Hispanic, employed, but still struggling to feed the family
Survey: Two-thirds report visiting a food pantry for first time
The new face of hunger in the Washington, D.C., region is a Hispanic man or woman who struggles to feed their household despite working, according to a new report from the Capital Area Food Bank.
The 2021 “Hunger Report” comes a year after the organization released a July 2020 report warning that the coronavirus pandemic could greatly grow the number of food insecure people in the area.
According to Radha Muthiah, the food bank’s president and chief executive, the organization which has doubled the number of meals it provided in the last year due to the pandemic to 75 million - was not planning on following up on last year’s report so quickly. “But it became clear that things were changing in the region,” Muthiah said. “We needed to understand what was changing and what was staying the same.”
The new report, based on a survey of 2,000 individuals who access food through the food bank and its partners, shows the pandemic has changed the demographics of its clientele: Two-thirds of the individuals surveyed reported visiting a food pantry for the first time in the last year. Ninety percent of the respondents said their problems with food access were directly due to the pandemic.
The report also lays out the stark racial disparities of food insecurity in the post-pandemic landscape. According to the food bank, before March 2020, 59 percent of the people accessing food identified as Black, while 16 percent were Hispanic, 9 percent were White and 5 percent were Asian.
The economic consequences of the pandemic upended those figures. According to the report, since March 2020, 51 percent of the people attending free food distributions identified as Hispanic. The share of Asian food distribution clients also rose to 10 percent. For both Black and White clients, the numbers dropped, to 26 percent and 5 percent respectively.
The report also sketches a picture of the household makeup of the region’s food insecure. According to the food bank, before the pandemic, 43 percent of the food insecure population reported having children at home. Since March 2020, that figure has risen to 69 percent. Before the pandemic, District residents overrepresented the majority of the food insecure population. Since March 2020, Virginia and Maryland residents now make up the main share.
But perhaps most alarming about the new face of the region’s food insecure is that they’re working. Before the pandemic, just 39 percent of the food bank’s food insecure population reported they were employed; since the pandemic, 66 percent of the population is employed but still not making enough to feed their households.
“People are working, it’s not that they’re not working,” Muthiah said. “It’s that they are working jobs that are intermittent or pay minimum wage or less.”
The post-pandemic food insecure are also much less likely to be enrolled in government programs designed to help alleviate hunger. For example, before March 2020, 45 percent of the food bank’s clients were also enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP; in the post-pandemic landscape, only 16 percent of the food insecure population is enrolled in the same program.
“The report gives us some real basis for focusing on near terms actions that can be taken to support these communities in particular, as well as medium and longer term actions,” Muthiah said. “Our foodsourcing needs to be much more culturally familiar and appropriate.”