95
including the 12 million who were al-
ready receiving the maximum monthly
SNAP allotment: $646 for a four- person
household in the majority of states.
Eight months later, in December, Con-
gress passed a second relief bill boost-
ing benefits by 15% across the board,
but that uptick is scheduled to expire
this summer. Unless Congress extends
it, millions of Americans will again be
left to make ends meet with the pre-
pandemic monthly amount—an aver-
age of about $1.39 per person per meal—
which is based on a formula that hasn’t
been revised since 2006.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans are
falling through the cracks because they
make just a hair too much each month to
qualify for federal food assistance or are
plagued by other financial burdens (like
health care costs or student loans) that
bleed into their grocery budgets. Deloria
Floyd, 41, who is juggling nursing school
and a full-time secretarial job at a hos-
pital inundated with COVID-19 cases,
makes roughly $37,000 per year, enough
to disqualify her from federal assistance
but not enough to cover healthy grocer-
ies to get her through 12-hour shifts.
Without access to Anderson’s free food
fridges, Floyd says, “I would be hungry.
I would be losing weight.”
In the absence of a government so-
lution, Anderson and an army of Good
Samaritans around the country, many
of whom are women of color, have
stepped up. In New York City’s South
Bronx, which is part of the poorest con-
gressional district in the country, Tanya
Fields runs the Black Feminist Project,
an organization that helps locals grow
their own food on a city-owned plot of
land. In Los Angeles, the group Feed
Black Futures, run by Ali Anderson (no
relation to Jammella), provides organic,
locally sourced produce to Black fami-
lies who’ve been affected by incarcer-
ation, parole or probation. In Chicago,
Erika Allen, Laurell Sims and their
team at the Urban Growers Collective
train new farmers and deliver hundreds
of thousands of pounds of foods thatare appetizing and enriching via a mo-
bile food shop, standing produce out-
lets and emergency relief efforts. And
in North Carolina, Ebonee Bailey runs
a roving produce market named the
Bulb that employs a take-what-you-
need, give-what-you-can model. “If
you want something done right, you
call a woman,” Bailey says of food ini-
tiatives that have emerged in response
to scarcity, “because we will handle it.”
Some of these activists were drawn to
the work of providing accessible meals
because they’ve known hunger in their
own lives. Jammella Anderson, for ex-
ample, was raised by a single mom in a
family that relied on food stamps and
Section 8 housing. She says her child-
hood shaped her understanding of her
fridge clients’ needs and behaviors.
Aware of the bureaucratic hurdles that
her mother had to navigate to get federal
aid, Anderson made the decision not to
require the people who use her fridges
to provide any proof of their finan-
cial situation or even give their names.
She’s also not bothered when folks take
as many groceries as they can carry,
often emptying the fridges in a matter
of hours. “If you grow up food- insecure
like we have,” she says, “you sometimes
want to take a lot because you don’t
know when you’re going to get it again.”
To Anderson, access to a decent meal
is a human right, not a luxury. “People
used to ask all the time, ‘What if people
steal the food?’ ” she says. “I always say,
‘You can’t. Because it’s free.’ ”The problem of food insecurity in the
U.S., one of the richest countries in the
world, is ubiquitous across regions and
ethnicities, but Black and Latino house-
holds are most vulnerable. They were
more than twice as likely as white ones
to experience food insecurity during var-
ious points in 2020, according to reports
by the Urban Institute. The disparities
remain today, though the percentage of
food-insecure people across all races and
ethnicities is getting higher. While 17%
of white individuals in America faced
food insecurity in February 2021, ac-
cording to snapshot polling analyzed
by Northwestern University, the rates
among Black and Hispanic- Latino Amer-
icans were 30% and 31%, respectively.
These racial discrepancies are the● Jammella Anderson next
to one of her Albany, N.Y.,
food fridges. Most share the
same inviting verbiage: FREE
FOOD. COMIDA GRATIS