Triple Threat to Food Insecurity

Phil: Now a new study just came out that showed that inflation is a triple threat to food insecurity. Tell us more about that. 

Sally: Well, what we're seeing, Phil, is we're seeing that a lot of women, particularly women that we're talking about, women that are in households where they are single moms are finding themselves food insecure. Not only food insecure, but also they are more prone to compulsive eating, to junk food addiction, unsuccessful attempts to get healthy when they really want to. And it really makes sense when you think about it. You know, I know I am a mom and, and you get stressed, you don't have time and you sometimes you're the last person to, to get to eat. So it is easy to see how this could happen, but particularly in families where women are raising children, this is happening. 

Phil: And also, what U S D A has has talked about, is that a lot of families are reporting that SNAP is insufficient that many must rely on food banks and pantries, as a safety net. And what's interesting, which I didn't know, is the Thrifty Food Plan they set their costs for a full year starting October 1st. That means that SNAP benefits between October 1st, 2022 to October 1st, 2023 are based on the cost of food in June of 2022. So even, even the fact that as prices continue to go up, they can't raise, you know, what the benefits are till next October. So we can only hope that frankly, you know, prices stay stable at worst case and even go down a little bit, otherwise we're gonna have a real problem. Also it's important to note that there are about 60,000 food pantries in the US and 53 million people actually went to a food pantry in the past 12 months. 

Phil: So again, just underscoring whether it's Feeding America, Google, everything that, you know, people are trying to do. And also what came out of the White House conference is a lot of grocery retailers stepping up and saying that they're gonna give not only for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but all year round that they're gonna be supplying food to a lot of these 53 million people. So that helps.