BRYSON CITY, North Carolina – What does food insecurity look like?
First, it’s often invisible, unless you’re paying attention. When you have enough, it’s easy not to notice when other people are hungry.
Also it’s pervasive, reaching every part of the country. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that food insecurity affected more than 37 million Americans in 2018 – more than 11% of all Americans, or about 1 in 9.
The USDA defines food insecurity in this way: lacking consistent access to enough food for a healthy, active life. In other words, food-insecure people don’t have enough money on a regular basis to afford the food their families need. Food insecurity is tied to economics, to inequality and to systemic public policy issues such as a lack of affordable housing, high medical costs, the adequacy of funding for addiction recovery and mental health care, low wages.
The Presbyterian Outlook is writing about food insecurity because Presbyterians and other people of faith are trying to do something about the problem in their communities – volunteering in soup kitchens and feeding programs; running food pantries in church basements; advocating for changes in public policy that will help low-income and vulnerable populations; stuffing food into backpacks at schools every Friday so hungry children will have something to eat over the weekend.
“It’s part of the calling,” said Bob Thomas, who coordinates the food pantry at Bryson City Presbyterian Church in North Carolina. “It’s what we’re commanded to do.”
This is also true: Some Presbyterians are currently or have been food insecure themselves. Or they will be, if they get sick or lose that next paycheck.
Some other realities:
The job. In many food insecure families, at least one adult is working – sometimes full-time, sometimes more than one job. But they don’t earn enough to feed the family.
The surprise. Sometimes people become food insecure through an unexpected life event – one bad something, such as the loss of a job, an illness or accident, a divorce, the death of a spouse or partner. For some, food insecurity is chronic. For others, it’s more episodic – a seesaw of up-and-down finances.
The choices. Sometimes, being food insecure means making hard choices: between eating, paying the rent, buying medicine, keeping the lights on. Being food insecure means constantly scrambling to pay the bills.
The subgroups. Some subpopulations are particularly hard hit by food insecurity. Among them:
- Senior citizens.
- Refugees and immigrants.
- People of color.
- College students.
- Minimum wage and food service workers.
- People in areas where the economy depends on tourism or employment is seasonal.
Ginny Bradford serves as chair of the Hunger Committee of the Presbytery of Western North Carolina – a committee that makes grants twice a year to both regional and international projects that are Presbyterian-related and focus on some aspect of hunger relief, from education to direct service.
Examples of those projects: an effort in Asheville, North Carolina, to collect unused food from restaurants and deliver it to homeless shelters, and an education program to teach clients of Sharing House in Transylvania County to learn to cook food on a budget.
The funding for the grants come from the presbytery’s “Nickel-A-Meal” program, in which Presbyterians are asked to set aside a nickel for each meal they eat (or $54.75 per person a year), and donate that to help address hunger needs in the community. At Bradford’s church, Brevard-Davidson River Presbyterian, children pass around galvanized pails during worship on the third Sunday of each month to collect the money. Last November, the Hunger Committee approved $60,400 in grants to 10 projects, one international and nine regional, all focused on hunger.
In the small towns that dot the Smoky Mountains, “we have a lot of people who are making minimum wage or less,” Bradford said. “They are working, but they still don’t have enough money to support their families. … A lot of industries have pulled out. We have a lot of people who are just struggling.”
In Bryson City, 65 miles or so west of Asheville, confronting food insecurity takes a lot of help. Early in 2019, Kathleen Burns started The Giving Spoon, a nonprofit that provides a hot meal once a week to anyone who needs it, in space she leases from Bryson City Presbyterian Church.
The church also provides space to the Bryson City Food Pantry, run by a coalition including Baptists, Catholics, Methodists and Presbyterians through the Swain County Ministerial Association. To get food at the pantry, people need a voucher from the social services agency or one of the local churches – some way of indicating they’re in need. Some of the reasons they give: on fixed income; disability; health issues; lost a job.
The pantry mostly distributes canned goods or nonperishable items such as rice, spaghetti sauce, peanut butter, cereal, flour and more. Thomas, who coordinates the food pantry, buys cans with pop-up lids whenever possible, because “some don’t even have a can opener.”
The first Wednesday of every month, Frank Monateri, a member of Bryson City Presbyterian, sets up a pop-up market outside the church, where people can take fresh produce and other food delivered by MANNA FoodBank. The market opens at 10 a.m., but often people line up by 7 a.m.
“It’s all fresh,” Monateri said – potatoes, onions, tomatoes, lettuce, bread, milk and more. “The only thing you need to do is show up.”
In Swain County, both the high levels of food insecurity and the generosity with which it’s addressed are indicative of the community’s character, these men said. Local high school students hold a food drive, for example. The local Food Lion store in nearby Cherokee asks people to donate food boxes for $5 – and often those donations are matched. Both individuals and local congregations give money.
“We have a very giving community,” Thomas said. “We’re poor folks, but giving folks. That’s the case in a lot of rural mountain areas.”
Thomas, who has lived in the area all his life, is a retired educator who taught for more than 40 years and still drives a school bus. “I know a lot of the people who come and the families from which they come,” he said. For some, “it’s kind of a generational situation. Grandparents didn’t work; they managed to survive. And this is kind of passed along.”
Affordable rental housing is scarce, and the economy is driven by tourism – with the draws including hiking, fishing, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Polar Express Train Ride, for which families wearing matching Christmas pajamas lined up just a few blocks from where The Giving Spoon was serving hot meals to the homeless.
Tourism means seasonal jobs. And “you’re going to see a lot of high-dollar houses because people have discovered our little spot in the universe,” Thomas said. “So people from Florida or Georgia – a lot are able to work from home, so they live in a gated community, which borders on land that has been in a family for generations. Basically people still living in a shanty. A stark contrast within a given cove or holler.”
The food pantry is open Tuesday evenings and Friday mornings.
This day, a young couple drove up in a navy sedan that was missing its front bumper and had plastic taped over where the driver’s side window was supposed to be. They said they were new in town. The woman carried a 19-month-old baby. The father spoke little, but as he elbowed open the pantry door, carrying a box of food out to his car, he looked over his shoulder and and told Thomas softly: “Thank you so much.”
Thomas keeps a notebook with a handwritten tally of those the pantry serves.
Another day, another name, another family in need.
