The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Images of miles-long lines of cars waiting hours to receive free food have become powerful symbols of the economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. They also show a flawed response to a longstanding problem, hunger relief advocates say.
“We’re never going to meet the unmet need by throwing more and more food box distributions at it,” said Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont.
Recent food distribution events have seen the launch of a new federal program, called Farmers to Families, that aims to connect local producers to people in need. But at the first event earlier this month in Berlin, hundreds of people went home empty handed.
Horton said those federal resources could have been better put towards expanding existing food assistance programs. Mass distribution events are “an insane way to take care of one of people’s most basic human needs that we all have,” she said, “when we could have just put that money into the SNAP program and expanded who can access benefits.”
Advocates say that while the need right now is acute — food insecurity in Vermont has gone up 50% during the crisis, by one estimate — there’s a sizable number of Vermonters who were facing food insecurity before Covid-19.
The state is working to streamline hunger relief efforts, which are currently handled by a patchwork of nonprofit and government entities. But advocates are calling on state officials to move more aggressively to address the problem and fund solutions.
**Podcast transcript**
This week: tens of thousands of Vermonters have lined up to receive food assistance during the Covid-19 pandemic. But those on the front lines of hunger relief say that feeding the massive number of people in need is going to require more than just meal giveaways.
Last Friday, the Vermont Foodbank and the Vermont National Guard took over the state airport in Berlin to hand out food.
Guard members moved pallets of milk crates and produce boxes around the tarmac. Drivers pulled up with their trunks open, soldiers loaded them up with about 50 pounds of food apiece, and then sent them away.
This was the first distribution event where families received fresh food instead of the military-style meals ready to eat, or MREs. Jason Maring from the Vermont Foodbank said this was part of a new federal program to connect local producers and distributors with people in need.
Jason Maring: We transitioned from MREs to more of a nonperishable food box, which is provided by FEMA, and then the USDA has provided the fresh food boxes.
There were boxes of Cabot cheese, and vegetables from Black River Produce. But the most striking aspect of the event was the lines. About 2,000 cars showed up to the site. They lined two runways, doubling back multiple times, and then stretched for miles along the road leading to the entrance. People waited for hours.
Driver: I’ve been waiting for about an hour. I may just cut out of line.
The fresh food ran out midway through the event. And about four hours in, they closed the site. Hundreds of people went home empty handed. One of them was Rebecca Vickery.
Rebecca Vickery: Hi, this is Rebecca.
Hi Rebecca. My name is Elizabeth Gribkoff…
Our reporter Elizabeth Gribkoff caught up with her after the event.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: So Rebecca Vickery, she’s a mother who lives in Essex. She has six kids in her care, including two foster children. Rebecca has her own voiceover business. She also previously had worked as a worship director but was laid off — prior to the pandemic, but not too long ago.
My impression was that Rebecca, like a lot of other Vermonters, has a lot of different strategies that she’ll use to ensure that her family is adequately fed. Of course that includes going to the grocery store, but she was saying something that’s been challenging lately is that prices of food have started to go up in stores, especially on items like meat.
Things aren’t always available. And she was saying, typically I like to try to shop sales, but at this point it’s kind of like you have to take what you can get.
Rebecca Vickery: It’s harder to find some things like in the store that you would normally be able to find affordably. Costco for example, has limits on the amount of food that you can purchase. And right now, I have six children in my care. Two of them are foster children. And so we’re in a family of eight, and you tell us that we can buy the same amount of food as a family of two? It doesn’t make sense.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: So she’s been supplementing that with going to different food pantry things.
Rebecca Vickery: There’s now some free meal programs like Mark’s Barbecue in Essex, Vermont, and the Skinny Pancake does, they call them, ShiftMeals. They do Tuesdays and Fridays. And I was picking up meals for some people from both of those.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: She had been one of the many people who were waiting to get food at the Berlin airport. And like a lot of other people, she ended up leaving.
Rebecca Vickery: The event closed like an hour and a half earlier, and so they had been telling us there was nothing left, but then obviously there was, because people were still waiting in the line. So it was like, I don’t want to go until they’re like officially, “no, you’re done.” Because we were picking up food for three other families as well.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: She said, Oh, it was a nice day. I didn’t mind waiting. But obviously leaving without any food, especially having driven from Essex over to Berlin, I think that was definitely a frustrating experience. It took a lot of time to get there, and I think to have waited to be trying to get food was hard.
Rebecca Vickery: It was a beautiful day, and we were surrounded by people. And it kind of felt, like, normal-ish. Except for, the scope of it was the most breathtakingly — I don’t know. I’m a word person, and I don’t even have the words. Because looking at the line of people coming from both directions, I have never seen a line like that in my entire life for anything. And it was just breathtaking. Because it was like, there are so many people here, and they wouldn’t be waiting in a line like that if they did not feel such desperation to feed their families.
I was there on Friday. I saw the lines, I saw people waiting in their cars. And we’ve been seeing scenes like this both around Vermont at other meal distributions and around the country, and it’s feeling like this very powerful symbol, all these people lined up for food. Do we have a sense of how severe the problem actually is?
Elizabeth Gribkoff: We do, and we don’t, I guess, if that makes sense. Vermont Foodbank told me that during April, they served 83% more food than they do in a normal month. So that’s an incredibly drastic amount.
And I spoke with this researcher at UVM, Dr. Meredith Niles. She and some other researchers had completed a survey kind of toward the beginning of the pandemic, like end of March/early April, about food insecurity in Vermont. And they found from that survey, there’s about a third more Vermonters experiencing food insecurity right now.
Meredith Niles: There is a high level of, percentage of, people who are consistently food insecure. So they were food insecure prior to Covid and stayed food insecure. Then there is a sizable — about a third of those people aren’t usually food insecure, meaning they were not food insecure in the year prior to Covid, but they are since the Covid outbreak. And that is significantly associated with job disruption and job loss.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: She also did point out, they’re doing some followup work on that. Because she pointed out that that would have been before a lot of people maybe would have gotten unemployment benefits and things like that. So they’re curious, to what extent did receiving those benefits impact food security?
Of course, we’ve also reported on how for many, there’s some people who still haven’t gotten those benefits. So that’s just something they’re trying to get a better understanding of. What are the levels of food insecurity right now in Vermont?
What do we do about that? When you talk to advocates, and people who work in hunger relief, what do they think is the best way forward here?
Elizabeth Gribkoff: I spoke with Anore Horton, who’s the executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, and something she was stressing was that efforts like that mass food distribution event in Berlin are not really a long term, or more sustainable, way to address this problem. And of course, also, we got tons of emails from readers who said they weren’t able to get food at that. So it’s certainly addressed acute needs for some people, but also clearly there were other people for whom it didn’t.
Anore Horton: Look, we have a structural problem. This is a longstanding problem that the coronavirus is throwing into sharper relief. But we’re never going to meet the unmet need by throwing more and more food box distributions at it. I mean, that’s not a long term solution. It’s not a sustainable solution. It’s an incredibly inefficient, undignified and expensive approach.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: That was federally funded. And she was saying a much better way to address this would be to have, say, an increase in SNAP benefits, so that people can go out and buy their own food, instead of having to drive and wait hours and hours to maybe get a box of food.
Anore Horton: This program is a travesty. USDA and our federal government and our federal administration chose to create a brand new, billions-of-dollars program that requires private food distribution companies to build boxes of food with specific items and then get those boxes into people’s hands through this complicated distribution system, that in Vermont involves us also paying the Vermont National Guard to do that. And then ask people who need food resources to go get in line in their cars and wait for four or five hours waiting to get food.
I mean, it’s insane. It’s an insane way to take care of one of people’s most basic human needs that we all have, when we could have just put that money into the SNAP program and expanded who can access benefits. And people could have gotten a card and gone to their local grocery store and picked out their items whenever it was convenient for them to do so.
I know there have also been these programs to distribute more meals through schools. What role does that play in this conversation?
Elizabeth Gribkoff: I think the school meal distribution plays a really important role. Because families with children are actually, and this is before the pandemic, are more likely to be food insecure. And of course for a lot of families — Meredith Niles from UVM was saying they found that people are already starting to cut back on how much they’re eating to ensure that their families are fed. So obviously if people can make sure that their kids at least have breakfast and lunch every day, that’s a huge, huge help.
There’s been free meals in schools programs before this, but they were only available to students whose families make at or below a certain income level. Whereas now there’s federal funding to have those available for any kids and teenagers 18 and under. So they don’t even have to be enrolled in a school, which advocates know, think is a good thing.
One area of concern is that, Anore Horton from Hunger Free Vermont was saying that there’s been areas where school districts that have busing, so they’re able to actually bus those meals out to families, are seeing a greater uptick in families getting those free meals, as opposed to districts where the parents or someone has to go and pick up the meals during the day.
Anore Horton: So that program has no funding in it, no extra money in it, for transportation. So that’s always been a limit on how many kids we can reach with summer meals in Vermont. Because in a lot of places in Vermont, in a normal summer, you either need to get the food to the kids or the kids to the food. But somehow you’ve got to transport one or the other, right? And there’s no money for that, right?
Those school buses stopped running at the end of the school year, in the places that even have buses. And then there’s no transportation funding. So that can’t happen this summer, or we’re going to have a really serious crisis of child and family hunger in our state. I mean, the fact that the school meal programs are operating right now and serving thousands and thousands and thousands of meals every day is why we’re not having daily long lines outside of our food shelves in our towns.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: So they’re hoping that, over the summer, they want to make sure that there’s continued funding from the state to keep busing meals to kids. She was saying, which I thought was fitting, you’ve got to either get the kids to the meals or the meals to the kids. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. Normally, before the pandemic, kids would be in school and they’d be getting the meals there. I think the transportation aspect of that, and the distribution, it’s a really important part to make that program as successful as it could be.
This week you went up to Burlington to see how the school meal distribution worked. What did you see?
Elizabeth Gribkoff: I got there at Burlington High School at 7 a.m. Had some flashbacks of arriving in high school, except there’s almost no one there, obviously, so it’s a little different. But yeah, I went in and met with Pat Teague, who’s the executive chef at the Burlington Food Project, which provides meals for kids at the 14 schools in Burlington.
Pat Teague: Here, you’re going to see tons of food just start to pile up on these carts…
Elizabeth Gribkoff: It was interesting to see how it was working. Because they’re not doing — I would sort of picture in the past, big, I don’t know, vats of chili, maybe heating up hamburgers or something like that going on at a school meals prep program. But this instead was, there was a lot of fresh food, they were cutting up cucumbers in one room. A lot of it in the morning, they take lunches and breakfast that have been bagged and put out the previous days, put them in boxes and then load them onto vans that go out in the morning for distribution at sites around Burlington.
Pat Teague: We make our own chicken salad, you’ve got a bun, Goldfish…
Elizabeth Gribkoff: After that, they go back and will be boxing up sandwiches and apples and all these lunches and breakfasts. That was something that Pat kept saying was, there’s just so many numbers and so much planning. Because now they’re doing everything like that, take out, and it has to be packaged in a certain way. And that’s very different than what they were doing beforehand.
Pat Teague: Wednesday would be say, 2000, Thursday another 500…
Elizabeth Gribkoff: One thing that’s been a big change is that now, I think there’s like 45 staff members that used to of course be spread out at schools around Burlington. And now they have shifts of 10 that will come in for two week intervals, and they’re way more spread out. They’re all now in one high school. It seems like they’ve got, at this point, got the system worked out pretty well, but I definitely think from what Pat kept saying, there’s lots of numbers in these huge spreadsheets and everything. It’s pretty intense.
It seems like there’s a really obvious need here. I’m wondering what we’ve heard so far from state government about what they’re doing to address it.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: Well, they’ve definitely been — the Agency of Education certainly has been coordinating the school meal efforts, which of course play a big role in this. But actually, advocates are saying that they think that the state needs to step up and do more to be addressing food security right now.
Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, actually recently came out with this over $50 million food security proposal from the state. So they just feel like this hasn’t been perhaps as front burner in the state’s crisis response as it should be.
At a press conference this week, VTDigger asked Governor Scott about this, and he certainly expressed concerns about long lines at places like that Berlin mass distribution, and said this is something they’re kind of looking into more, but didn’t really provide a lot of specifics.
Gov. Phil Scott: Yeah, this is a great concern to me. Obviously what we saw last week at one of the points where there were long lines at some of the food centers. I’ve asked [Human Services] Secretary Smith to take a look at the Meals on Wheels program to see how much new activity is there, as well as with the Vermont Foodbank, so that we can do an assessment of the need, as well as what we can do in the future to provide for those in need. And to encourage those who may be in need, but haven’t utilized the services to reach out to us so that we can help.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: The state does have this, it’s called a mass feeding program. It’s something that they’re submitting to FEMA, and a lot of it has to do with supporting or ramping up existing efforts, like supporting the Foodbank’s increased work and making sure the free school meals program continues. And sort of coordinating a little bit more of a statewide response to this.
So organizations like the Foodbank, which of course has drastically increased the amount of food it’s distributing, they’re saying, “we’re not really meant to be all of a sudden serving this much more food.” You know, “we don’t necessarily have the capacity or the means to be doing this long term. That’s not exactly our role.”
They see these food distribution events as kind of an emergency solution. What happens next? Like, as we look towards a potentially lengthy economic downturn, what do advocates see happening six months from now, a year from now?
Elizabeth Gribkoff: Well, something that really stuck with me was when I was talking with Meredith Niles from UVM, she was saying that food insecurity levels, not surprisingly, had gone up around 2008 during the great recession. But they stayed elevated for years after that, which kind of makes sense if you think about the long term economic recovery.
That’s something that I think I hadn’t maybe appreciated: the extent to which this could be going on for years. It’s maybe not just an acute problem. So kind of given that, Anore Horton from Hunger Free Vermont was saying that food is something — if families are on a really tight budget, and especially if they see a sudden significant decline in their budget from someone becoming unemployed — that’s something where people may start literally cutting back on what they’re eating, to ensure that they’re paying fixed costs like rent and other bills.
And so because of that, organizations like Hunger Free Vermont see really addressing hunger as addressing broader economic inequalities. They actually see things like raising the minimum wage and providing access to universal healthcare, which would ideally put more money in people’s pockets and reduce costs for things like healthcare, that would have a direct impact on then providing people with more money to be able to buy food.
Thanks Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Gribkoff: Thanks Mike.
