9 minute read
Root Causes
Edible Community Hunger in The Land of Plenty
An alarming disconnect and those who are working to alleviate it
By Elizabeth Limbach
Monterey County—one of the 10 highest producing agricultural centers in the country—produced $3.85 billion of agricultural products in 2011, and when you add in Santa Cruz and San Benito counties, the total ag production figure for the tri-county area reaches a whopping $4.68 billion. Yet, in this “salad bowl” of bountiful fields of strawberries, leaf lettuces, broccoli and a huge variety of other high-nutrient fruits and vegetables, many Central Coast residents are hungry.
One in five Monterey County residents receive food assistance, according to the county’s food bank—a shocking four times the national rate of 5.1% of households that received emergency food in 2011, according to Feeding America.
A report this year by the same organization, drawing on information collected in 2010, found that 27.1% of Monterey County’s children and 15.4% of the county’s population as a whole were food insecure, meaning they don’t always know where their next meal will come from. Similarly, Feeding America reported that 24.4% of Santa Cruz County children and 15.9% in Santa Cruz residents overall are hungry, and 28.1% of children and 17.7% of residents overall in San Benito County are food insecure.
The overall hunger rates are similar to the national average of one in six households, but the figures for local children are around one in four—significantly worse than the one-in-five average for the children across the country. This higher-than-average rate of child hunger is also in stark contrast to the copious amounts of food grown locally. What’s more, many of the hungry are farmworker families, and the food that they have least access to are fruits and vegetables— the highly nutritious foods that most local field workers plant and harvest themselves.
Hunger in the area has swelled since 2008 due to economic strife in the region. The Associated Press found San Benito County to be one of the hardest hit counties in the state in its Economic Stress Index—a calculation that considers unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy rates. It scored 21.25; Santa Cruz and Monterey counties received scores of 13.97 and 14.21, respectively.
Unemployment rates, alone, provide a telling glimpse of the bleakness of the situation: California Employment Development Department figures show that San Benito County went from singledigit unemployment in 2006 and 2007 and a low of 7.8% in 2008 to a peak of 21.3% in February 2010. Unemployment averaged 15.7% last year—better, but still much higher than the state and national averages.
Joblessness raged in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, as well. In 2008, Monterey averaged 8.4% unemployment. Last year, it was 12.4%. Santa Cruz County started with an average unemployment rate of 7.3% in 2008 and saw 11.3, 12.6 and 12.1% averages in the three years that followed.
Unsurprisingly, given this information, food banks in all three counties have experienced growth in demand since the recession struck. The Community Food Bank of San Benito went from serving an average of 3,210 households monthly in 2007 to 6,540 in 2011. Executive Director Mary Anne Hughes reports an increase in the number of working families who rely on its services.
The Food Bank for Monterey County has seen a 50% increase in the number of families needing emergency food assistance, according to Executive Director Leslie Sunny. “Many of the families share with us that they never thought they would need food assistance,” Sunny says. “Folks who have been donors have called me looking for food.”
Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County’s distribution is up 32% since 2008. SHFB, which was the first in California, now serves 55,913 people each month. Ten years ago, two-thirds of clients only needed emergency food assistance a few times a year, recalls CEO Willy Elliott-McCrea. Now, he says, more than two-thirds of the families served need continued assistance.
The face of hunger—and how food banks combat it—has changed dramatically since Elliott-McCrea first started working at SHFB as a warehouse manager and driver in 1978.
Back then, he says, the mission was to get food—any food—to children who were not receiving enough calories.
“It’s grown and evolved from a focus exclusively on hunger issues and providing basic foods and calories back in the ’70s—when it was all about kids’ brains not even developing because they didn’t have enough energy—to now, when they’re getting too many calories, not too few,” says Elliott-McCrea. “The biggest driver of hunger today is the flood of cheap food-like substances that are manufactured out of corn and soy. That actually increases hunger.”
Food assistance programs have solved hunger as they defined it decades ago, he says. Now, they are faced with a new problem.
The Food Bank for Monterey County’s food distributions, like the one above, draw 100s of residents in need of food. They also attract lots of volunteers, like the group of Hyatt Regency Hotel employees, at right.
“There’s no shortage of access to cheap food for struggling families,” says Elliott-McCrea. “You can buy 2,000 calories for 99 cents. It’s fresh food—real food—that they need so much.”
