ANOTHER VIEW: To combat the hunger crisis, we must normalize asking for help

Maura Healey, Erin McAleer and Catherine D’Amato

Published Feb 16, 2021 

Editor's note: The stories of the people mentioned in this article are real, but their names have been changed to protect their privacy.

Pick any city or town in Massachusetts and you’ll find the heartbreaking and unacceptable reality of people going hungry.

In Worcester, Gary and Patricia were already struggling to feed their three young children and Gary’s elderly mother before the pandemic hit last spring. The family of six lived off Gary’s income, a sizable portion of which was used to pay for an expensive monthly prescription for his mother. But things got worse – Gary lost his job and started collecting unemployment. The kids received food through the free school meals program, which kept the family going, but Gary and Patricia were soon forced to skip and stretch out their meals, to ensure the kids and his mother had enough.

In Lawrence, Sarah and Jose have been living paycheck to paycheck. When the COVID crisis happened, Sarah lost her job as a waitress right before giving birth to their baby, and the couple could barely pull together enough to keep a roof over their head, let alone afford the high cost of groceries.

These stories of food insecurity are not new. They mirror those of the more than 17.5 percent of households in Massachusetts that are now struggling to put food on the table. The rate of food insecurity in our state has skyrocketed by more than 60 percent during the pandemic. Even more heartbreaking, nearly 22 percent of households with children don’t have enough food. Due to longstanding disparities in economic opportunity, Black and brown children are twice as likely to experience hunger, and its lifelong consequences.

This issue is far too grave to be ignored. For too many families, the pandemic was the tipping point from food insecurity to hunger. Those struggling before the pandemic have now been joined by tens of thousands of people who never imagined they would need food assistance. According to a recent survey, fewer than four in 10 Americans could cover an unexpected $1,000 bill from their savings. Families find themselves in situations like Gary and Patricia’s and Sarah and Jose’s — forced to survive with limited resources and impossible choices including how to put food on the table.

Hunger can happen to your neighbors, your family, and your coworkers, and it is happening in every community across our state. That’s why our organizations – the Attorney General’s Office, Project Bread, and The Greater Boston Food Bank, along with the state’s three other regional food banks (Merrimack Valley Food Bank, The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, and Worcester County Food Bank) have partnered to raise awareness about the pervasiveness of hunger and take action to end it. We’re holding convenings to support food pantries and connecting local officials, community leaders, school superintendents and teachers to resources that can help families, children, seniors, immigrants, and others facing hunger. Food is the most basic of human needs, and we all have a responsibility to ensure that need is met and that no one in our state goes hungry.

It’s beyond time that we normalize asking for help, and help is out there for the more than 394,000 Massachusetts families like Gary and Patricia’s and Sarah and Jose’s who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. For example, SNAP is a lifeline for more than 900,000 Massachusetts residents. Between 2013 and 2017, the program kept more than 133,000 people in our state out of poverty, and fortunately, the Biden Administration has already taken steps to expand SNAP’s reach. Project Bread’s Food Source hotline at 1-800-645-8333 is a free confidential resource available in more than 180 languages to connect those in need to assistance programs like SNAP and others including Pandemic-EBT, free meals for kids, and the Women, Infants and Children Nutrition Program (WIC), as well as a thousand local food pantries and soup kitchens. During the pandemic, the hotline responded to more than 46,000 calls from those in need across the state. Each month, 600 pantries that partner with the Greater Boston Food Bank provide assistance to more than 600,000 food insecure residents. These pantries saw a more than 91 percent increase in those seeking help during the pandemic.

Crisis and opportunity often come hand in hand. We are at a crisis point in Massachusetts, but if we come together to raise awareness about the scope of hunger in our state and encourage people who need help to seek assistance, we can seize the opportunity to ensure that none of our neighbors go hungry.

Maura Healey is the attorney general of Massachusetts. Erin McAleer is president and CEO of Project Bread. Catherine D’Amato is president and CEO of The Greater Boston Food Bank.