Millions in Texas troubled on food
Storms compound unemployment
Nearly 7 million Texans are struggling with hunger, a crisis that hasn’t abated despite $3 trillion in federal assistance throughout the pandemic.
With the state facing another food emergency after last week’s brutal storms and with unemployment rates still high, experts on food insecurity and advocates for low-income people say the next round of aid can’t come soon enough. Yet the $1,400 stimulus checks Democrats are pushing through Congress are a stopgap at best, they say.
Celia Cole, the CEO of Feeding Texas, the state’s largest hunger relief organization, said around 1 in 4 households are struggling to afford food. On average, food banks across the state are serving hundreds of thousands of people every month, though some urban areas, such as San Antonio, see much higher volume.
“It’s been described as the perfect storm so many times, we said we’d never use that phrase again,” Cole said of the spike in food insecurity since the pandemic hit last spring. “But it really was. Overnight, the demand doubled.”
That demand is still evident daily in San Antonio, where Eric Cooper, the CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank, has seen more than 625,000 individuals pass through the organization’s food distribution locations. Many are first-time food bank visitors, spurred by job loss and whittled-down savings.
Lines of 2,000 cars snake through distribution sites most days, requiring logistical planning on par with that of concerts or sporting events.
The scene is sometimes so staggering, Cooper said, he asks himself if the organization will have enough food to meet the need.
“I have not become accustomed or immune to the line,”
Cooper said. “It haunts me every day when I see it.”
Stimulus a short-term fix
Boosting nutritional assistance, along with direct aid to families in the form of stimulus checks, are key provisions of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, which the House is expected to vote on this week.
But the measure that could most directly address the Texas hunger problem, advocates say, is the controversial proposal to push the minimum wage up to $15 by 2025. Republicans and even some moderate Democrats have rejected it as too devastating to the economy, especially businesses already threatened by the slowdown caused by COVID-19.
Texas would be among the states most affected by hiking the minimum wage, with an estimated 3.5 million workers getting a raise, estimates from the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute show.
Jeremy Everett, the director of the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, said stimulus checks act as Band-aids that keep families fed and bills at bay for a month or so.
Citing data from the Urban Institute, Everett said food insecurity
rates in Texas jumped from 11.1 percent before the pandemic to a whopping 23.5 percent by April. Once stimulus payments went out, that rate dropped to 18.5 percent until July.
Around 80 percent of respondents among households in the U.S. that spent their spring stimulus checks reported using it on food, Household Pulse Surveys from June show.
All this is evidence that the spring stimulus checks did have a “huge impact” in the short term for families dealing with a crunch for necessary groceries, Everett said.
But he said enduring change will come only from sustained, systemic intervention, such as increasing benefits for food stamp programs and boosting employment opportunities.
“We need policies, systems and environments to support people,” said Cassandra Johnson, a professor at Texas State University in San Marcos who studies food insecurity and food policy. “What we really need is a dramatic reset to the system.”
Preparing for a ‘food cliff ’
Last week’s polar plunge has again spiked demand at food banks. The storm may have caused many residents to skip a much-needed paycheck or incur unexpected emergency housing costs, said Brian Greene, president and CEO of the Houston Food Bank.
The Houston Food Bank’s massive distribution sites fed around 140,000 people a week during the pandemic’s peak, Greene said, a number that slowly dropped until the widespread power and water outages last week. Now the crowds are back.
Meanwhile, food banks are preparing for an imminent “food cliff ” — with federal supplies running dry and need showing no sign of abating, said Cole, the Feeding Texas CEO.
There’s also the worry of burnout among food bank volunteers and support staff, who have faced unceasing demands on their time for nearly a full year now.
Said Cole: “How much longer, from an energy and morale perspective, can we keep this up?”