couple of different food banks,” he said. “It helps absorb the void of not having.”
The specter of hunger is haunting soaring numbers of families throughout the Washington region and across the country. Sudden job losses, especially among lower-income service workers, are mainly to blame. The burden has fallen most heavily on Latinos, African Americans and other racial minorities, who are disproportionately more likely to live paycheck to paycheck.
In a blunt illustration of our unbalanced economy, the Washington region, one of the world’s wealthiest metropolitan areas, is home to about 600,000 people unsure of where they’ll get their next meal. That’s up by 200,000 people since the recession began, according to the Capital Area Food Bank, the clearinghouse that supplies smaller food banks throughout the region.
The loss of access to food has already been more acute than during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, from which it took years to fully recover.
“Clearly there has been no other year in our history like this year,” said Capital Area Food Bank President Radha Muthiah. “With past recoveries, it takes easily two to three years to bounce back from major crises. We know that people will continue to be in need for at least 18 months to two years.”
Food insecurity — the formal phrase meaning lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life — affects every part of the region. Even in our most affluent jurisdictions, hunger is a worry in households whose members clean our office buildings, bus tables at our restaurants and stock shelves in our stores.
“Most people assume that because Fairfax County is one of the wealthiest counties in the nation that there isn’t much need, but there are some pockets of deep need that are mixed in with communities that are well-established,” said Annie Turner, executive director of Fairfax-based Food for Others.
Before the pandemic, Food for Others was serving about 1,800 families per week. Now, it’s up to 4,000 or more a week.
“I know a lot of people think of individuals who use food pantries as not working, not trying, but that’s not the case with our families,” Turner said. “They are trying hard to make it. It’s just difficult. . . . I think the pandemic just shows the huge gap between the haves and have-nots.”
Anyi Gajardo, 29, and her husband are have-nots struggling to support their two daughters, ages 7 months and 5 years. She was among those in Gaithersburg who picked up two Manna boxes filled with foodstuffs including rice, beans, apples, carrots and chicken.
“I lost my job in March” cleaning rooms at a Rockville hotel, Gajardo said. Her husband, who installs flooring, is getting less work than before.
She would seek a new job herself, but she has to stay home with her children.
“I don’t have anybody to leave them with,” Gajardo said.
In D.C., the nonprofit So Others Might Eat (SOME) has supplied Anthony D. Holland, 52, with noodles, peanut butter, vegetables and other food since he lost two part-time jobs as a bartender/server: one with an Arlington caterer, the other at a Silver Spring retirement facility.
He got by for a while on his federal stimulus check and tax refund but said he hasn’t received unemployment benefits because of a bureaucratic snag. Friends have helped him, as well as SOME.
“I lost all my income,” Holland said. “After July, that’s when I began to reach out to my network, because I had used up all my savings.”
Holland isn’t bitter. “My faith tells me that I have to believe that things are going to get better,” he said.
Food banks have scrambled to cope with the increased demand and multiple disruptions caused by the pandemic.
In the spring, large grocery chains sharply cut back on donations, because they were having trouble obtaining supplies themselves because of panic-buying and supply-chain delays. To make up the shortfall, the Capital Area Food Bank has purchased 771 truckloads of food so far this year, more than 25 times what it purchased in all of 2019.
“The food network distribution channel has been stressed and strained almost to the breaking point,” said SOME President Ralph F. Boyd Jr.
The federal government has helped fill the gap, but its support will drop sharply unless it acts soon to authorize more aid.
The Trump administration created a $4.5 billion Farmers to Families Food Box program to support struggling farmers and feed jobless Americans. Another program, part of aid to farmers hurt by the China trade war, allocated $7.1 billion for direct food purchases for food assistance.
But the food box initiative is running out of money, and the trade program is scheduled to expire Dec. 31.
“With all that ending, food banks are looking at about a 50 percent decrease in food they’re getting from the federal government,” said Kate Leone, chief government relations officer for Feeding America, a national nonprofit. “It’s a real food crisis that food banks are facing.”
She said Congress’s failure to extend unemployment aid or provide other direct relief to the jobless is straining families’ finances, thus worsening hunger.
“The lack of additional help from the government has been sort of stunning,” Leone said.
Advocates would like the multiple crises of 2020 to prompt the region and nation to ensure that the recovery lifts up poor and low-income Americans with better wages and benefits, and a stronger social safety net.
“We’re hoping that this moment of reckoning with race and the health-care system is an opportunity to look at a new way of dealing with our economy and make sure it’s fairer and there are opportunities for everybody to have prosperity, and not have these struggles, whether there’s a pandemic or not,” said Jackie DeCarlo, Manna’s chief executive.
That’s a meaningful wish for the holidays and new year.
