Marie Smith and her husband Fred (not their real names) are not bringing in enough money to make ends meet. After paying their mortgage and other bills, the couple, who are in their early 40s, barely have enough money to feed themselves and their two young children. They have maxed out credit cards to buy food, took out a consolidation loan, paid off the cards and maxed them out again. Six months ago, Marie stepped into a food pantry for the first time. “I felt horrible,” she says. “I feel that I failed myself. I don’t think of myself as better than anyone else, but I looked around and never thought that I would be there.”
Erika Beek is a 32-year-old single mother who was diagnosed with cancer and is currently on disability. Her monthly check barely covers her rent, so feeding herself and her 15-year-old son is a challenge. While Beek admits that she has an understanding landlord and friends and family who occasionally pitch in, she still needs the food pantries to subsidize what minimal food she can afford. “A lot of people blame situations like mine on being lazy and not working, but they don’t understand unless they’ve been in this situation where they get cancer and can’t work,” says Beek. “It’s not like somebody just financially takes over for you and pays all your bills and buys your groceries.”
According to United Way, 41 million Americans worry about where their next meal is coming from and struggle to afford three meals a day. Here in the Hudson Valley, Smith and Beek are just two examples of residents who are food insecure. Among all households served by the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley‘s emergency feeding programs, 76 percent are food insecure, meaning they do not know where they will find their next meal and 44 percent experience hunger, meaning they are without a source of food.
“It’s not an issue of not being able to get and hold a job,” says Renee Fillette-Miccio, PhD, executive director of Dutchess Outreach. “It’s an issue of making enough money at that job to cover your living expenses and also having access to the food that you need.”
According to Dutchess Outreach, the three least severe conditions that would result in a household being classified as food insecure are: they worried whether their food would run out before they got money to buy more; the food they bought didn’t last, and they didn’t have money to get more; they couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals.
“I hate canned soup and I’m eating it sometimes because it’s all we have and my husband has skipped meals and just eaten peanut butter and jelly for two weeks straight,” says Smith.
Inflation and Food Prices Eating into Budgets
Dozens of organizations in the region are working to alleviate food insecurity, but three years post-pandemic, Hudson Valley residents are struggling more now than ever before.
“At the end of 2019, we were serving 16 million pounds of food per year through our agencies, such as food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens and schools,” says Sara Gunn, director of the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley. “In 2020, that need went up to 22 million pounds of food, which we attributed to the pandemic and then things settled down a bit. But inflation and food prices went up and the need has remained relatively steady.”
In Columbia County, 11.5 percent of the county’s 60,000 residents struggle with food insecurity. To help, Carole Clark, a former restaurant owner and chef, founded Columbia County Recovery Kitchen at the beginning of the pandemic with two additional chefs and the use of a church kitchen. They receive referrals of those in need from the Department of Social Services and school counselors or programs like HeadStart who identify children who aren’t getting enough to eat.
“Friends drove around Columbia County leaving food at doors because it had to be contactless, but we’ve maintained that service for people who can’t come to the door or have certain physical and mental problems, says Clark.
And it’s a service that even more people in Columbia County are using today. “During Covid, there were federal programs that gave financial assistance, but post-Covid the government eliminated them,” explains Clark. “So people now have less money than they had during the pandemic. With the loss of financial assistance, plus the escalating costs of food, they have no choice but to go to food pantries.”
Clark’s connections with local farms allows her organization to bring food to those in need up to four times per week. “The people who get the most deliveries are the homeless because because they’re living in motels or don’t have kitchen facilities,” she says.
Today Columbia County Recovery Kitchen has two chefs on staff and approximately 15 volunteer cooks as well as 60 volunteer drivers. She does see first-hand the positive impact that her organization has had. “We had one family whose situation was very dire and we helped, and eight months later they sent us a check thanking us because they were able to sustain themselves,” she says. “Lives do change and people are no longer dependent, but for many there’s no hope.”
Why Haven’t Things Gotten Better?
“You would think that after the pandemic, things would even out, but in 2022, we gave out 1.37 million meals and this year that number is probably closer to 1.5 million,” says Christine Hein, executive director of People’s Place in Kingston, a food pantry, thrift store, and community cafe serving Ulster County since 1972.
Hein explains that the majority of people who use their services are either unemployed, working multiple jobs, or retired. “They should be living out their golden years, but instead, they can’t afford to stay in their house and put food on their table,” says Hein. “The prices of everything have skyrocketed, but wages have not gone up proportionately, especially for food service workers.”
