Deep Dive: Covid-19’s long-term impact on Wilmington-area food insecurity

WILMINGTON — Since the pandemic forced massive economic shutdowns in March, leaders of more than 40 food assistance agencies have held weekly internet conference meetings to address the rising demand among the groups they serve, and others who are seeking food assistance for the first time in their lives.

Sarah Daniels, a former director for Feast Down East who now runs her own food insecurity consultancy company, leads the meetings every Wednesday as head of the Cape Fear Food Council (CFCC).

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Two troubling trends have become apparent in the past two months, she said. First, a health crisis that has killed more than 100,000 Americans has further deepened underlying disparities of what is already a chronic issue in the Wilmington area. While the needs for school children were addressed relatively quickly, a group that has most often “fallen through the cracks,” according to Daniels, is low-income seniors who face a larger risk of contracting the coronavirus while using public transportation they rely on to shop for groceries.

Second, with about 955,000 North Carolinians applying for unemployment since mid-March, many people who have lost their jobs are now “having to make the choice between food versus other expenses,” according to Daniels.

“It’s both illuminated and deepened an existing crisis and added another layer of complexity to it,” Daniels said.

Beth Gaglione, the Wilmington branch director of the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, said she met a 65-year-old man through one of her partner agencies who mentioned that he hadn’t been jobless since he was eight years old.

“And it is hard for [people like him] to come forward and ask for the kind of help they need right now,” Gaglione said. “We’ve seen enormous increases in requests for support with food stamp applications at the Food Bank, to the degree that we’ve had to pull many, many staff off of what they normally do … to help with those efforts.”

To understand how the pandemic has exposed an issue that is not publicly discussed as often as it should be, according to Daniels, one must first see how it caused far-reaching disruptions to the national and local food supply chain.

Decreased demand meant less meat, dairy, produce

Empty meat shelves at the Harris Teeter on Oleander and Independence Blvd. on March 17, an hour after Governor Roy Cooper issued a statewide stay-at-home order. (Port City Daily photo/Mark Darrough)

Dr. Jill Waity is a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington who studies food insecurity. Nationally, she has observed dairy farmers dumping milk while vegetable and fruit farmers plow under healthy crops because the widespread closure of restaurants, hotels, and schools ravaged the food market.

Meat processing and packaging plants across the nation began suspending operations due to workers contracting the virus. In the Cape Fear region, even small meat processors faced severe bottlenecks. Juliann Janies of Red-Tailed Farm in Burgaw told WECT that she was “facing record high demands for my products and without getting my meat legally inspected and processed, packaged, I can’t get it to my customers.”

The pandemic’s agricultural impact was devastating in a region where farmers were hoping for their first full, healthy harvest year since Hurricane Florence, according to Cara Stretch from Feast Down East. 

“Florence hit in the fall of 2018, so that impacted their ability to grow in all of 2019 as well,” Stretch said.

On April 17, a month after North Carolina’s governor closed restaurants for dine-in service (along with many other businesses), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced it would purchase up to $3 billion in fresh produce, dairy, and meat products. By May 15, it said it would begin distributing family-sized boxes to banks and other nonprofits.

“That took longer than those of us who work in food insecurity were hoping … Farmers had been clamoring for someone to do something about this, so they didn’t have to waste their food,” Waity said.

According to Politico, industry leaders and lawmakers urged USDA to make the move in March, which they said acted far too slow in connecting the surplus with a surging demand that stemmed from the highest unemployment figures ever recorded.

Meanwhile, grocery stores began running out of meat, produce, toilet paper, and cleaning products as Americans rushed to gather food and supplies amid the uncertainty of how long stay-at-home orders would last, including stores in Wilmington. 

Gaglione said that before USDA stepped in, the Food Bank suffered from a lack of supply from its normal suppliers, mainly local grocery stores and distributors. 

“For weeks and weeks, [Sarah Daniels], myself and others in the community were getting calls from food distributors that were desperate to find a place, a home, for their food,” she said. “As much as they would’ve liked to donate it to food banks, Feast Down East, and anyone who would be willing to distribute it, they were struggling with the loss that they would take on that product.”

Although she has seen shortages of meat and produce in the past, she was surprised to see products like broccoli missing from the produce aisles of local grocery stores. She said her team has heard that such items — those that are traditionally accessible — will likely be scarce for the next 12 months.

“When they can’t get it, it’s a sure signal that others of us who are trying to access food for other reasons are having major difficulties accessing some of those items,” Gaglione said.

Walking out of one of the freezers at the Food Bank’s Wilmington distribution facility near South 16th Street, Operations Supervisor Greg Casaletto said that before the pandemic, they’d receive on average about 800 pounds of meat per day from local grocery stores.

“Now we get maybe 250 to 300 pounds [a day], somedays 40 to 50 pounds,” Casaletto said.

Although the USDA program has increased the supply of meat, he said many food assistance agencies are not qualified to receive it. 

‘Falling through the cracks’

In early April, shoppers leave the Walmart Supercenter near College and Market Road as others wait in line to enter. Local food insecurity experts say low-income elderly, immunocompromised, African American, and Latin communities are most exposed to the challenges of buying healthy food. (Port City Daily photo/Mark Darrough)

“One of the biggest concerns is: Who’s out there falling through the cracks who we don’t know about?” Daniels asked. 

Although the New York Times reported that only 15 percent of eligible children had received benefits approved by Congress to replace school meals by May 15, it said North Carolina was one of two southern states that acted quickly distributing funds. This was also true in Wilmington, according to Gaglione, but low-income elderly and immunocompromised communities did not receive the same attention.

“It seemed like the immediate response of our community was very heavily focused on children. And that was fantastic, but there didn’t seem to be a really strong coming together to help seniors in our community in any significant way,” Gaglione said.

Daniels has observed that the issue is compounded for senior citizens because much of the Covid-19 response is technology-dependent. 

“It’s one thing to ask a neighbor to get you groceries, but if you’re social distancing or don’t have people to rely on, using an app or an online ordering system — those challenges are very real,” Daniels said. 

She said many low-income seniors are forced to make a difficult decision: use public transportation like WAVE Transit bus routes to buy food, further exposing a vulnerable group to the risks of contracting the virus. On top of that, much of the food offered by food pantries are packaged in boxes and cans, difficult for older people to make meals from.

Stretch said safe food access for the disabled and immunocompromised population — including those of all ages with diabetes, cancer, and genetic immune deficiencies — had also been inadequately addressed by the community.

She believes the neighborhoods that Feast Down East has traditionally addressed already struggle with accessibility issues because transportation to a grocery store is a challenge.

“But now that people are out of work, it’s even harder. Not only are they struggling to get somewhere, but now they don’t have the money to pay for it either,” Stretch said.

She said the public transportation hurdle is particularly prevalent for those who live in the Wilmington Housing Authority communities located in ‘food deserts,’ defined by the USDA as low-access and low-income neighborhoods located at least one mile from a grocery store in urban areas and at least 10 miles away for rural communities. In these food deserts, at least 20 percent of the population live in poverty or their family income is less than 80 percent of the median income for their area.

The USDA identifies six food deserts in New Hanover County, one in Brunswick County, and one covering a large portion of western Pender County. (Port City Daily/Courtesy USDA Economic Research Service)

According to the USDA’s latest data, there are six food deserts in New Hanover County, two in Brunswick County, and one covering the western portion of Pender County. In early 2018, New Hanover County Manager Chris Coudriet estimated roughly 16,000 Wilmington residents live in a food desert.

Nick Pylypiw, director of data science for the Cape Fear Collective, said that number has risen to 26,170 Wilmington residents.

Stretch said that Latino communities like migrant farm workers in Pender County are also facing exacerbated challenges to food access because of the pandemic. This arises from a hesitation to access public assistance due to a lack of proper documentation, language barriers, transportation issues in rural areas, or not owning smartphones or computers to access information.

In addition, there are fewer relief agencies in rural areas due to the sparse geographic disbursement of a rural population.

The pandemic’s long-term effects

Volunteer Pam Whitlock loads a family food box with cereal, pepper, and other dry food items at the Food Bank in Wilmington on Wednesday. (Port City Daily photo/Mark Darrough)

The pandemic’s impact on vulnerable families will be long-lasting, just as it has been after recent hurricanes and the Great Recession, according to Dr. Waity. 

When she was researching the economic impact of the recession on food insecurity in 2012, four years after the government bailed out big banks, she found that food bank workers were still experiencing its lingering impacts.

“It’s really important for us to realize that, once this is over and they develop a vaccine and everything, there will be ripple effects with the economy and food insecurity,” Waity said. “This year was the first year the food insecurity rate finally dipped below the rate [that existed] before the recession in 2008. And now it’ll be back up again.”

Gaglione said the pandemic has created so much job loss, with so many employees let go or furloughed, those ripples could last for years. 

“Whether it’s six weeks of no work, eight weeks of no work, 12 weeks of no work, or just less work, when you’re trying to live on $25,000 a year and feeding four people, that is not easy to recover on,” Gaglione said.

For Daniels, the health crisis has forced organizations like the CFFC and Food Bank to put bandaids on the issue during a crisis, but in the long-term, community leaders need to evaluate the conditions that are creating these vulnerabilities. There needs to be more conversations around supporting small business and restructuring agriculture at the federal level “to make it a more fair game,” she said. 

She said public health experts in the community are doing well in highlighting Covid-19’s disproportionate impact on black people across the country. (A study by scientists at John Hopkins’ University, Emory University, and the University of Mississippi showed counties with large black populations accounted for 58 percent of coronavirus deaths nationally.)

Not only is food insecurity among low-income populations exacerbated by the health crisis, but the increasing disparities in access to healthy food in turn increases those populations’ vulnerabilities to Covid-19.

“We know that when folks are low-income and have other risk factors, that food insecurity is a contributing factor that can make people more vulnerable to a virus or add stress to their overall situation,” Daniels said.

Boxes of apples are loaded onto a truck at the Food Bank distribution facility in Wilmington, bound for a Leland-Navassa area nonprofit called Town Creek Vision. (Port City Daily photo/Mark Darrough)

[Read the story as published here.]