Christine Moss agrees. She is the regional coordinator for the Central Coast chapter of the Network for a Healthy California, a state-funded effort to promote nutrition and physical activity.
“One of the misnomers is that hunger and obesity are contradictory,” Moss says. “That is far from the case. Obese people can be very poorly nourished. If you’re looking to fill your stomach—an understandable motivation when you’re poor—starch and fat are cheap. They are putting calories in but they aren’t getting nutrition.”
But as the issue increasingly becomes about access to fresh fruits and vegetables, many of those being left out are the agricultural laborers, themselves.
“A lot of the population you’re seeing that utilizes the food banks are the people who are actually picking the produce for us,” says Lindsay Coate, executive director of Ag Against Hunger. “They start utilizing the food bank resources during the off seasons” when they aren’t working. Because of this ag off-season, unemployment rates spike dramatically in winter months throughout all three counties. For example, Santa Cruz County’s unemployment went from 13.5% in January 2012 to 9.4% this August. (Even more stark is the difference in the unemployment rate between the county’s urban Santa Cruz area—7.8%—and its rural, agricultural area of Watsonville—20%.)
The low wages associated with the region’s largest industry— agriculture—don’t stand up to the area’s high cost of living, Coate says. “The cost of living here in our tri-county area is very high, and I don’t necessarily think that salaries that are available reflect that.”
SHFB estimates that it serves 15,000 farmworkers and their families each month, and Sunny reports that 65% of those served by the Food Bank for Monterey County fall into this category. “The two largest employers in Monterey County are the hospitality and agriculture industries,” she explains. “Both industries are at the lower end of the wage scale.”
“Our region does produce a large amount of food,” Hughes says. “However, most of it is contracted to large processors and exported. Sale prices are high overseas. Prices are high locally, as well. So low-income families who need to get the best calorie bang for their buck can’t always buy the most healthy food but rather that which is cheapest.”
Moss, of Network for a Healthy California, adds that “growing, unfortunately, is not purchasing access.”
“[In] a lot of our little communities, their shopping is confined to a convenience mart or a liquor store, where you maybe have a few cans of canned vegetables,” Moss says, adding that many low-income residents may not have a refrigerator or access to their own kitchen in which to prepare fresh foods.
Because these rural and low-income communities may not be able to attract a supermarket any time soon, health advocates like Moss are working to bring affordable produce to them via farmers’ markets. “That gives them access to wonderful, fresh, straight-fromour-fields produce,” Moss says. She says that the number of farmers’ markets in the tri-county area that accept electronic benefit transfer (EBT) has gone from five to 19 in recent years.
Elliott-McCrea believes the next step for the hunger-fighting movement is to address the epidemic’s root causes, which he described in a recent speech given in Chicago as “a complicated mix of politicoeconomic structures, generational poverty, exploitation, lack of social capital and individual coping strategies.”
“There’s something fundamentally broken,” he says. “The question we really have to look at is, how do we build sustainable communities? How do we get folks plugged back in to the workforce? How do we help people who are dealing with huge issues like poverty? How do we look at our local food systems, and create local pathways for kids to move into work? How do we create more entrepreneurial opportunities?”
Health and wellness is one crucial pathway for moving forward in life, he says, but SHFB has its sights set on providing more integrated services that address a broader swath of problem areas.
From her post at Ag Against Hunger, Coate says she is constantly amazed by the efforts of the area’s ag leaders and hunger organizations in fighting the problem locally. But while there is hope for curbing it, she concedes that hunger will always be a reality.
“I don”t think hunger will ever go away,” Coate says. “It’s here to stay, especially with what’s going on in our economy and the way the job market is. I think it’s up to myself and the people who work at Ag Against Hunger and our food bank partners to continue trying to come up with solutions to providing these people with the food they need.”
Elizabeth Limbach is an award-winning journalist based in Santa Cruz.
HOW TO HELP: To learn how you can support—or receive help from—our important local food aid organizations, go to our website, www.ediblemontereybay.com and click on the “Local Food Guides” tab. On the dropdown menu, look for “Food Banks and Other Food Aid Groups.” There, you’ll find information about Ag Against Hunger, California Grey Bears, Central Coast Hunger Coalition, Community Food Bank for San Benito County, the Food Bank for Monterey County, Pajaro Loaves and Fishes and Second Harvest Food Bank.
