Food insecurity: a longstanding problem made worse by COVID-19

Many people don’t have a meal on Thanksgiving or throughout the holidays — but with the pandemic leaving millions of families unemployed, they also can no longer afford and provide the nutritious meals that children and adults need every day.

Before we went into a nationwide pandemic, 35 million people struggled with adequate food supply in their households.

But this year, that number may increase to 50 million people, says Feeding America, a national network of food banks.

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank is acting as quickly as they can in helping provide meals to families all over the country, says Roger Castle, a development officer with the food bank.

“A lot of it is increasing the amount of food to our partner agencies — which are 700 other non-profit and religious organizations that get food from the food bank,” said Castle. “Mainly through these emergency distributions where we do large drive-throughs in big parking lots, where cars can pull up and we load food, with masks and gloves into their car — and its 80 pounds of food.”

Castle said the L.A. Regional Food Bank sees firsthand how much the pandemic has caused an increase in food insecurity.

“We have seen in our emergency distribution lines people that have said that I’ve worked for thirty years and I’ve never needed food assistance before,” said Castle. “Our food distribution is up 145 percent and we are now feeding 900,000 people each month either directly or through our agency partners.”

In 2019, according to Feeding America, one out of every 10 American families were food insecure, which means they didn’t have access to a variety of healthy, quality foods.

And in 4.1% of households, Americans went hungry at least twice this year.

Many are affected by food insecurity — but children are the most vulnerable.

“Currently, one in four children [is] experiencing food insecurity,” said Nellie Duran, Assistant Professor of Family and Consumer Sciences at CSUN. “Even when you control for poverty, when a child experiences food insecurity, there is an impact in their academic performance.”

The L.A. Regional Food Bank tries to close the gap between children and food insecurity.

“We have a child’s breakfast program, we also have an after school meal and summer lunch program. Other places run those programs, but we fill in the gaps where we see that those kids in a certain area are not getting enough food,” said Castle. “If someone’s not getting their meals on the weekend we send them home on Friday afternoon out of school with enough food for meals for the entire weekend so they don’t have to go hungry all weekend home.”

Although the nationwide pandemic has contributed to the increased number of people that are food insecure, the problem has been going on even prior to the pandemic.

Duran believes U.S. leaders must acknowledge that world hunger is a bigger issue.

“As long as our policies continue to ignore the right to food,” she said, “we are always going to have food banks, food pantries, food drives.”

This story was reported by the following team: