Food insecure families make tough decisions daily

Thousands in county lacking reliable access

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Avoid brand names. Look for sales, daily. For sandwiches, if there’s cheese, just one slice — and careful with the lunch meat. Not too much milk. Make a pot of spaghetti and hope it lasts you a week.

For some families, these might be optional guidelines for saving money. For the Breegle family in Clairton, these rules are a matter of survival.

On the surface, Elizabeth Breegle and her two children, a 12year-old son and 13-year-old daughter, might seem eligible for SNAP benefits since the monthly paycheck is $452 below the gross income limits for food stamps. But the family doesn’t qualify for aid because it doesn’t meet another important qualification: the net income limit, a calculation of the gross income minus eligible deductions like rent and heating costs.

That puts them in a no man’s land: They don’t qualify for SNAP but still are food insecure — lacking reliable access to affordable, nutritious food. The USDA estimates that 12.3 percent of households and 41 million people nationwide, were food insecure as of 2016. That percentage is higher in Allegheny County, where an estimated 168,000 individuals were food insecure in 2016 —13.7 percent of individuals overall and 16.8 percent of children, according to Feeding America.

“It’s a choice to pay the utilities or buy food to feed you and your children,” said Ms. Breegle, 45, who rents a house in Clairton.

“I would have to decide which month, which utility is getting paid so I can feed the kids,” she said. “It comes to a point sometimes where you only pay the ones that you have a shut-off notice on and let the other ones go for a while.”

Ms. Breegle still fits within the eligibility cutoffs to receive some federally funded food pantry resources — but many food insecure people don’t. Nationally, a little more than a quarter of food-insecure individuals are ineligible for federal nutritional assistance, but that percentage is even higher in Allegheny County. In 2016, an