Working Americans Turn to Food Banks as Fed Inflation Battle Drags On
(Bloomberg) — Once a month, Kersstin Eshak visits a food pantry in Loudoun County, Virginia to stretch her family’s budget.
Eshak’s husband works at a big box retailer. She works as a substitute teacher. They have income, but with prices up nearly 23% over the past five years — and still rising — their earnings just don’t stretch quite far enough some months.
Food banks across the nation are seeing a similar story: A post-pandemic wave of demand for food driven by working people caught in America’s cost-of-living crunch.
“This is a new era of food insecurity,” said Emily Engelhard, vice president of research at Feeding America, the largest US hunger relief organization. “This isn’t an unemployment issue.”
As prices have risen, so have the share of Americans reporting they don’t have enough to eat. And despite robust economic growth and historically low unemployment, those figures have remained elevated in 2024, US Census data show.
The rise in hunger highlights what’s at stake in the sharp-edged choice Federal Reserve officials must make in the coming months. If they keep interest rates elevated to push down inflation, they potentially risk a further cooling of the jobs market, including slower wage growth and higher unemployment. If they cut rates too much in an effort to support hiring and boost workers’ paychecks, they risk inflation remaining stubbornly high.
Policymakers are expected to hold rates steady when they meet this week and have signaled they may not lower borrowing costs again for a while — at least until they see signs that inflation progress has resumed.
“Everyone sees prices getting high — for food, clothes, everything,” Eshak said in an interview at a food pantry run by Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington. The assistance allows her to budget for other purchases, she said, like clothing for her three children.
The Flagstaff Family Food Center in Arizona broke records in 2022 serving nearly 28,000 meals per month on average. At first it was exhilarating, said Ethan Amos, the food bank’s president. Then it was exhausting. “We expected things to slow down,” he said.
It never did. The food bank is now serving more than 40,000 meals per month, using the same equipment and space it had in 2015 when it served 127,000 meals for the entire year.
On the other side of the country, Capital Area Food Bank distributed 64 million meals last fiscal year in Washington and the neighboring areas — five million more than the prior year. Their research shows the sharpest increases in food insecurity in the area were in households earning about $100,000-$150,000.