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More working families in Washington turn to food banks

Kennewick family making ‘decent money’ still struggles to make ends meet

By Thalia Beaty and Glenn Gamboa, Associated Press
Published: May 11, 2022, 9:17pm
2 Photos
Sgt. Kevin Fowler organizes items at a food bank distribution in January 2021 by the Greater Cleveland Food Bank in Cleveland.
Sgt. Kevin Fowler organizes items at a food bank distribution in January 2021 by the Greater Cleveland Food Bank in Cleveland. (Associated Press files) Photo Gallery

Kendall Nunamaker and her family of five in Kennewick faced impossible math this month: How to pay for gas, groceries and the mortgage with inflation driving up prices?

Like many other working families, the Nunamakers are grappling with the 8.3 percent inflation in the consumer price index in April announced Wednesday. The national average gas price reached a record high Wednesday of $4.40 a gallon.

Food banks across America say those economic conditions are intensifying demand for their support at a time when their labor and distribution costs are climbing and donations are slowing. The problem has grown to the point where last week President Joe Biden called for a Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health in September, the first since 1969.

For many families like the Nunamakers, food insecurity became a painful surprise.

“There’s no reason us as a couple and a family should be struggling so hard,” Nunamaker said. “We make decent money.”

She works three days a week at a home décor store for $15.25 an hour; her husband, Nick, works a full-time union job as a paratransit driver at $27 an hour. Though they receive some money from a state nutrition program for young children that their two youngest qualify for, they still spent $360 on groceries last week.

Because of inflated prices, those groceries didn’t go far enough to feed everyone. And the family still lacked money to pay other household bills, leaving Nunamaker wondering how she would stretch their next paychecks to cover those bills and their mortgage this month.

In the past, to bridge the gap, the family sold off possessions like firearms.

“At some point,” Nunamaker said, “we’re not going to have anything because we would have sold everything.”

So Nunamaker and her husband visited two local food banks for the first time last week.

The pandemic forced roughly 60 million Americans to seek help for food insecurity, according to Feeding America. At the end of 2021, as hiring boomed, demand for food banks returned to regular levels. But the relief was short-lived.

“In the last few months, with this increase in inflationary pressures, we’re seeing 95 percent of our 200 member food banks saying that they have seen either leveling or an increase in need,” said Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America.

In the area along the Columbia River where Nunamaker lives, the number of clients seeking food aid at a church pantry jumped 40 percent between December and March, according to Eric Williams, director of community partnerships at Second Harvest, an organization that works to supply local pantries with food.

He said his organization must make more happen with less because its suppliers are subject to the same cost increases. The price that Second Harvest pays for obtaining donated produce has risen from about 6 cents a pound a year ago to about 10 or 11 cents a pound now.

Because it upsets her so much, Nunamaker said, she hasn’t discussed her family’s struggles with her three children, age 2, 4 and 7, or her network of friends and relatives.

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