41 percent of Kalamazoo families strain to meet nutritional needs

41 percent of Kalamazoo Families Struggle to Meet Nutritional Needs: How Poverty is an Inadequate Measurement of Food Insecurity

The Browns probably wouldn't be the stereotypical family that comes to mind when thinking about food insecurity. They own a small home in Portage; Adam is employed full-time in sales at a local financial institution, and simultaneously attends school for a degree in Naturopathic medicine; and in between caring for their two small children during the day, Steena works from home doing seasonal alteration and sewing projects.

However, the Brown family is what the United Way refers to, in its September 2014 study of financial hardship in the U.S., as an ALICE family. ALICE stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, and the report reveals that a full 40 percent of Michigan families earn too little to provide for basic needs.

In Kalamazoo County, the statistic matches that of the state-wide average. Some 17 percent of households in Kalamazoo live at or below poverty, and 24 percent live below the ALICE threshold, totaling 41 percent of families struggling to make ends meet in Kalamazoo.

So, what do the numbers look like? The Household Survival Budget calculates the costs of basic needs in Michigan. The Household Survival Budget for the average family of four in Michigan is around $50,000 and for a single adult it is around $17,000. When you consider the federal poverty designation is $23,000 and $11,000 for a family and individual, respectively, the survival budget reveals the significant inadequacy of the poverty numbers as a measure of economic stability.

Within the broad issue of economic insecurity lies a number of individual insecurities, including food and nutritional insecurity. For a family like the Browns, the Household Survival Budget holds a line item for food hovering around $600 per month. Steena says their family budgets $400 for food a month, but they rarely stay within that budget. She says what they actually spend is more like $600 to $700. They pull money from other bill categories, or a windfall sewing project, to make up the difference.

"It is emotionally exhausting to always feel like I don't have enough money to cover our groceries," Steena says. "We do pretty well in most other areas of our budgets and don't have trouble paying our mortgage or utility bills, but we always struggle with food." She finds food to be the biggest struggle because "it is a need with all of these choices attached to it about how I'm going to feed my family and what farms and businesses I'm going to support in the process."

This raises a notable point in the disparity between levels of food insecurity on the socio-economic spectrum. Many families don't have the luxury of considering nutritional and ethical constraints. Families without transportation and reliable income are limited to the resources in their immediate vicinity; and within city neighborhoods those resources can be deeply lacking in whole, nourishing foods.

The Vine Neighborhood, for instance, lost its lone full-service grocer, when the Howard Street Harding's was bought out by a developer and abruptly closed its doors in February of this year. This left countless households without access to fresh food sources within walking distance.

A walkable resource is one thing the Browns don't have to worry about – they have the ability to drive to places that sell fresh foods and to places that offer the best deals.

Steena says that avoiding as many pricey processed foods as possible, shopping the bent-and-dent section, and limiting her family's meat consumption helps them stay on a shoe-string food budget. They can't afford the meat that she would like to buy for her family, so she looks for sales and tries not to think about the chemicals and hormones that they are ingesting. All of this requires a lot of pre-planning and time for shopping trips and home-prepared meals and snacks.

While 59 percent of families in Kalamazoo County live above the ALICE threshold, a look at the Household Stability Budget (another measure of security from the ALICE Report), reveals that while that 59 percent may be meeting their basic needs, many of those households are still not fully secure.

The Household Stability Budget differs from the Survival Budget in that it allows a higher, but still modest, budget at a much more sustainable level. And it adds a savings category. The Stability Budget in Kalamazoo would require an income for a family of four, like the Browns, of around $87,000 per year. The food budget, itself, is nearly doubled at around $1,200 per month.

"I'd LOVE to have $1,200 a month for food! I'd probably have money to actually roll over then instead of coming in over budget all of the time and trying to make it up," says Steena.

Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes offers a range of services to the food insecure living in Kalamazoo County. In addition to their food pantry programs, they also partner with Communities in Schools to offer weekend food packs to eligible students; and the Loaves and Fishes office can even help people fill out food stamp applications.

