Courtesy of Lowcountry Food Bank
Loading food into car trunks at a Lowcountry Food Bank distribution event
Brenda Shaw grew up in southeastern Ohio, where her mother was the food service director for their local school system. She spent her summers helping her mother sort through the free and reduced breakfast/lunch applications for students. As she got older, Shaw volunteered at her church’s pantry. She eventually joined the board of directors of the Delaware County United Way and continued to volunteer at food distribution facilities in the region.
Five years ago, her fight to eradicate hunger took Shaw to South Carolina, where she now manages food distribution programs for the Lowcountry Food Bank. The COVID-19 economic crisis has exacerbated food insecurity, and social service agencies are experiencing unprecedented demand during the holidays. Shaw, her co-workers, and volunteers distributed more groceries this past Thanksgiving than they did last year, and they expect a similar demand during Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s. They’ve given away over 37 million pounds of food this year already and are well on their way to surpassing the 32 million pounds they distributed in 2019.
Before the pandemic, food insecurity rates nationwide were the lowest they had been since before the 2008 recession, according to Feeding America, the country’s largest hunger relief group. But the current economic crisis means that more people are experiencing hunger. As the dollars from residents’ first stimulus checks run out and lines of cars stretch for miles in communities around the country, food banks are the difference between food on tables and empty stomachs.
One of the biggest barriers to obtaining SNAP benefits is the high levels of job discrimination that Black Americans face.
With some of the highest rates of COVID and unemployment, Black Americans are also overrepresented in food insecurity populations, according to a November 2020 study by Princeton Sociology Department researchers Diana Enriquez and Adam Goldstein. Service workers, who are predominantly people of color, have been hit hard by unemployment. With tourism practically nonexistent, restaurants and other leisure businesses have cut back hours or closed, putting people’s livelihoods in jeopardy.
The Princeton researchers surveyed low-income people nationwide who received SNAP benefits—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. They found that families skipped meals during the shutdown, relied on food pantries to get enough to eat, and relied on friends and other family members for meals. Low-income Black and Latino families also had higher food insecurity rates than white families.
One of the biggest barriers to obtaining SNAP benefits is the high levels of job discrimination that Black Americans face. SNAP imposes work requirements to obtain benefits, but those rules have been temporarily suspended under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. But once the COVID emergency ends, work requirements could once again disproportionately impact Black Americans. “We know the barriers to accessing SNAP and other nutrition programs tend to be higher in states with larger Black populations,” says Enriquez.
Along the South Carolina coast, the four southernmost counties—Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton, and Jasper—traditionally make up the Lowcountry region. Rice was the major cash crop during slavery, but after the Civil War, the appeal of the coastal region’s beaches, wetlands, and forests slowly gave way to the tourism and service sectors that dominate the regional economy today.
In South Carolina, nearly a third of the population is Black. The Lowcountry Food Bank, a member of the Feeding America network, provides food assistance in ten coastal counties in the state. The Black population ranges from nearly 20 percent in Beaufort County, where 40 percent of Black residents live in poverty, to Williamsburg County, where 65 percent of residents are Black and about 30 percent of them are poor.
The food bank coordinates with its partner agencies to identify areas that lack networks of social service organizations and grocery stores. In many communities, food banks typically use large locations like schools and churches as distribution sites. But the rural, underserved communities where many Black residents live often do not have suitable locations to distribute food. “One of the big issues we have is that in our most rural areas, we can’t always find a location that has pavement—we can’t move pallets of food around on gravel,” Shaw says.
Shaw recognizes that food insecurity is a first step toward homelessness, which places additional stressors on human service agencies. “The increase in unemployment and soon-to-cease unemployment benefits has negatively affected those in service industries, a large part of the coastal South Carolina population,” says Shaw. “Many of the jobs in the service industry are not going to return until people feel safe traveling or until widespread vaccinations are available.
With COVID-19 killing hundreds of Americans every day, a nutritious diet is crucial to maintaining a healthy immune system to help people fight the disease. The second coronavirus relief package approved by Congress includes $600 stimulus checks and $300 in weekly unemployment benefits. But millions of people will find that those paltry sums of money will not provide the boost needed to pay off months of debts or put food on the table for more than a few weeks.
