Searching for an end to food lines
The Great Depression was nine decades ago, long enough that it is routinely shorthanded into ashen images of people waiting in long lines for food. Our current crisis never earned a handle with the same resonance, though “COVID-19” seems fitting for the modern age with its caps and numbers, like a soulless wireless password.
The Great Depression lasted for almost a decade, starting in 1929. As the longest economic slump in U.S. history, it was recognized as being over when the food lines shortened.
Someday, reflections on the pandemic may conjure images of serpentine waits to receive vaccines. These lines are not limited to the impoverished, but no one needs to be in it more than twice.
Meanwhile, other lines can be overlooked. They are as relentless as the ones of the 1930s, but move with more anonymity because most of the recipients wait in cars.
The food line in Connecticut stretches back 14 months, and we still can’t see the end of it.
Cars wait in queues in Connecticut’s cities five days a week for packages of free food to be placed in trunks. It was at its longest a year ago when jobs vanished and the world shuttered. Some popup food banks have vanished, but the stubborn need has remained steady in 2021. Part of the problem is that many people with lowpaying jobs now earn even less.
Nancy Coughlin, the head of Person-to-Person, which serves Stamford, Norwalk, Darien, New Canaan, Weston, Wilton and Westport, told the CTMirror “the demand never went back down, it just sort of stopped increasing.”
“Until those jobs come back, they’re going to continue to be hard hit ... People are in so much debt and there was such a small safety net for so many of them before the pandemic that it’s going to take them a long time to dig out ... . ”
A revival of primitive methods of the Great Depression, however, has experts contemplating better ways to feed the hungry. In typical times, clients are offered the dignity of choosing items at permanent and mobile pantries. As Connecticut Food Bank/Foodshare President Jason Jakubowski said, “Obviously, lines of cars and putting boxes in cars is not the way of solving hunger.” Alternatives are less obvious. Experts continue to struggle to contextualize the relatively flat percentage of the population participating in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly referred to as “food stamps.”
Part of that may be due to the paperwork that SNAP mandates. There’s also the likelihood that many potential clients were scared off by former President Donald Trump’s threats to deny citizenship for SNAP recipients.
SNAP debit cards remain preferable to food lines. But the lines do serve a secondary purpose. They illustrate the scope of the problem, of the need to continue to make donations and to pursue innovative solutions such as urban farming.
And they prove that the lines of the Great Depression are really a circle.
The food line in Connecticut stretches back 14 months, and we still can’t see the end of it.