High food costs are putting an unprecedented squeeze on consumers with limited income and the food banks that serve them.
U.S. food inflation numbers in June reflected grocery prices that were 12% above year-ago levels, the largest yearly jump since April 1979.
Demand for food assistance is way up this year, too, says Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks, Columbus.
“I’ve been doing this work for nearly 30 years now and I’ve been through economic cycles, and I’ve been through some pretty horrid weather conditions,” she said. “But I’ve never seen anything like this, ever.”
In the months of April and May this year, the 12 Ohio food banks and related charities served 1.77 million people, up 26% compared with the 1.41 million served for the same period a year ago.
”I have to believe, based on what I’m seeing, that [assistance numbers] are likely to go up once I get those June numbers,” Hamler-Fugitt said in mid-July. “I would not be at all surprised if that doesn’t jump by another 5% to 10%.”
Part of the reason for the expected increase in need is because April and May numbers were reflective of a period when students were still in school and receiving school meals.
“Once schools recess for the summer months, we have traditionally seen our numbers go up,” she said. What’s more, Hamler-Fugitt said, 30 of Ohio’s 88 counties do not offer the Summer Food Service Program for children, a program that serves free healthy meals and snacks to children and teens in low-income areas.
“We have seen a marked increase in the number of households with children that are turning to us,” she said.
Trying times for seniors
Another “frightening” trend, she said, is an increase in the number of consumers over 60 turning to food banks.
“I just had a food bank respond that, in their latest distribution, they were quite concerned about the number of seniors over the age of 80,” she said. Hamler-Fugitt said seniors are the “canary in the coal mine” for food banks.
“When we see seniors showing up in these kinds of numbers, that gives us pause, because seniors tend to be the last people that join the line because they don’t understand the nature of how our food distribution works,” she said, adding that seniors also tell food banks they try every coping strategy that they can before turning to food banks because they don’t want to take food away from children.
Many seniors in need have low fixed incomes, she said, without pensions or well-funded 401(k) retirement accounts or other supplemental sources of retirement income. Instead, they are attempting to live on Social Security, which Hamler-Fugitt estimated may provide 40% or less of basic needs.
Despite low incomes, many are not participating in other programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or the Commodity Supplemental Food Program.
About half of the people who turn to Ohio food banks are not poor enough to qualify for SNAP because they are slightly over income requirements, she said. Seniors in need also often lack a support network, such as family, children or grandchildren.
Without the ability to feed themselves well, seniors may face an inevitable and unwanted path to nursing homes, an outcome which can cost the state of Ohio $65,000 per year per individual, Hamler-Fugitt said.
The lack of senior support in communities is critical and food is the No. 1 issue, she said. Affordable housing, high utility and fuel costs, and costly prescription medication also weigh on older Americans.
“Seniors were already making tradeoffs between food and medicine and food and other basic needs,” she said, and escalating inflation in 2022 has made those choices even tougher.
Hamler-Fugitt said the West Ohio Food Bank, serving 10 rural areas, recently saw 80% of the 200 seniors who came to the food bank for assistance were first-time recipients of food assistance.
A big drop in the donation bucket
Food banks are hurting from a big drop in USDA-sourced food boxes, she said.
Beyond government programs that support food banks, Hamler-Fugitt said industry donations are down because of inflated input costs and markets.
“I know our vegetable growers, and they not going to overproduce when they have got this kind of increase in their input costs,” she said. “When producers have strong markets because of supply chain issues, then [they] are going to sell to those first-line markets first.”
Growers donate when they have a surplus, but lately, that hasn’t happened as often. Donations from farmers, growers and commodity producers, retailers, and other community sources have previously accounted for between 50% to 60% of all the food distributed by food banks, but Hamler-Fugitt said that percentage is declining rapidly.
Ohio food banks benefit from a state-operated agriculture clearance program that can reimburse growers a portion of their picking, packing, processing or production costs. That program yields about 40 million pounds of food a year at about 20 cents per pound.
“That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the production costs and, as the costs go up, we recognize that, while we’ve been very fortunate out of this partnership, our growers have higher input costs,” Hamler-Fugitt said.
Ohio food banks will need to spend more money to get the same amount of product.
“Unfortunately, we are seeing a decline in monetary donations and overall governmental support,” she said, noting that USDA is having a more difficult time purchasing commodities this year because of elevated markets and stiffer competition for goods.
With government programs supplying less volume of commodities, food banks have had to fall back on privately purchased food, Hamler-Fugitt said.
“Food banks have been spending every dime they raise, trying to keep enough food on their shelves since the pandemic began, and we are now in year three,” she said. “We are now seeing the trends in the number of people turning to us as we did at the height of that pandemic.”
Another big concern of those providing emergency food assistance is the significant loss of the number of pounds of food they are receiving.
“We’ll lighten the bag, we’ll lighten the box and ration what food we have,” she said “We, as food banks, can engage in the same activities, initiatives and coping strategies [of] the people that we serve.”
A ‘beyond-brittle’ situation
Hamler-Fugitt said food banks have lived off the generosity and “dark side” of the food industry for a long time.
“We recognize that we were the direct beneficiaries of overproduction of products that were close to code date, surpluses or not Grade A product,” she said. “We recognize that and we were extremely appreciative, but those rules don’t apply anymore.”
The supply chain, now often described as brittle in post-pandemic times, has gone “beyond brittle” to completely broken down, she added.
“Nothing is better; nothing has recovered to pre-pandemic levels as it relates to the supply chain,” she said. “We, in America, have taken for granted for far too long our abundant, relatively inexpensive sources of the variety of food.”
Because of the lack of affordability now, many people are telling food banks that the only time they would be able to access fresh fruit is through emergency feeding networks.
Food banks raise money to purchase food from growers, wholesalers or retailers, but the cost of food purchases has soared, she said.
“Last year, on average in Ohio, we spent 42 cents per pound for purchases statewide; last quarter, the cost was $1.04 a pound,” Hamler-Fugitt said. “I’m having to raise more money just to keep pace with the amount of food that I was able to purchase before.”
Fresh focus
Hamler-Fugitt said Ohio food banks are moving whatever dollars they get to source fresh fruits, vegetables and perishable protein items, such as eggs, cheese and dairy, because those items are less expensive per pound than processed foods.
“Our 12 food banks and 3,600 member charities have been working for decades to move to a minimum of 50% fresh and 50% shelf-stable or frozen,” she said. “We are trying to build up more capacity, more refrigeration units, more reefer units, more point-in-time distributions, so we can get highly perishable food into communities and onto the plates of low-income Ohioans as quickly as possible.”
Looking ahead, Hamler-Fugitt said she hopes growers and emergency food providers can come together and really make an impact on the upcoming farm bill.
“There’s a lot of challenges in front of all of us, and if we don’t have the money to be able to adapt quickly, to especially climate change and extreme weather conditions, and the vulnerability of input costs in these variables, hunger is going to continue to grow in the U.S. and we will quickly become a second-world country.”