When asked about the prevalence of food insecurity from her vantage point of meeting the food needs of struggling families in the Kalamazoo community  Jennifer Johnson, the Executive Director of Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes says: "Our country, as well as state and local areas, is says to be 'recovering' from the recent recession but those that were hit the hardest during that time will take the longest to recover. It is disheartening to think that those folks who are working continue to struggle so much to make ends meet or fill that gap that occurs sometime during the month," she says.

Johnson says that food stamp benefits or other forms of aid are not requisite in order to receive food from Loaves and Fishes food pantry program, "precisely because we want to also help those that are living on the fringe – employed but not making a living wage, employed but just beyond the reach of the food stamp system."

Johnson also acknowledges that fresh, nutritional foods are the hardest foods to come by for the food insecure. "I think we would be remiss to not be providing fresh produce since Michigan is the second largest agricultural state in the country. But getting that food, on a daily basis, to our 24 Grocery Pantry sites can be challenging," she says.

For food pantries like Loaves and Fishes barriers to keeping fresh food stocked, is primarily just that – the inability to keep fresh food fresh. While their Grocery Pantry Program does, indeed, provide access to healthy, perishable foods, like fruits and vegetables, many of those pantry sites are small and have inadequate refrigeration space to keep very many perishable items. So, of course, feeding thousands of people on a budget compels Loaves and Fishes to seek out processed, shelf-stable foods.  

As awareness grows that certain residents lack access to nutritional foods, more efforts are being made to break down barriers when it comes to equal access. In addition to efforts like Kalamazoo Loaves and Fishes' to offer more fresh food, Food Stamp recipients also qualify for a special Farmer's Market program, called "Double Up Food Bucks," which turns every dollar spent on produce into $2 (up to $20 worth) every market day.

The Browns might qualify for food stamps – they used them a couple of years ago around the time of their second child's birth – but didn't re-apply. "It was so time intensive. I felt like I had to tell my life story and then some to get a little bit of money each month," Steena says.

If you've ever navigated that application process, your empathic groan might have just been audible. Applying for food assistance is a daunting task, which involves filling out upward of twenty pages of paperwork, and providing proper documentation and verifications, all of which must be renewed every six months in order to maintain benefits.

Instead, in the summer, the Browns raid Steena's uncle's garden and visit Tabitha Farm and Urban Homestead's Free Farm Stand, which provides free produce, without qualification or restriction, to anyone in the community during the Farmer's Market season.

Katie Pearson, the farm owner, gleans leftovers from willing farmers at the close of the Saturday Bank Street Market, often with her own baby slung on her back. She then hauls them back to her farm on the Southside, just off of Burdick and sets up a free roadside stand on Sunday. Her farm is a community-led justice model in response to the lack of access to fresh foods in the city.

Attendance varies as the season fluctuates, but last year she averaged between 80 families per week during the peak season and 15 families per week at the slower ends of the season. In 2014, her farm offered up 3.1 tons of fruits and vegetables to the community for free.

When nutrition and health are readily accessible only to the most socio-economically privileged in our community, the community, as a whole, is vulnerable. When families are forced to make difficult choices, like food and nutritional compromises, their own health is at risk and those repercussions are passed on to the greater community through increased health-care premiums and taxes for everyone.

If you are interested in learning about ways you can help, check out KLF's website to learn about donation and service opportunities. If you'd like to learn more about food justice, ERACCE, a Kalamazoo-based training organization committed to Eliminating Racism and Claiming / Celebrating Equality, offers a day-long workshop called, "Introduction to Food Justice," for those wanting to explore the connections between food justice, the food system, and the ways that racism and oppression contribute to food insecurity.You can find more information about that workshop, and all of their programs on their website.

Kathi Valeii is a writer, speaker, and activist living in Kalamazoo. She writes about gender-based oppression and full spectrum reproductive rights at her blog, birthanarchy.com.

Photos by Susan Andress