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Americans, who are forced to deal with ballooning inflation, have turned to food banks to feed their families. But these organizations are also struggling to keep up with demand due to soaring food prices and a fundraising slowdown.
Last month 25 million adult Americans said they did not have enough to eat in the previous seven days, The New York Times reported, citing data from the Census Bureau. The country has not reached such a high level since Christmas 2020.
The Biden administration celebrated last week’s consumer price index numbers that came in at 8.5 percent, which was lower than expected. The administration conveniently avoided talking too much about food and energy prices that remained at an annual rate of 5.9 percent. Producer price inflation came in at 9.8 percent for the 12 months ending in July.
The New York Post‘s editorial board wrote the number “ensures more future pain for consumers.”
The food at home category increased 13.1 percent over the last year, putting a strain on millions of Americans. Food prices are rising at the fastest pace in more than 43 years, according to economists.
These groceries include rice (12.7 percent), potatoes (13.3 percent), milk (15.6 percent), chicken (16.6 percent), eggs (38 percent).
The Urban Institute told the Times that a recent survey showed that one in five adults reported experiencing food insecurity in the past 30 days. Nearly 20 percent of these individuals have a job.
Wendy Osborne, the director of Tabatha’s Way, a food bank in Spanish Fork, Utah, told the paper that her charity normally caters to about 130 families each week, but that number has increased to above 200.
“There are more people who have jobs, they are working, they’re just not making enough,” she said.
She continued, “I repeatedly hear: ‘I’ve never had to use a food pantry. I’m the one who’s helped people, not the one who needed help.”
The food crisis is, of course, not isolated to Utah. The Des Moines Register reported that the Food Bank of Iowa is almost doubling its warehouse space to accommodate the growing demand.
Michelle Book, the CEO of the food bank, told the paper that the 50,000-square-foot facility was last updated in 2018 to triple its storage capacity and currently distributes 1.5 million pounds of food per month. She expects that number to increase to 2 million.
“Food Bank of Iowa is out of room,” Book said. “As the need for food assistance skyrockets, we can no longer make do with cramped space and unreliable off-site storage.”
The Food Research & Action Center said in a report that about 1 in every 12 homes in New Jersey suffered from some form of food insecurity from 2018 to 20.
Feeding America told the Times that about 65 percent of smaller frontline pantries reported an increase from May to June in the number of people coming for food. The problem is compounded because donations have slowed by about one-third since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak and pantries are also impacted by rising food prices.
In 2020, almost 14 million households in the U.S.—or about 10.5 percent of the population—did not have enough food to meet their family’s needs, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.
From 1 June to 13 June 2022, about 24 million households—including 11.6 million with children under the age of 18—reported that they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat during the week, according to American Progress. (See “SPOTLIGHT ON INFLATION.”)
TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal has long reported on how COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates have done incalculable harm on the economy and livelihoods of billions across the globe… what is happening in America is “non-essential” when compared to third world nation’s poverty levels.
And rather than cleaning up the Streets, helping the homeless or rebuilding America’s rotting infrastructure, the Washington, D.C., crime syndicate instead focuses on funding the industrial military complex and Ukraine’s losing war against Russia. (See “BIDEN WARNS AMERICANS HIS SANCTIONS WILL HURT RUSSIA…AND AMERICANS. WRONG ABOUT WHO’LL WIN THE UKRAINE WAR?”)
The Biden administration has tried to assign inflation blame on Russian President Vladimir Putin and since the beginning of the war has said, “Democrats didn’t cause this problem. Vladimir Putin did.” When gas prices were soaring, he called it “Putin’s gas tax.”
In response to Biden’s claim, Putin said, “Supplies of Russian oil, say, to [the] American market do not exceed 3 percent. This is a negligible amount. We have absolutely nothing to do with it. They just hide behind these decisions in order to deceive once again their own population.
The UN announced that in a worst-case scenario, global food prices could rise by an additional 8.5 percent in five years.