Food Banks Are Nice but Not Enough

Why are so many Americans unable afford food?

From the second-story window in my house, I watch the cars lining up for free food as I write in my home office. Three days per week, the people come. Volunteers in orange shirts, mostly retired church members, hand over boxes of food.

There are two food pantries within easy walking distance from my house. The Catholic church runs the one I can see from my window. The township office runs one that’s just a short walk away. There are many others in my small city of about 30,000 with a poverty rate of about 15 percent.

I don’t live in a food desert

My neighborhood also has a full-service grocery store a few minutes walk from these food pantries. The walkability of my neighborhood is one of the things that I took into consideration when I bought my house.

So the question arises: Why do so many people here need free food? Why do they need to subsist on non-perishables instead of simply going to a grocery store and filling a cart with whatever fresh foods their family likes?

Ideally, we wouldn’t have any food pantries because everyone capable of working would have a job that paid enough to cover their basic needs. Also ideally, we’d have a healthy safety net that would provide a dignified living for people who are unable to work.

Lots of working people struggle to afford groceries. So do people living on any kind of assistance. Add to that elderly people who never made enough money to be able to afford to put anything back and who are now trying to survive on only paltry Social Security payments.

The poverty rate is a joke

What makes it worse is that the poverty rate is a wholly unrealistic measure of poverty — for a single person, it’s only $15,060 per year, for a family of four, it’s $31,200 — so you can be far above the poverty line and still be objectively poor.

The poor are visible in my town, but even if you live in a wealthy area, there are poor people. You just might not realize it, because you may be operating in a bubble. Who is making your food, serving your coffee and cleaning your home? Who is working at your fast-food places and gas stations? It isn’t your friends’ rich kids; it’s poor adults who probably can’t afford to live near the people they serve.

I belong to a literacy organization, and yes, this is related

It’s called Altrusa and you may have a chapter in your city. We provide college scholarships for high-schoolers and free books for all the first graders in our city. We just got involved with another organization seeking to get every child reading at grade level.

If your goal is to increase literacy, you have to fight poverty. And to fight poverty, you have to increase literacy, and breaking that cycle is a bitch. There’s no other word for it.

One of the educators at that meeting mentioned a young boy whose education is at risk because he has to babysit his younger siblings each evening. He’s often too tired to go to school.

Where are his parents? They’re both working two minimum-wage jobs. How are we supposed to tell these parents that they need to do a better job of reading to their children and making sure they all get to school on time every day?

The poor are not stupid

They love their kids. They want them to do well. They aren’t sticking them in front of the TV because they don’t know better, and if they aren’t reading to them often enough, it’s not because they are unaware that reading to children is a good thing. And they definitely aren’t feeding their children crap because they don’t understand that fresh vegetables are healthier than boxed macaroni and cheese.

Food drives and food pantries are all very well, but many pantries only provide non-perishables. Some do offer dairy, produce, eggs and meat, but that’s rare because it’s expensive to safely store and handle perishables. So if you are trying to survive on donated food, you can expect to eat a lot of canned and boxed things.

You cannot put together a healthy diet just from cans and boxes.

You’ve probably been asked to donate to a food drive at some point, and you were probably asked to give non-perishable foods. Chances are good that you donated things like boxed macaroni or canned soup.

Years ago, I worked with an intelligent and educated woman who fell into poverty after fighting cancer. She survived, but the cancer destroyed her mobility. She had to move into public housing and began using a scooter to get around. After a few years of this, she told me, she could no longer bear to even look at boxed macaroni and cheese.

It’s not that she didn’t know better. It’s that she couldn’t afford anything better.

Cooking is a privilege

My own personal way of dealing with food costs has always been to cook as much food as possible from scratch. I’ve generally had more time than money.

If you have more money than time, you have lots of options. You can purchase things like vegetables that are already prepped, allowing you to prepare a healthy dinner without spending much time on it. You can eat out. You can choose to order healthy take-out.

If you lack both time and money, you don’t have any good options. You’re going to put together meals using boxed and canned items from the limited options you received from a food pantry.

I wouldn’t be baking bread or making pots of homemade vegetable soup if I were working two jobs or relying on food pantries.

Income inequality strikes again

Jobs need to pay enough to feed a family. We produce plenty of wealth in this country, but most of it is concentrated in the hands of the few. We all know this already. If you don’t, read Richest 1% bag nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together over the past two years by Oxfam International.

This is a choice. We made a decision that the money produced by workers would mostly reward the companies that employ them, not the workers who create the wealth. We also decided to cut taxes on the wealthy. We can change these things anytime we want.

That family struggling to make it with four jobs? That is three jobs more than it should take.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me on Medium or Substack. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.

About the novel

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist at a dying newspaper with one dream left. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t change their predicament. Darren is a disabled man with a dark past just trying to enjoy his life. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Kaitlyn is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy, the trailer park manager, runs it like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.