Lawrence Strickland remembers what it was like to be a hungry child in Tampa.
“You do whatever it takes to eat,” he told me. “Whether it’s knocking on a neighbor’s door asking for a pack of chicken, or waking up early in the morning at 9 o’clock or 8 o’clock and going through the phone book list of churches at 9 years old. I had to explain to them our situation and hopefully get assistance.” Strickland’s family hadn’t always been in need of the kindness of strangers. But when his mother went through a bad breakup and, as a result, became addicted to crack cocaine, “we went from stable housing to a trailer with roaches in neighborhoods that we weren’t familiar with.”
When Strickland became an adult, he thought he’d beaten the hunger curse: he had a good job as a corporate trainer, was married to a woman with a position at a local uniform company, and was, he thought, secure. But then he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and was in and out of hospitals so often that his employer let him go. To make matters worse, Strickland’s wife lost her job when the uniform company relocated to Missouri. Once again, hunger was a part of his life, and though he and his family received SNAP assistance from the government — commonly referred to as food stamps — the allotment for a family of four, of about $10 a day, didn’t meet their most basic needs.
So they learned to make do. “We’re okay with food most of the time,” Strickland told me. “We don’t really have too many issues with that, ’cause we eat within our food stamp assistance. It runs out but we become pretty creative with things. You have to put bread and water together, see what it makes. You have to take powdered milk and eat a potato.”
Fortunately for the Strickland family, their pastor has given them a place to live, and Metropolitan Ministries, the extraordinary anti-poverty organization led by Tim Marks and headquartered in downtown Tampa, has helped them with food, daycare, and other necessities.
But without MetroMin, it’s not clear how this family could sustain itself. That $10 a day is all the government is offering.
Strickland’s story is not, unfortunately, unique. A 2014 study shows that 49 million Americans are “food insecure”: meals skipped, fewer meals eaten, nutritious foods purchased less frequently and/or children are fed but not the adult. In the 10 counties of the Greater Tampa Bay area, more than 841,000 people go hungry each day, including nearly 200,000 children and more than 160,000 senior citizens. In Hillsborough County alone, there are over 200,000 food insecure people (72,900 of them children), a full 16.5 percent of the population; in Pinellas and Polk, the percentages are 15.7 and 16.7, respectively. And according to Thomas Mantz, CEO of Feeding America Tampa Bay, the demographic status of these people isn’t what you’d expect.
“Surprisingly, the largest percentage of folks we give to are white at 44 percent, I think African-American is 40, I think Hispanic is 16 or 17.”
And there are other surprises: “95 percent of people we give food to own or rent their own home,” he said, and almost 23 percent of the food that Feeding America Tampa Bay gives out “goes to somebody who has either a college degree or some post-secondary education.”
You don’t even have to be classified as poor to be hungry.
“We often say that the worst place in the world to be is a dollar over the poverty level,” said Mantz. “Because you get no service support. None at all.”
Specialists like Mantz make a distinction between hunger that’s “situational” — the result of an unexpected event such as divorce, unseen medical bills, or job loss — and hunger that’s “generational” — the result of growing up in a culture of need. Mantz told me that “by far” the cases of most of the people to whom Feeding America delivers food (almost 16 million pounds in Hillsborough last year) are situational. The Great Recession of 2008 was just the sort of debacle to threaten the food security of large swaths of the population, he pointed out. And Mantz worries that a poverty rate that used to be 10 percent rose during that recession to 15 percent, which may be the new normal.
“We saw a bunch of people come into the community of need and of help [because of the recession]; we haven’t seen all of them leave quite as quickly.”
Unemployment isn’t the only cause of hunger in Hillsborough: a low-paying job can also make food prices hurt. Consider Margarita, who has a full-time position at a Tampa preschool, where she makes a little over minimum wage. I met Margarita when she was picking up needed free groceries at the Tampa Jewish Family Services Community Food Bank in the Citrus Park area.
“We don’t make enough at work,” she told me, explaining that she has to support herself, her 20-year-old daughter (who’s studying to become an EMT, and works part-time), and her daughter’s two children. Actually, the trouble really started, Margarita told me, when her kids turned 18, and child support from her ex-husband ceased; things got worse when her younger daughter had two children outside of marriage.
Now the financial demands are exhausting: two weeks’ worth of Margarita’s income goes toward paying the mortgage on her Town ’n’ Country home. Another drain on her income is the health insurance that her employer removes from her paycheck; but “I’m a cancer survivor, so I have to get regular checkups and stuff.”
I asked Margarita if she ever went hungry: yes, she said, “mostly at the beginning or the end of the month.” She explained that certain needs simply had to precede food: “If the electric is due, you got to pay the electric, the kids can’t be without electricity. So diapers. Necessities.”
