Before Covid-19, one in every 10 Vermonters struggled with food insecurity. Now one in every four residents in the state struggles to obtain adequate nutrition.
John Sayles, CEO of the Vermont Foodbank, joined VTDigger on Wednesday to answer reader questions about food insecurity during the pandemic and beyond. Below is a partial transcript, condensed for length and clarity.
Anne Galloway: How is this crisis different from the one that we experienced with the Great Recession? What kinds of trends are you seeing? Is this going to really impact people differently this winter?
John Sayles: It is profoundly different than what we experienced in 2007, 2008. We have not experienced, I think, across the country, a food security issue or hunger issue like this, really, in a generation. It is deeper and wider than we’ve seen before.
To contrast it to the Great Recession, where we saw a huge spike…Then, we expected that unemployment would remain high for a period of time and then go down. And it also affected some people more than others. There were certain types of industries and people with certain types of jobs that lost jobs and have lost them for longer.
Now this, Covid, is basically shutting down large parts of the economy — the retail, the restaurant industry, hospitality industry in general. In Vermont, I think, at one point we saw 70,000 people applying for unemployment. And it’s not only the people who are unemployed, it’s older Vermonters who are justifiably scared to leave their homes that are really susceptible to this, and aren’t getting out to go grocery shopping, and are worried about people coming into their homes bringing things, or getting a ride somewhere.
It’s really hard to plan what’s going to happen next. We just don’t know what’s going to happen. We know how recessions work. We don’t know how pandemics work. So this could be over in six months, we thought, or it could be over in two years. We’re finding out more about that. But the up and down nature, and the lack of understanding over the long run, makes it much different.
Anne Galloway: That uncertainty must be really difficult for people to experience, especially since the federal government has played a role here — there have been some programs that have supported people — but those are expiring soon. I wondered if you could talk about that — when the benefits might be re-upped and whether there’s going to be a gap that people are facing in between.
John Sayles: There were a number of coronavirus relief bills that passed. The first one had some additional resources for foodbanks and food. And it was the second or third that had the PPP, the payroll protection program to support businesses, the increase in unemployment benefits, the $600 federal boost, and the $1200 dollar checks that went out to everyone over 18.
We had seen at the very beginning this real surge in people who were losing jobs, and justifiably really concerned about the future, going to food shelves and meal sites. It was in April and May when we worked with the National Guard and FEMA and had meals ready to eat, MRE kits, provided to Vermont, trucked in here and distributed across the state. Because we were just worried that people had an urgent need that we weren’t going to be able to fill more quickly. And we did see that real boost in people looking for help. And then with those extra benefits — the $600 unemployment, the $1200 checks — we actually saw a decrease in demand. Fewer people going to food shelves, fewer people going to the Foodbank-run distributions around the state, which we call Veggie Van Go.
It was easy to explain: People had money, and they were able to go and shop for the food that they wanted and needed. And then as over the two months after that, we really saw things slowly ramp up again. During that time, we also saw the federal government institute what’s called the Farmers to Families food box program, a program run by the USDA and the Foodbank as a partner. And we do daily distributions of boxes of pre-packed fresh fruits and vegetables and dairy and meat products. We’re doing, right now, 576 of those a day. We do one a day in different locations all around the state. You have to make a reservation for that, to pick up a box, and the reservations are full at every distribution. So we’ve seen we’ve seen the need go back up again.
There’s also now the Everyone Eats program, which people may have heard about, where some of the CARES Act funding that came to Vermont was allocated and being used to pay for restaurants to continue operating and producing meals, and then those meals are being given away. That’s been very popular. Over the course of that program, it’s going to be about half a million meals that’ll be distributed.
As you mentioned, all this support goes away on December 31. CARES Act funding expires. Any money that’s not spent has to be returned to the federal government. Money that’s come to the Foodbank from the state — $4.7 million to purchase food, to make grants to your local food shelves and meal sites, and just pay the operational expense of moving all that food. There have been a number of people in Vermont who have been losing their extended unemployment benefits. So there’s a real concern that come January, if the federal government doesn’t act again, that we’re going to see another surge in some pretty dire need, not just for food but also for other basics like housing.
Hannah, Barre: Given that the level of food insecurity has increased that the pandemic — once the worst of Covid-19 passes, can we expect to see the numbers return to pre-pandemic numbers? Or do you expect to see residual challenges when it comes to food and security?
