By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Since last year, White Center Food Bank has seen a 40% increase in the number of households it serves—even as food and other supplies remain increasingly difficult to come by.
Donations of food from grocery stores and individuals have “definitely slowed down,” said Carmen Smith, White Center Food Bank’s executive director. Even though households in need have significantly increased, she said, “Our food donations are, I think, only right now at a 7% increase.”
Fresh produce at the White Center Food Bank
“For much of the year, it was pretty much a 0% increase,” she continued. “So we’re essentially distributing a similar amount of food as last year, but to more people.”
And it’s a lot more people. Since 2019, Smith said, the food bank has seen about a 200% increase in households it serves. This past year, Smith said, the food bank served an average of 1,000 households per week, and the food bank estimates that about 70% of the households who come through belong to the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community.
When the Northwest Asian Weekly spoke with Smith in mid-November, she said that White Center Food Bank had seen a record-breaking 1,300 families the week before—the most the food bank had seen “ever.”
Even smaller, local food programs targeted towards a specific demographic are feeling the strain. A few members of the International Community Health Services (ICHS) team spoke with the Northwest Asian Weekly just before the Thanksgiving holiday. Located in the Chinatown-International District (CID), ICHS runs a congregate meal program for elders aged 60 and older. The program provides these elders with a hot meal, as well as needed social interaction and physical activity.
ICHS’s congregate meal program
The ICHS team also reported a steady increase in elders attending the program, and said that the program averages about 40 elders per day. About 90% of the elders the program serves report living alone.
The increases the food bank and the food program are seeing aren’t anomalies, and the reasons for them aren’t mysteries.
“I went to an anti-hunger policy conference earlier in the year in D.C., and there are people from all over the country there, and pretty much across the board, what everybody is seeing as families’ biggest challenges is, the housing prices,” Smith said. “They just keep going up, and wages aren’t keeping up with that. So, there’s a saying that I’ve now adopted: ‘The rent always eats first.’”
And in Seattle, the rent does always eat first. Axios this year reported that home prices in Washington state have increased 800% over the last 40 years, far outstripping the national average of 500%. The publication last year also reported on the overall ever-increasing cost of living in the Seattle area. This means that, in addition to families having to contend with increasing housing prices, they also have to face increasing costs in everything from transportation to gas to groceries. This is due in part to pandemic-induced inflation that has still not fully cooled down.
“There’s something I saw recently, that more families are also turning to credit to buy groceries,” Smith said. “And then, of course, there’s those deadly fees at the end, and does trying to buy food for your family to stay alive turn into bankruptcy, and no home?”
Food shortages and the increasing difficulties of simply making ends meet aren’t just localized to the Seattle area, either. Across the United States, food banks are seeing record numbers of households in need, and the USDA reported a statistically significant decrease in food security across the United States at the end of 2023. The national Feeding America food assistance program, composed of a network of 200 food banks, last year reported in its 2024 financial appropriations priorities the struggle to keep up with demand, in the face of ever-increasing costs to purchase and transport food.
Funding is a major factor in food assistance programs’ woes. Both Smith and the ICHS team pointed to the fact that local, state, and federal funding still doesn’t cover what’s needed, and financial donations are down, overall.
For instance, Min Huang, the senior services manager at ICHS, said ICHS contracts in five-year cycles with the City of Seattle to receive money for its food program. But the amount of money the program receives currently stands at just $10—and that is after the City’s 2024 increase in its basic monthly payment to the program.
“If you want to go out to buy a lunchbox, it costs at least $18-$20 already,” Huang said. She explained that she asked the City to increase the payout, but because the unit price listed on the contract was $10.83, they refused. Paulo Allarde, ICHS’s Food Services & Congregate Meal Program Supervisor, later explained in an email that the unit price is “what the city thinks we are spending just for food cost. We received a monthly base price which covers the supplies, labor cost, rent, etc.”
The program also no longer receives volunteer services from the National Asian Pacific Center on Aging, which means it has to employ enough folks to cover the meals needed. Previously, that had helped with the cost of labor.