She’s been on food stamps in the past, but for right now “they say that I make too much money.” So she has strategies in the supermarket designed to maximize buying power. She looks for “buy one get one free” offers, utilizes lots of coupons, and frequents Spanish markets “because they’re a lot cheaper than Publix or any of the higher-name grocery stores.” She stints on treats for her grandchildren, but still has one firm policy: when someone goes hungry, it’s always her or her daughter — never the infants. Adults, she suggested, can handle hunger better.
At least Margarita is aware of places like TJFS Community Food Bank, run by the compassionate Lea Merrill Davidson-Bern. But not all the hungry are availing themselves of such services.
According to Caitlyn Peacock, the passionate project coordinator of Tampa Bay Network to End Hunger, “A lot of individuals, ever since the economy had the downturn, they never had to use programs or assistance before, so they don’t really know how to utilize the services that are available for them.”
Seniors present a special problem: “One of the biggest issues is how to get seniors who are eligible to apply [to SNAP], because for that population it’s about pride. Also computers. How to apply online.”
And then there are the tens of thousands of food-insecure children, many of whom depend on free and reduced-price school breakfasts and lunches for the nutrition their parents can't provide them.
“But then during the summer what do they do?” said Peacock. The county tries to offer them continuing summer services like Breakspot and Weekend Bags, “but only 10 percent of the kids that are eligible are actually taking advantage. So it’s really a transportation issue, getting the food to the kids.”
In fact, transportation is so central to TBNEH’s program for addressing Bay area hunger that, utilizing Feeding America data, it came up with a map that indicates not only where the hunger is in the counties it serves, but where the greatest gaps are between needy citizens and the services that can feed them.
So, for example, downtown Tampa is “one of the areas that has the highest poverty and highest food insecurity,” but it’s also a region served by food pantries like MetroMin that don’t require much of a hike. The areas in Tampa that have the largest gaps, on the other hand, are New Tampa and the neighborhoods south of Gandy — not regions one would intuitively suppose were underserved. Nor would one necessarily guess that the demographic with the greatest food insecurity is neither seniors nor children but adults aged 30 to 49.
I asked Peacock what she thought of the idea that the poor and hungry aren’t motivated enough.
“Whenever anybody just says to me, aren’t they lazy, I can only tell you what I’ve seen,” said Peacock. “And that is people who are trying to go to school but they’re making minimum wage, or they’re making $10 an hour and they have a kid. So when you do the math of rent or mortgage, car or bus passes, just transportation costs and food, how are you going to make it work?”
Her own personal solution may sound utopian: she wants to see outlets “on every corner” offering free food at regular hours every week.
Because basically she’s an optimist: “I definitely think we’re going to solve hunger.”
Until that day, there’ll be stories like that of Katherine, a Thonotosassa-based single mother about to start full-time work at the post office. I met her at the Emergency Care Help Organization (ECHO) in Brandon, where she was picking up free food. She told me, “I make sure my kids eat, but there’s days when I go without eating. Drinking water. Especially when they were newborns: I mean, there was one time I went to the hospital because I hadn’t eaten for three days.”Or there’s Maria, a part-time assistant teacher with Hillsborough County Schools, whose husband is a delivery man for Meals on Wheels. Up until ten years ago, Maria’s husband worked full-time for Publix Supermarkets, but when he was let go he couldn’t find full-time employment, and since they’re both 55 years old now, the job market isn’t very welcoming. The solution: food banks.
I asked Maria if she always gets enough for her family’s needs. “Sometimes I still need food,” she said with a smile. But “I prepare food from scratch; I figure out a way to make it last.” Her past, she said, prepared her for these difficulties because “I come from a poor country, so I know how. From Colombia.” She’s been a U.S. citizen since 1992, and figures that it must be her English that’s kept her from finding full-time work.
So what’s the solution? The key point is that Lawrence, Margarita, Katherine, and Maria aren’t slackers or any of the other stereotypes surrounding the hungry; they look and sound like you and me, like our friends, our co-workers. They work or are willing to, but even a full-time job isn’t always enough. The conclusion is inescapable: As long as the U.S. government refuses to feed its hungry citizens — and SNAP only provides a fraction of what a family needs — individual philanthropy will continue to be essential. Barring a sudden miracle in the U.S. Congress, the only answer is for good people to keep writing checks to good charities.
Is this as it should be? Well, consider the following radical assertion: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
Sound extreme? Socialistic? These are the words of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948, and signed immediately by the U.S. government.
There are over 200,000 hungry people in Hillsborough. They’re not lazy. They’re not parasites. Many of them work full-time jobs, or would if anyone was hiring.
Someone’s got to look out for them.