Two stark images speak to the current crisis facing America’s food system: The long lines of people in cars waiting at food banks across the country and the farmers plowing under tons of unharvested crops and euthanizing livestock in the millions.
The most modern food system in the world is in serious disarray. Supply is not the problem; purchasing power is. Demand in the commercial food-supply chain is collapsing because people have stopped going to restaurants. Those who have lost their jobs during the pandemic are swelling food lines because they can no longer afford to buy food.
As we have repeatedly seen in the last few months, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed and exacerbated the nation’s systemic inequities — including the true nature of hunger in America.
Even before the health crisis, Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief program, provided food to some 46.5 million Americans (about 14 percent of the population) every week, including 12 million children and 7 million seniors. Hundreds of smaller local nonprofits also pitched in with food donations for those in need.
What’s new is that those receiving this aid are no longer just the invisible immigrants, elderly, homeless, and working poor. They are our neighbors: a dental assistant single mother of two, a web-designer father of four, a lawyer, and a nonprofit executive, all jobless and lacking health insurance during a pandemic.
Since the health crisis began, 17.4 percent of mothers with children 12 and under report that they cannot afford to feed their children — nearly four and a half times higher than in 2018. As a result of job loss during the pandemic, nearly 27 million people may no longer have employer-provided health insurance. Without income and insurance, families lack the ability to protect their families from either hunger or disease.
Philanthropy Alone Is Not Enough
America’s food system works well for those who can afford it, but it consistently fails large segments of the population, including those who work two or three jobs to make ends meet or live on fixed incomes. Many reside in food deserts where healthy food is scarce, and a federally funded lunch may be the main meal of the day for children. A food bank may not operate in their community, leaving provisions provided by a local church their only option. For these Americans, this is not a system, but a sketchy patchwork of philanthropic programs held together with spit and baling wire.
Today that philanthropic patchwork is stretched to its limits and our “world class” market-based food system, lacking demand, is imploding. Feeding America relies on the excess production and surplus of that same food system to secure the dried and canned foods it donates to families every week. As that system contracts, those surpluses will evaporate. There won’t be enough free food in the supply chain to meet the exploding demand during the pandemic. And there are not enough church basements in this country to make up the difference.
How to Nourish a Nation
Reversing this food-security death spiral will require bold action by government, business, and nonprofits. The good news is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is starting to increase assistance. It recently announced $2 billion in new funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, $850 million in emergency food assistance, and $470 million for food banks.
But these efforts are funded only through June 30 and don’t go nearly far enough. Greater investment will be required through 2020 and into 2021. SNAP benefits need to be increased, work requirements for certain benefits lifted, and unemployment benefits boosted to enable families to purchase food through retail markets.
Nonprofits, nationally and regionally, must play an important role in extending the reach of the emergency food-bank systems by promoting massive food rescue of fresh produce and nonperishables from retailers, farms, and food processors.
And perhaps more importantly, foundations, think tanks, and nonprofits need to come together to create a social contract for food security in America that can be central to a massive Covid-19 recovery endeavor. This social contract must recognize access to affordable food as a basic human right and ensure that Americans will no longer suffer the vulnerability of sustaining their families on handouts and soup kitchens. The richest country in the world with a superabundance of food is capable of building the infrastructure to feed its citizens with dignity and without stigma.
We saw what well-led big government programs could do in the 1930s and 1940s to rebuild an economy and win a war and go on to build the golden age of capitalism in the 1950s. Government of that era gave dignity and sustenance to millions of destitute American families. This pandemic should be a moment of reckoning for all Americans, a moment to build the social and political institutions that might once again nourish the nation.
