Meal programs struggle as funding dwindles

Two years ago in Dallas I met an 85-year-old woman and her 65-year-old son. Both were very hungry with almost no food in their fridge or in their cupboards. After they had paid their bills, their meager monthly income from Social Security was dwindling. For lunch the mother wanted boiled cabbage with lima beans and collards, but the son reminded her there was no money for that. It was the second week of the month.

They had been on waiting list for food from the Visiting Nurse Association of Texas, the Meals on Wheels provider in Dallas. About 800 names were on the list the day I visited.

Indeed, there are waiting lists all over the country, and the statistics are as grim as the prospect of having no food for lunch. The anti-hunger group Feeding America found that nearly 8% of Americans 60 and older were food insecure: about 5.5 million seniors.

This year’s congressional budgets are, at least, beginning to address that horrifying statistic.

In the meantime, Feeding America found that almost 10% of the Dallas population age 60 and older were “food insecure,” meaning they didn’t have consistent access to enough food for good health.

The numbers were even worse in other parts of the South. Nearly 12% of the senior population in Mississippi and about 10% in Alabama, for example, were food insecure. The problem is hardly confined to the South, though. In Indiana, Feeding America said, nearly 8% of seniors were not getting proper food; in South Dakota it was 7.3%.

The number of hungry seniors has more than doubled since 2001 and is expected to keep increasing. Meal programs almost everywhere struggle to keep up with the growing demand.

This was the third time in 20 years I found myself reporting on hunger among seniors in America. The numbers of elders on waiting lists has grown since I first visited the topic in 1998 and called attention to the irony of older people coming home from the hospital but finding themselves without the food they needed to heal. When I worked with Kaiser Health News on a third story published just two months ago, focusing on the plight of seniors in Memphis, we found the same thing. Very little had changed except that many more people needed help.

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