John Sayles: I think my answer is going to be based somewhat on what happened back in the Great Recession also. When the economy does start coming back, which eventually it will, what we found is that the folks who are relying on food assistance, a lot of them, are kind of the last ones to come back. These are people who maybe were working two or three jobs and lost one of them or got hours reduced. And they may be the last ones to really be hired back.
I call hunger a leading and lagging indicator of a bad economy. So we generally start seeing an increase in need prior to something like the Great Recession. Covid came on so quickly that there really was no leading in, but there’s going to be a lag. I’m expecting that would be 12-18 months past when the newspaper headlines are, “everything’s back.” We’re preparing for that, and we expect to need to provide above and beyond what we would normally expect to for quite a while to come.
Anne Galloway: It sounds like, from what you’ve said, that you’re not sure that you can replace the kind of mass feeding programs that the federal government is efficient at offering. Is that true? How are you going to handle that?
John Sayles: That’s true. The charitable food system was never set up to be a mass feeding program. And in fact, as soon as Covid hit, we started talking to the state and actually put together a mass feeding team that still is still meeting and making sure that the needs are being met.
Once the federal resources go away, we’re going to be doing everything we can to fill in that gap. Fortunately, the people in Vermont, and outside of Vermont too, have been so generous and supportive that we’ll have the ability to continue on at the current level for some period of time. Not a long time — we’re still going to need resources.
But the federal government needs to act. This is just too big for a nonprofit organization. And I would say this is too big, really, for the state of Vermont to address, for people who live in Vermont. Just the 3 Squares Vermont benefits — it’s about $10 million a month in normal times that are going to the 60-70,000 people that are getting those benefits. So we’re just going to do the best we can. And also we are doing a lot of advocacy at the federal level — working with our congressional delegation, working with our national organization — to help guide the federal government to make sure that whatever they do is something that’s really going to have an impact on the ground.
Ev, Woodbury: I believe this statistic, but please tell us how we know that one in four Vermonters is experiencing food insecurity. And please put them in human perspective because we all need to be motivated to do something to help.
John Sayles: How do we know? Well, we actually know because we ask people. There are a couple different surveys that happened across Vermont. The Census Bureau does a monthly survey, and that information feeds into the USDA and some of their economists, and the USDA is doing periodic surveys also. So they put out data on the food insecurity levels.
In addition to that, the Foodbank, with our national organization Feeding America, is doing surveys also. And those numbers generally line up. We can also correlate those numbers to the number of people that are getting 3 Squares Vermont benefits. So we’ll see those numbers increase and decrease kind of in tandem with the numbers that the Foodbank is looking at.
Just recently there’s a consortium with some leading folks from the University of Vermont and the Gund Institute. They’ve actually been doing periodic surveys since March that have shown it’s actually more than one in four right now. We’ve seen since Covid began in March that at least 30% of the people in Vermont have had the experience of food insecurity at one point. That could be somebody who’s lost their job for two months and now they’re back to work and things are OK. But a lot of people are seeing continued issues.
I just want to point out, food insecurity is really financial insecurity. It’s harder to go to the grocery store now, but there’s plenty of food there. So it’s really just about people not having the financial resources to be able to buy the food they want and they need.
Ev also asked about how we humanize this. If you look back to a story that was in VTDigger to a woman named Amanda, who had been homeless and really knew what food insecurity was like — that is a common story. People who, for whatever reason, find themselves in a position where they don’t have a home, are automatically food insecure. Well beyond that, food insecurity for people in Vermont can be just eating ramen noodles three nights a week for dinner because you can’t afford fruits and vegetables and dairy and meat to put on your table. It can mean buying hotdogs and macaroni and cheese for the kids, while maybe the parents eat a bag of chips and a two liter bottle of soda, which is really cheap, but can fill you up enough to get you through the night.
What we find over and over again in talking to families and people showing up, is that people will do anything to make sure their kids are fed. Oftentimes we hear stories of parents who are skipping meals and are making sacrifices to make sure that their kids have the food that they need. If you go to our website, you can also look at our blog and see a lot of stories of people working very hard and trying very hard. It’s just tough these days to bring those ends together and have a roof over your head and make sure there’s enough food on the table.