More than half of the shelves at the Atlanta Community Food Bank are bare, in part because of supply-chain issues, but mostly because demand for food assistance is as high as it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, the nonprofit’s executives said. They said two in five people seeking food assistance in the Atlanta region this year have not done so before.
“Food banks have been around for 50 years, but this is the first time we are seeing unprecedented high food demand combined with historically low unemployment rates,” said Vince Hall, chief government relations officer for Feeding America, which supports 60,000 food pantries. “The fact that we have a lot of first time users who are no longer concerned about the stigma of going to a food pantry – and actually see value in it because they can no longer afford retail food – is a reasonable proxy for the health of the economy and consumers,” Lowrey said.
“What’s happening now reveals the scope, scale and pervasiveness of food insecurity in this country and the effects of inequality, not just more recently from inflation, but the inability of wages to keep up with the cost of living,” McKee said.A complicating factor: the issue of government food assistance has become entangled in the debate among lawmakers about whether to raise the country’s borrowing limit.
As temporary COVID-era supplements to SNAP have ceased, food banks from Georgia to Colorado to Virginia say demand for their services has grown. The Highland Food Pantry in Winchester, Virginia, said it served about 90 families a week during the pandemic. This month, it’s serving about 135. Among the new clients is Haywood Newman, a 47-year-old handyman, who made it through COVID without assistance but says he’s struggling now.