Since spring 2022, a flood of migrants fleeing political instability in Venezuela — about 136,000 — have settled in Queens, New York, and are in desperate need of food and other resources. The surging migrant population has led to depleted food pantries in the borough; as of June 2023, more than 20.5% of Queens residents are experiencing food insecurity. They may be physically safe, but are swept into the new challenge of hunger.
Food insecurity, defined as a lack of access to a sufficient quantity of nutritious food, is a growing public health problem in the United States. In 2019, according to the Department of Agriculture, 35.2 million in the U.S. lived in food-insecure homes, with higher rates in single parent households and households of color. In 2022, that number rose to 44.2 million. Many of these households are also lacking something that could help them combat food insecurity: nutrition education.
The lack of reliable access to nutritious food is associated with increased risk of chronic and metabolic diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and arthritis. In the United States, poor diet is the leading risk factor for death from diseases, even greater than tobacco.
Interesting article and I agree nutrition education can help. I wanted to drop an additional point as someone that grew up in a home that got food assistance and used food banks. There is often an assumption that people with food insecurity lack access to healthy foods. I disagree, they might lack access to a variety of healthy foods, but buying soda and snacks with food assistance is a choice. Of course, the choice is made for a variety of reasons, but the one I saw was desperation. When you are living depressed, you’ll look for any source of happiness and sometimes yummy snack food is all you’ve got. Also, healthy food usually takes additional prep time, and when you’re working multiple minimum wage jobs, you don’t always have a lot of free time, especially if you have kids, so queue the prepared processed foods. This isn’t the case for everyone, but I wanted to point out the people needing this help aren’t stupid, they are living day to day. We can help them by raising minimum wage, providing child care assistance, and maybe a universal income, but not throwing more food at the problem, that’s a band-aid.
