More americans turning to food banks to survive pandemic
The pandemic has exposed the fragile nature of success for millions of Americans: material markers of outward stability, if not prosperity, but next to nothing to fall back on when times get tough.
In conversations around the country this August — at kitchen tables, in living rooms and in cars during slow-moving food lines with rambunctious children in the back — Americans reflected on their new reality. The shame and embarrassment. The loss of choice in something as basic as what to eat. The worry over how to make sure their children get a healthy diet. The fear that their lives will never get back on track.
There was the family in Jackson, Miss., that relied on a local food bank over the summer, even though before the pandemic they had been making almost six figures a year. That is a nice living in a place like Jackson, and it got them a house in the leafy Belhaven neighborhood, a Chevy Suburban and beach vacations to Florida.
Or the single mother in Tennessee who had finally pushed her way into the middle class with a job that paid enough to send her oldest daughter to private school, only to find herself accepting food from charity.
Ms. Cazimero, 40, faced her new financial circumstances with as much equanimity as determination, even as it shook her sense of what it meant to have made it. Before the pandemic, she was a hair stylist at a salon owned by her mother-in-law that would shut down in accordance with California’s coronavirus rules. She also ran her own events business, which had been “rocking and rolling” after a lucrative holiday season decking out car dealerships for Christmas. Her husband, Adam, saw far fewer people come into the local Ford dealership where he works, and his commissions have plummeted.
These days she has become an armchair therapist to friends who feel ashamed at not being able to afford enough food; a logistics specialist in how she navigates the schedules of all the pantries in San Diego County; and a food procurer and distributor to the needy, even as she is needy herself.
“Before, I always helped out,” she said. “But I wasn’t the one who needed it. Now I need it.”
After making her rounds, Ms. Cazimero returned to her modest house in a development studding a hillside, and separated out what will go to her family, and what she will give away to neighbors and others. Over Facebook and text message groups, informal barter networks have sprouted among needy families. “You have toilet paper? Let’s trade,” she said.
She reminds them they are not the only ones. “Dude,” she said, “none of us can because we can’t work.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/food-pantries-hunger-us.html
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