Boston's food for all
By Kaitlyn Mettetal, Claudia Montaner
and Peter Spetelunas
The novel coronavirus outbreak has upended semblances of normalcy and stability in every facet and strata of American life. Parents have been deprived of holding their grandchild for the first time, college students have forfeited their long-sought independence, and resources at community food pantries are running threadbare. As the third and most fatal surge continues to ravage communities across the nation, 14.4 mil. Americans have fallen ill and more than 270,000 have died from the virus.
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Regardless of who we are or where we are located, adapting to the “new normal” has presented an onslaught of struggles. And, paramount of these, is the economic crisis that, as of May, forced 8 mil. people below the poverty threshold in the United States.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Civilian Unemployment Rate data, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an exponential increase in the national unemployment rate from 3.6-percent in Feb. 2020 to 14.7-percent in April — higher than it was after the Great Depression.
The magnitude of the current economic crisis, unprecedented in its scale, has underscored many negated but dire issues of poverty and economic inequality. Especially, where Americans’ access to quality sustenance is concerned.
Photo taken by @roslindalecommunityfridge on Instagram
Overall food insecurity rates are expected to reach 14.2-percent in Massachusetts this year, and every crevice in the region is wracked with uncertainty about when, or even if, state and local legislators will be able to mitigate this burgeoning pandemic-within-a-pandemic.
“The need isn’t going anywhere,” Catherine Drennan, the director of public affairs at Greater Boston Food Bank, said in an interview with The Boston Globe on Nov. 5.
Food scarcity rates have hovered around seven percent in 12 out of 14 Massachusetts counties as of 2018, according to Feeding America’s Mapping the Meal Gap data.
But, just as the pandemic’s economic fallout has revealed a plethora of identity-based fissures embedded within other U.S. federal and state institutions, the plight of Massachusetts’ food scarcity is a disproportionate reality for urban residents.
A recent study conducted by Feeding America, a nationwide non-profit food bank organization, stated that up to an additional 17.1 mil. people are projected to experience food insecurity by the start of 2021 if the current national unemployment trend continues. Mississippi and Louisiana are expected to have the largest overall food insecure populations, with scarcity rates breaching 20-percent by the end of the year.
However, and despite wielding a median household income of nearly two times that of the projected top food-insecure states, Massachusetts continues to see the most exacerbated facets of hunger since the pandemic’s initial outbreak in March. The same study by Feeding America found that the state’s food insecurity rate has increased by 59-percent since 2018, rendering proper nutrients inaccessible to more than 1 mil. Massachusetts residents.
Food insecurity rates in Suffolk County stood at an average of 4.8-percent higher (11.9%) than surrounding Essex, Norfolk, and Middlesex counties in 2018. Now, in the throes of the pandemic’s third “wave”, research conducted by Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB) posits that one in every eight Suffolk County residents are unsure of how and when they will eat their next meal.
GBFB, alongside more than 500 hunger-relief agencies, provides meals to food-insecure families across Eastern Massachusetts. While the organization has served over 9.5 mil. pounds of food since the start of the pandemic and plans to provide 20 mil. meals as a part of their Hunger Free Holiday initiative, new disputes with the USDA’s food-distribution program are limiting the span of federal-and-state-funded food banks’ community outreach.
The Boston Community Fridge initiative is a mutual-aid coalition emerging across city neighborhoods in direct response to the federal and state governments’ shortfalls in applicable funding to community food-distributors and proper financial assistance to those most devastated by the pandemic’s economic crisis.
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Sarah Ribero, the co-founder of the Community Fridge in Allston/Brighton, explains that their food-distribution functions on a first-come-serve basis. Most of the food provided is donated daily by local farms and restaurants, and the fridges are often maintained and cleaned voluntarily by neighborhood residents. And, instead of walking or spending money on public transportation, the fridges are usually placed in areas that are convenient for the community.
“We placed the Allston fridge in Union Square on Austin and 1 North Beacon,” said Ribero. “It’s a really popular area for the unhoused community to hang out,” she said when describing the process of planning the fridge.
Ribero went on to explain that making the Allston/Brighton fridges MBTA-accessible was a priority in determining the location.
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“We wanted to make sure that it's where people spend their time and that it's targeting the demographic that we're hoping for,” she said.
"It's not just unhoused people who need food, there are families, there are people who are very suddenly unemployed people who are underpaid in general, that we want to make sure that they know that the fridge is accessible for them as well. It's for anybody who needs food anytime.”
The community began to take on a new meaning during COVID-19. Awareness of privilege and race became further apparent with the loss of jobs and inadequate resources available to some. As communities came together, so did the recognition of inequality across race and socioeconomics.
Climate Ready Boston, a renewable energy campaign launched by the City in 2000, defines social vulnerability as the “disproportionate susceptibility of some social groups to the impacts of hazards, including death, injury, loss, or disruption of livelihood”. Of the seven populations analyzed in their 2017 Social Vulnerability study, people of color are most likely to endure high-risk circumstances while also comprising the majority (53%) of Boston’s total population.
