Important Takeaways:
- 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.
- “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
- 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.
- “Increasingly, those who are food insecure are middle income and more highly educated,” said Radha Muthiah, chief executive officer of Capital Area Food Bank. “We don’t suffer from people not being employed.”
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