Local food pantries have reported increased visits despite national trends showing an average decrease nationwide since mid-2021. Over the last year, news reports have indicated that food pantries are either experiencing or expect to experience an increase in visits.
One such report from May a national media outlet in May notes how even a full-time job isn’t a guarantee against food insecurity due to rapidly rising costs.
“When the COVID money ended, that’s when our numbers started going up,” Lynn Staggs, founder and director of The Storehouse in Hendersonville, told the Carolina Journal. “Then, by the time the full amount had ended, our numbers were going crazy. So, we’ve been up into the 80-something percentile into this year.” According to Staggs, the Storehouse, new cases are up 113% across their system.
Kamren Lewis, Care Resource Center coordinator at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke, said that visits have increased over the last two semesters at their locations (fall 2023 and spring 2024) and are approaching 5,000 total visits for their fiscal period, from July to June of the net year.
The US Census Bureau conducts two surveys: the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) and the Food Security Supplement of the Current Population Survey (FSS). AEI uses both surveys to track the demand for charitable food, as they are believed to present the most accurate picture of community need. FSS has been conducted since the late 1990s and is considered the official source of statistics on food insecurity.
HPS differs from other surveys conducted by the Census Bureau in its approach, designed to be a short-turnaround instrument that provides valuable data with a short turn-around time.
Because survey results can differ substantially even though the questions they ask are almost verbatim, challenges exist in assessing true levels of food insecurity. A 2021 report examined the pitfalls of juxtaposing the survey responses on food insufficiency, finding that the HPS food insufficiency rate was more than three times that of the FSS rate. Differences in response rates have been attributed to administrative factors, including screening questions, sample population, and screener question placement.
These surveys also show differences in the rate of charitable food receipts.
“Data on charitable food assistance can be hard to find, and even harder to interpret,” wrote the Center for Opportunity and Social Mobility (COSM) at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Understandably, it is difficult for mostly volunteer-run food pantries to track how many people come through their doors, let alone how many unique households they see and the quantities of food they distribute.”
Staggs said they at the Storehouse experienced a downtick in visits during the pandemic due to increased government assistance, allowing them to stock their shelves and better assist those on their senior delivery route. Now, with demand rising all over again, they use Charity Tracker to keep track of the data from each visit.
“It is a cloud-based data system, and the other pantries in town also use it,” said Staggs. “Every time a person comes in, it generates a ticket, and those tickets get loaded in the computer for the day that they picked up. So it’ll show on a monthly report how many unit totals — which means how many boxes — and then it’ll show how many children, and it has age groups, youth, adults, seniors, and how many new cases.”
While not every food assistance program is experiencing a current surge, the demand has held steady at recently elevated levels.
“The drive-through numbers are about the same as they were the previous year and the year before,” says Dr. Peter Morris, Executive Director of Urban Ministries of Wake County. “It’s a little bit less predictable from day to day. It isn’t a solid 80-85 cars a day. Some days might be as low as 40 cars, and others might be as high as 130 cars. The food bank reported that their partner agencies (like us) were seeing an increase in the number of families served – which was true for us the past two years.”
“But our ‘extra’ or increased families were identified by partner agencies,” said Dr. Morris of the difficulty in tracking exactly how much need there is. “It’s a challenge in Wake County because our biggest food programs are drive-ups – and the partner agencies were helping those families through us. It’s understandable that their case managers would have been spending lots of time delivering food as opposed to being therapists or case managers – and backed down the number of boxes they asked from us.”
Urban Ministries tracks the number of cars that come through daily and gathers information such as name, address, and zip code. According to Dr. Morris, most cars are counted as one family, but some cars represent two families.
At UNC-Pembroke’s Care Resource Center, each visitor fills out a ticket on an iPad with their name and other information, but it’s still difficult to track duplicate visits.
“Overall, there remains some uncertainty over changes in the receipt of charitable food among US households,” wrote COSM. “However, when you rely on the most comprehensive set of survey data, demand for charitable food has changed very little since 2021.”
According to a May poll by the John Locke Foundation, surveying for food insecurity in North Carolina, 93.2% said they do not use food assistance programs like SNAP, WIC, food banks. However, official number of people receiving food assistance is more than double what the rates reflected in the poll results, suggesting underreporting by those in need. Of those on food assistance, 32.5% said it is not meeting their needs.