Over half of the City of Boston’s residents, being people of color, are at-risk for experiencing food insecurity with no end to the pandemic in-sight. And, to complicate the issue tenfold, higher poverty rates and denser populations of color tend to share a mutually exclusive relationship, according to the same study (2017) conducted by Climate Ready Boston.
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Food insecurity rarely evolves alone. While poverty is the leading cause of hunger in Boston, the persisting consequences of tactics like redlining and faulty mortgages, engrained within the City’s political systems, have muddled the boundaries between being impoverished and being non-white. And, thus, food-insecure too.
Project Bread, a local food-advocacy and research organization, found that the rate of food insecurity within Black households is double (1 in every 3 families) the hunger rate of white households in Boston. Latinx and Hispanic families are second-most at-risk for food insecurity in Boston with a 25-percent hunger rate, as of October.
why is the hunger crisis in boston disproportionately affecting people of color?
Jenny LaFlame, the co-founder of Roslindale Community Fridge, believes that it is because the systems in place to help underprivileged communities are actually intimidating them.
“I'm from a community of color that, you know, there's poverty here, there's folks that are out of jobs, there's undocumented immigrants, there's, you know, people who don't speak English,” LaFlame said in a Zoom interview. “People who are illegal immigrants don’t want to go somewhere that they are afraid of. They don't want to be caught on cameras or asked for their ID or something you know.”
Flavia DeSousa, an organizer of the Sommerville fridge, whose family is made up of mostly Brazilian immigrants, agrees.
“The people in my community would rather use a fridge, where there are no cameras because they aren’t doing anything bad, just trying to feed themselves or their family,” she said.
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DeSousa has lived in Sommerville since she was 4 years old. In a community of immigrants, some undocumented, residents relied on each other for assistance that failed to be provided by state and local governments. When Flavia noticed other fridges being organized during the pandemic she decided that it would only be natural for her to do the same for her community.
She organized a location in her neighborhood to combat discrimination and intimidation tactics utilized by welfare agencies to deter at-need populations from applying for assistance. Many members in the community were denied stimulus unemployment aid, and most of her family, like her mom, who worked as a housekeeper, lost their jobs.
Food insecurity became a dilemma within her community quickly after the beginning of the pandemic.
"i saw the food insecurity affecting my own family and my own community."
She teamed up with city councilman J.T. Scott to organize and purchase a fridge.
“Honestly we are super lucky that Scott reached out to us,” DeSousa said. “Like he found us we didn’t go looking for him.”
However, the process of establishing a community fridge in other Boston neighborhoods was not so effortless. Many of the organizers were met with scrutiny and disinterest from municipal and state representatives, who insisted that such an initiative would not have any leverage in the city, according to LaFlame from Roslindale.
“I think that, it gets difficult because we had conversations with folks but like, there's never really been any pull up to the fridge,” LaFlame said. “Sometimes you feel like you're just not getting that recognition from the folks that you need to get it from, or you would like the recognition from”.
If the community fridges are going to be a solution for the vulnerable, local and state officials need to start getting involved in their communities. Zach Shea, a representative from the Sommerville fridge, explained his frustration towards the City of Boston’s radio silence on systemic hunger.
“Yeah [Joe] Curtatone seems like a nice guy but I've driven past his house before and he lives in a totally different world,” Shea stated. “He doesn't see what we see every day.”
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Although these fridges are only a few months old the benefits are already apparent to the operators and volunteers.
“We'll get a large drop off from a farm or a restaurant. And within an hour, all of that food, which is typically pounds and pounds of produce is completely gone,” Ribero from Allston/Brighton said. “And a lot of the times people are coming up while we're stopping by to clean or maintain the fridge. And they thank us for the food.”
LaFlame believes that the increase in community fridges in the area will help the solutions that the city is already putting in place saying
“And I think that that's the thing with food insecurity, too, is maybe we community fridges, we're like, all right, food pantries, have had a huge number of increase of people,” she said. “This isn't the one solution. But this is our solution.”
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Photo Taken by Wicked Local
Despite the lack of help or interest from state representatives, the communities are recognizing the issues they have and are actively working to improve them. Food insecurity has been rapidly increasing, and Massachusetts is projected to be among the states with the highest levels of food insecurity next year.
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To combat this, community fridges are working to be a part of the solution by teaching their communities that they do not have to rely on the government. It would be of no surprise if other metropolitan grassroots organizations begin indoctrinating this program elsewhere.
Maybe community fridges are the necessary light to the boundless darkness that is COVID-19.
They echo the best and worst to come out of the pandemic.
While they spotlight burgeoning social inequality, inadequate government support, and fragile systemic failures, Boston Community Fridges, above all, express the power and love of community in the most dire of straights.