Remember when eggs were almost $7 a dozen? While they have come down in price, grocery bills are still going to remain high for several years. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food prices are expected to grow more slowly in 2023 than in 2022 but still at above historical-average rates. In 2023, all food prices are predicted to increase 5.8 percent, with a prediction interval of 5.7 to 6.0 percent.
Hudson Valley residents can’t stretch the same amount of their money as far as they used to, so food pantries are a lifesaver for some residents. Unfortunately, getting food at the pantry itself can also be a struggle. “It almost feels cutthroat,” says Smith, a Poughkeepsie resident. “If you don’t get there two hours early, then the good stuff is gone because people stuff their pockets. At other pantries, the racks are bare.”
Beek, a resident of Cairo in Greene County, sympathizes with Smith’s difficulties at the food pantries. “Our local community action did farm stand Tuesdays, but you needed to get in line an hour early and it’s take-as-much-as-you-need, so people would leave with bags full,” explains Beek. “Even if there were only 20 people in line and you are at the back, when you get up there, there is nothing left.”
Looking Toward the Future
To try and feed even more residents, the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley has launched a $22.5 million capital campaign to construct a new 40,000 square-foot state-of-the-art distribution center in Montgomery. Their current facility in Cornwall-on-Hudson can no longer handle the growing demand. The new building will provide increased capacity to obtain, sort, store, and distribute food donations in the region and continue to serve Orange, Ulster, Sullivan, Rockland, Dutchess and Putnam counties.
Filette-Miccio says that Dutchess Outreach is also working toward the future. “We’re asking county executives to support the formation of a multidisciplinary food security council to solve the issues of food access with the most creative minds at the table, including people who have lived experience with food insecurity,” she says.
She also hopes to solve what’s called the ‘last-mile’ problem. “It’s about eliminating barriers to help people get access to that food,” she says. “We have to pay someone or get a volunteer to rescue food and get it to the pantry, but that still doesn’t get it to the person’s house.”
This is vital to help those who can’t get to the pantry or for those who may work during traditional pantry hours.
“I’d also love to leverage our resources in Dutchess County to get state and federal funding and help solve our problems of poverty and to help simply purchase local food,” says Filette-Miccio.
People’s Place offers patrons a Wellness Empowerment Center and nutrition education as well as exercise, yoga, meditation, and financial education classes. “They learn how to make their food, whether they get it here or at the grocery store, go further,” says Hein. “We hope to take some of the stressors of everyday life off of them.”
Looking forward, Gunn says food security needs to be on everybody’s mind. “We are studying what more we can do with our board of directors, but it’s going to take everybody to ultimately address the problem of food insecurity,” says Gunn.
Smith tries to keep a sense of humor and hope about her situation. “I just have to keep pushing forward but it’s difficult,” she says.
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This is important reporting, thank you. Though the issue of income inequality and low wages isn’t addressed directly. Inflated prices due to corporate and landlord greed, among other factors, is outstripping people’s incomes. It would be great to see follow up reporting on the problem of low pay in the Hudson Valley and all the woes that follow from that.
You have to be there every week even when you don’t feel well. If you miss a week you could also run out of food. Pantries don’t usually give butter or flour but if people had these basics they could learn to make pie crusts or basic foods and it can stretch it out further. Personally , my husband and i have lost a lot of weight and have gotten more sick than we would otherwise from our bodies becoming weaker. It’s horrible. We went from high income earnings to nothing quickly…and now we can’t even afford butter.
We do a free vegan food program called The Happy Cart (happyvegancart.org) every Wednesday in the warmer months in Kingston NY in collaboration with People’s Place in Kingston NY. Because vegan food addresses a lot of growing concerns (health issues caused by the 65-75% of people, particularly people of color, who have food allergies to things like dairy), climate crisis issues caused by harmful and outdated farming practices such as addressing better land use for protein sources, and also the growing concern for animal welfare) creating food aid programs that don’t continue to exacerbate broken food system issues is critical. We have served thousands of free meals in the three years since The Happy Cart program was introduced and we have found there is a huge interest and demand for this (serving up not just food but education that empowers us to make better choices that impact us as a community.) We really could use support but find the larger programs get tons of funding while the smaller community-led initiatives do not get support. We do this all on our own dime. Hoping this comment here can help people learn about this kind of local, Hudson Valley-based program and others like us!