WILTON — Over the last decade, the number of households accessing the Wilton Food Pantry has slowly increased from 15 to an estimated 70 this year, according to Wilton Social Services Director Sarah Heath.
Heath said the department gets new households interested and eligible for the food pantry every week — whether it’s someone who’s elderly, someone whose only income is Social Security, intact families or single parents with children.
“People struggle, even in Wilton, with keeping up with expenses. And if they fall into our guidelines, the first thing we offer, other than our general resources, is our food pantry,” Heath said. “And because Wilton is an extremely generous and supportive community, we never have empty shelves.”
The food pantry is extremely helpful for people who are “food insecure,” Heath added, which is part of a growing issue in Connecticut and in the U.S.
The number of such people without reliable access to food in Connecticut has almost doubled in the last 15 years, with about 442,000 considered food insecure in 2015-16, according to most recent data from the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
But a more troubling statistic is the increasing number of people who experience actual hunger in Connecticut, said Bernie Beaudreau, chief executive officer of Connecticut Food Bank, who led a presentation in Wilton on Oct. 25 that Heath attended.
Nearly 230,000 people in Connecticut experienced “disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake” in 2015-16. Or, in other words, a little more than a quarter million of people in Connecticut went without meals for some time that year, he said.
Typically, with a family with children, parents sacrifice their meals and often go days without eating, he added.
“Look at what’s happened in the last three years,” Beaudreau said, pointing to data comparing food insecurity statistics in Connecticut and in the U.S. “The actual experience of hunger has gone up in the last three years while the national one has gone down. So the persistence of hunger in our state is troubling.”
To deepen the conversation about the current state of hunger, Beaudreau began holding “Community Conversations: Breaking the Cycle of Hunger.” The presentation held in Wilton is part of that new initiative and aims to raise awareness about what Connecticut Food Bank is doing to help address the problem and to stir conversations about what communities can do to help solve the issue.
Based on in-house research and outside expertise, Beaudreau said one of the causes driving food hunger in Connecticut is the issue of underemployment and unlivable wages. And the way trends are going — in terms of growing food insecurity and income inequality in the state — the Connecticut Food Bank will need to distribute 56 million pounds of food by 2025, which is more than double of what they are distributing now in the six counties it serves, Beaudreau said.
“Our problem is that the people we serve are not organized to fight for wages. They have a voice, but it’s not being channeled,” Beaudreau said. “So we have an obligation to broaden the conversation and say, ‘What’s driving hunger and can somebody, somebody — people that we elect, people that make economic decisions — be mindful of the fact that people need to get paid a living wage?”
Growing income inequality is an issue Lisa Lenskold has also noticed while looking at food insecurity on the local level, she said at the Wilton presentation on Oct. 25.
Lenskold, who recently moved to Wilton from Norwalk, is a member Norwalk ACTS, a collective impact organization comprised of 100-plus civic leaders, educators and organizations whose mission is to improve the lives and futures of all Norwalk’s children, from “cradle to career.” She also started Norwalk Grows, a program that has installed edible gardens in 12 of Norwalk’s public schools.
She wonders why it is that some children go home with backpacks of nutritious food (from the Connecticut Food Bank Kids’ BackPack Program) to help feed their families while others come to school in their parents’ Mercedes.
“The inequity, right? Fairness, that’s not even the discussion. It’s just a matter that shouldn’t happen in our community,” Lenskold said. “I don’t know if people put their head in the sand and don’t realize that these people are hungry. I mean, it’s real.”
The event that made the experience of hunger real to Beaudreau was witnessing massive starvation in 1985, during the Ethiopian famine that shocked the world and caused an estimated one million deaths. Since then, Beaudreau has been committed to ending hunger in all its forms.
“While it’s not starvation, the deprivation of people and the suffering of people and the shame got me angry and got me determined to start to change that,” Beaudreau said, referring to hunger in Connecticut. “And many years later, the problem is bigger than it was, which is kind of frustrating.”
But Beaudreau doesn’t let his thoughts end there. Instead, he looks to small victories in the fight against hunger in Connecticut — from organizing people on the state level to try to create policy change to providing a place, such as the community discussions, where others working to end hunger can commiserate with one another.
This is the message he concluded with at his presentation in Wilton.
“Our output is 53,000 meals every day, so people are getting fed through the system. And that’s why I go down to the food pantries,” Beaudreau said. “When I see the transactions and when I see people being helped, I’m reinforced that this is a good thing. When we get these stories and find out what’s going on behind there, that’s when we have to start thinking about, ‘Well, how do we deepen the conversation?’ And it can change things.”
Cheryl Thompson, philanthropy officer of the Connecticut Food Bank, agreed and encouraged the few people who gathered Oct. 25 to become involved.
“There’s not a lack of resources, there’s certainly no lack of money. It’s just people are not aware of what a widespread problem it is,” Thompson said. “Even in a town like Wilton, where we are tonight, and in Weston, where I live, we have food pantries. And those are two of the most affluent communities in the state.”
“We want people to see it’s here and be part of the experience,” Beaudreau added. “We have a basic simple equation of feeding people. If we’re not getting that done, then we’re not doing our job.”
skim@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2568; @stephaniehnk
