Ann is a D.C. resident in her 80s living in Ward 6. She’s been homebound for the whole pandemic, and for much of that time, she’s been struggling to find a consistent source of food that can be delivered to her doorstep.

“For shut-ins, if you were not connected with, say, a church or a family member or a reliable source, it was left up to us, in this case, to desperately look for food,” she says.

Ann is not the only person in the District struggling to feed herself during the pandemic. DCist/WAMU is not using Ann’s last name upon request to protect her privacy.

A new report from the D.C. Food Policy Council projects that 16% or more of D.C.’s population — 113,000 people — could be food insecure this year, up from 10.6% before the pandemic.

Ann has conducted her search for services entirely by phone, using a telephone book, because she doesn’t have access to a computer or smartphone. She says she has called more than 20 different service providers, but something always seems to get in the way. She can’t pick up food somewhere and is not taking public transportation, and she doesn’t have internet access to apply for programs online. Some charities are unable to help because of pandemic restrictions on their operations, which creates another barrier, and sometimes organizations just don’t call her back.

At one point, she started receiving deliveries of frozen meals — but she says the food was sometimes unfrozen and spoiled by the time it reached her. That made the “stress and trauma” worse, Ann says.

“After a point, you’re physically, mentally, emotionally wrung out,” she says. “And that’s what happened. I was right on the verge of saying, ‘I can’t do it anymore,’ because it wasn’t working out.”

Sometimes, she’s had to rely on friends and strangers leaving bags of groceries for her outside her home. Some of that food she can’t eat because of medical problems. What she can’t use, she gives to others in need.

She chokes up talking about the experience.

“There should be a better response to people who have to ask for help and have to plead for food, and have to demean themselves to ask for help,” she says.

Ann, who’s lived in D.C. since the 1970s and used to volunteer with local churches and a soup kitchen, says she worries most about other vulnerable people who may be hungry.

The Problem

The District experienced a pronounced spike in food insecurity during the worst of the first COVID-19 wave this spring. In May, 21.1% of District residents were food insecure.

A July Capital Area Food Bank report on hunger in D.C. and surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland estimated a 48-60% increase in the regional food insecurity rate during the pandemic. The District report, CAFB CEO Radha Muthiah says, is in line with the food bank’s figures.

“We are seeing, and our warehouse is certainly experiencing, an incredibly high volume of food that is coming through us to be able to get it out to the residents of our region,” Muthiah says.

“The numbers are staggering,” she says. “The need is just unprecedented.”

Food insecurity rates are expected to be higher for the elderly, children, people experiencing homelessness, and undocumented people, according to the report.

Those groups of people were already the most likely to be hungry. In 2018, for example, D.C. already had the highest food insecurity rates for seniors in the country at 14.3%.

Muthiah points to a rapidly increasing cost of living — expenses seniors may not have factored into their plans for retirement — as one reason many seniors in the District were already struggling for food before the pandemic hit.

“What we see constantly is, whether it’s with seniors or others, is that the part of a family’s budget that is fungible, that they can squeeze and that they tend to squeeze, is their food budget,” she says.

That’s only gotten worse during the public health crisis.

“In the first two weeks of collected data from April 23 to May 5, nearly one-third (32.8%) of seniors reported that they were not able to access or afford the food they needed,” the District report explains. “8.6% reported that they sometimes did not have enough food to eat.”

And that data, the report states, is likely incomplete because the survey was conducted online and by text — excluding people like Ann, who don’t have access to the internet and “likely skewing the data towards high-income seniors who face lower rates of food insecurity.”

Ann thinks senior food insecurity is compounded by society’s tendency to brush off the elderly.

“People think that just because you’ve passed 65 … that you no longer, are worth having a job, you’re not worth thinking for yourself … or you cannot maintain your individuality,” she says. “That’s a myth.”

Race and structural racism play a significant factor, too. Black residents have been especially hard hit. The report revealed that in late April, Black families in the District were 13.5 times more likely than white families to report they sometimes didn’t have enough food to eat. Latinx families were 6.5 times more likely to report hunger.

The District Response

The District was required to produce the report as part of the Coronavirus Support Emergency Amendment Act of 2020, which Mayor Muriel Bowser signed in May.

The fight against hunger described in the report involves multiple District agencies. A total of 29 DCPS schools have distributed 624,000 breakfasts and lunches to students, and 24,645 bags of groceries for families. The Department of Aging and Community Living has delivered 451,586 meals to seniors at home. And the Department of Human Services has handed out 32,679 meals to people experiencing homelessness.

Nonprofit partners have also contributed to alleviating the hunger crisis by distributing nearly 7 million meals, the report estimates.

The District administers major federal government nutrition aid programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which has seen an uptick in participation during the pandemic.

But even with these additional resources, Ann and many others are still living with uncertainty about their access to food.

“You either fall through the cracks permanently or you do like we do: you keep treading water and persisting,” she says.

Just recently — months after her food problems started — Ann sought assistance from So Others Might Eat, a nonprofit aid organization she says will start helping her soon. But that took months of working her flip phone and falling back on the people and organizations she referred people to as a volunteer years ago.

“If it hadn’t been for personal individuals, helping us, or saying, ‘Try again, call this person or that person,’ we would not be having the help we are now getting,” she says.

Even if Ann’s outlook is brighter these days, hunger isn’t abating. In September alone, Capital Area Food Bank gave 75% more food than they did in the same month in 2019.

Muthiah and the Capital Area Food Bank say they’re bracing for high demand this winter and trying to get ahead of possible problems with the supply chain.

“We’ve gone ahead and purchased more than 500 truckloads of food for the coming months,” Muthiah says.

What Could Help?

The report also recommends steps the District could take to make food access better and more equitable during the pandemic and beyond.

Federal aid is key to continuing the immediate fight against hunger, says Muthiah, of the Capital Area Food Bank.

“SNAP, in particular, is a very effective program,” she says. “For every meal that a food bank can provide, SNAP can provide nine for that for that same individual.”

Muthiah echoes the report in recommending that District leaders push for extension and expansion of federal help. Earlier in the pandemic, the District got a waiver from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to relax SNAP criteria to qualify for the program and offer maximum benefits to all beneficiaries. That will continue — as long as the federal government allows.

The report suggests that D.C. take a number of steps during the pandemic: continue its existing food distribution efforts; add new partner organizations to focus efforts on vulnerable Black, Latinx, and undocumented communities; expand transportation options for grocery shopping and delivery; give food help to essential workers; and help shore up Black- and Latinx-owned food businesses.

Beyond the pandemic, Ann hopes things won’t go back to the way they were.

“Hopefully, we won’t go back to normal because normal wasn’t that good,” she says.

The report also provides some suggestions for long term solutions to fix the D.C. food system. Those ideas include increasing healthy food options in wards 7 and 8 and making sure District government food contracts advance health equity, sustainability, and the local food economy. It also suggests strengthening the D.C. food workforce, promoting opportunity for small food businesses, investing in agriculture in densely populated areas, and educating Washingtonians on nutrition.

The city’s Food Policy Council also wants the District to convene “agencies and organizations that serve seniors to develop and deploy a strategy to address senior food insecurity in the District.” Ann has thoughts about that one. She’d like to see the District do a better job of centralizing food support for the elderly so that she and other homebound seniors only have to make one phone call, not dozens.

“It has to be a system, an office, an agency or whatever that you could call and say, ‘Here’s what we need. Who do we go to?’ and have it done on a regular basis, not just on a crisis basis,” she says.

“What we went through and what others are going through, trying to get food that is healthy and safe and not spoiled and delivered reliably every day or every so many days is inhuman in this day and age and should never happen,” she says.