And while the program won’t turn anyone away, it also cannot reliably collect donations from the people it serves, because of the financial choices those elders in need have to make. ICHS suggests a donation of $3 per elder who comes to its hot lunch program, but most of them can’t afford to both donate $3 and pay for a bus pass to ICHS to get what may be their only meal of the day.
“Some of the seniors share that when they are by themselves at home, facing four walls, sometimes they lose their appetite, and they don’t know what they should cook for dinner,” Huang shared. “Sometimes, if there is any leftover, they ask to take some home. So we always give the leftovers for them to take home. … Then they have, you know, they have something to eat, at least to keep their nutrition in balance.”
All told, Allarde said the cost per meal currently stands around $27. The program is set to serve 10,504 meals by the end of the year, according to its contract with the City, but if it ends up running out of resources before year’s end, the program may close for a few days to wait for the necessary funding to come through.
The White Center Food Bank is also feeling the squeeze from a lack of funding, in a slightly different way.
The White Center Food Bank sources food in a variety of ways, including through the state’s participation in The Emergency Food Assistance Program—or “TEFAP,” a federal program—via Food Lifeline to local food donation drives.
But even here, the food bank is running into problems, again because of the shortage of money at every level. A lack of money in the wallet of a single household is reflected in the amount of food it can donate to the food bank, and the amount of money they can donate to programs like Food Lifeline. And even though the federal government just increased the amount of money allotted to TEFAP, it is still not enough.
“Food Lifeline (a member of Feeding America) is our big food bank distributor,” Smith said, speaking of the Western Washington food assistance program that White Center Food Bank gets some of its food from. “They allocate our TEFAP commodity items and even their donation streams are drying up, too. We’re seeing it from all levels of the industry experiencing very similar trends.”
Smith said that though she does not have any hard data on the matter, she personally believes that food producers may have continued to scale back operations, and be more stringent with their bottom lines, leaving less food to be donated overall. While this means they are not overproducing, which prevents food waste—“a good thing,” Smith said—this also means there is less food to be donated to agencies like the state’s Food Lifeline.
“And I think, you know, just all around, Food Lifeline is probably supporting more agencies than they ever were before,” Smith noted.
Her read on the matter of Food Lifeline is correct. According to current statistics, Food Lifeline’s clientele has increased by 100,000 people since last year, bringing the total number served across the state to 1.7 million people. Likewise, the number of food access locations via community partners has jumped from 402 locations to 541 locations.
Smith said that the food bank has been able to secure funding for produce, which she said is great news. Not only is the food bank able to get a better price on items that are more perishable, such things are what White Center Food Bank clients want anyway. The majority of the White Center Food Bank’s AAPI clientele hail from Vietnam, Cambodia, and China.
“Because we serve such a diverse demographic, we try to get things that are really cross-cultural,” Smith said, listing off produce like varieties of hot peppers, citrus fruits, eggplant, purple onions, and even daikon and ube, which “my mom was so excited about.”
The White Center Food Bank and ICHS’s meal program are but two food assistance programs that are in need of assistance themselves. The far-reaching, long-term problems they and food assistance programs like them are facing require the same sorts of solutions, but this is not to say that individuals can’t help. Smith encourages people to regularly “donate to their local food bank in whatever way that’s meaningful to them.”
“Maybe money isn’t an option. So, can somebody host a food drive at their place of employment? Also asking the food bank, ‘Is there a time of year that’s better than others?’” Smith said. “I think we always tend to see a lot of generosity around the holidays, but families have to eat year-round. There could be leaner times where the food bank is needing more support. And then, the types of food that the community wants, if someone’s hosting a food drive. And certainly, volunteering is always an option, too.”
Allarde also encourages the community to donate in whatever ways they can.
“This program is very, very important and integral to our seniors, not just because they get nutritious meals. It helps a lot of the family members as well to make sure that their parents are not just at home,” Allarde said. “A lot of the program costs ICHS has to recoup, just because the funding from the city is just not enough.”
Readers can donate to ICHS here and to the White Center Food Bank here. The Asian Counseling and Referral Service (ACRS), which runs a food bank that specifically caters to AAPI diets, also accepts donations.