- [Interviewer] How would you describe senior food insecurity in one word?

- Not.

That's the one word.

It's not a problem until it happens to you.

(light dramatic music) - [Reporter 1] One in six seniors in the United States are food insecure, meaning they don't have reliable access to nutritious, healthy food.

- [Reporter 2] These organizations say senior citizens in the Amarillo area often face food insecurity.

- We rank among the lowest for food security in our senior population.

(light dramatic music continues) - [Reporter 3] Our seniors are having to choose between purchasing food and purchasing their desperately-needed medications.

- [Reporter 4] One in five individuals in the next five to six years will be 65 or older.

- Make sure that people understand that this is a significant issue in our country and it's not going away.

- I think it's fine for organizations to say, "We want to end hunger in this area."

I think everybody knows what that means.

Saying that we wanna end food insecurity in the area, then like, "Well, what exactly is that?"

My name is Craig Gundersen.

I'm the Sneed Family Endowed Chair at Baylor University in the Department of Economics.

- Food insecurity is maybe a little confusing.

We're used to hearing the word hunger.

Hunger is a physical sensation of lacking food in your stomach.

Food insecurity is a little bit deeper.

- To be very basic about if somebody doesn't have enough food at some time over the past year due to financial constraints, we would consider them to be food insecure.

- We don't measure hunger- (keyboard clacking) Because if we were to measure hunger, we were to survey everybody in the room.

Everybody would say, "Yes, I've experienced hunger in the last day or the last week."

Just because you've experienced hunger doesn't mean you're experiencing food insecurity.

- So if you look at this recent inflation that occurred in 2022 and 2023, which led to very large increases in food insecurity in the United States, in particular, seniors saw these increases in food insecurity.

- According to Feeding America, senior citizens are the fastest-growing food insecure population in the United States.

- Rising food insecurity during the pandemic has impacted a lot of people, especially our seniors.

- [Reporter 5] Data shows more than three million US seniors reported sometimes or often not having enough to eat.

- When we first started this work, I don't think there was anyone who really knew the number of older adults in the Texas Panhandle who were experiencing hunger and food insecurity.

- One of the biggest challenges for the Texas Panhandle is just how large it is in terms of the area that you have so many people spread out over, roughly 30,000 square miles, but that's spread out over a very, very large area.

It's very challenging then when you have food insecurity and you're trying to reach all those food insecure people over a very large, large region.

- Anywhere between 10,000 to 15,000 older adults in the Texas Panhandle are experiencing hunger and food insecurity.

- For me, for a long time, it was a number, and it was honestly easy to not do anything about a number, 'cause a number doesn't have a face, a number doesn't have a story.

It's just something that takes up space on a spreadsheet.

- I'm Zach Wilson, I'm the Executive Director with the High Plains Food Bank.

The most eye-opening part to me, we actually spoke more with the individual who said that, you know, she hadn't had a blueberry in a long time, and she explained her story, and all of a sudden it makes sense, it was a food access barrier, it was a transportation barrier.

It was, you know, her family status.

She was the only one in her family that was still alive.

The problem is growing, you know, in our area.

- I went out on some community meetings, and tried to ask that question, "How many older adults in your community are experiencing this issue?"

And by large the answer was, "I don't know," or "We don't know."

- So my name is Alan Keister and I'm the founder of Heal the City.

- [Reporter 6] Heal the City is continuing to grow and looking forward to changing lives.

Uninsured patients are seen at no cost.

The clinic manages acute care, chronic care, dental care, and more.

- When we started, I didn't recognize that a lot of our patients really didn't have access to food.

In fact, about 2/3 of our patients at some point during the month didn't have enough food in their home to eat.

- One of the key determinants of food insecurity in the United States are food prices.

- [Reporter 7] $7 for eggs, eight for bacon.

Food costs are rising.

- [Narrator] Food prices continue to outpace inflation, increasing by 28% since 2019.

- The cost of eggs is expected to go up 40% this year.

- We have a nutrition class here every Thursdays, and we talk about they have to eat salmon, they have to eat fish, they have to eat fruits, vegetables, like, good food is expensive.

- And diet is important and can further complicate issues like food insecurity for elderly people.

(oil sizzling) - Food insecurity is not just about having the money to buy food, but also some of our seniors that experience food insecurity is lack of transportation.

- [Don] And bus service is not sometimes available at the time those people need to go to buy their groceries.

- [Karla] A lot of the people that use public transportation, they have to walk.

- And we know that seniors have higher rates of disability across many different dimensions.

- [Zach] Those factors start to add up and all of a sudden you have a person in need.

- Think about the stress that they take with them to bed at night.

You have to acknowledge there's a challenge first, and then solutions come later.

- [Zach] We have a whole generation that is moving into that age group.

- [Craig] Nobody else seems to care about what can we do to help them out.

- They seem to be a forgotten demographic.

- At Catholic Charities, at the Interfaith Hunger Project, we worked with several organizations who were focused on feeding kiddos.

People were passionate, I mean, would volunteer their whole day to helping those kiddos and, you know, making sure that their snacks were packed up and that their meals were coordinated.

But then it was almost a struggle to get people to focus, refocus on senior hunger.

- Because we've all been kids.

Maybe we all went hungry one day.

So we have some context that we can go back to and recognize and appreciate, and understand that situation a little bit more.

We have such a hard time understanding what older adults are experiencing, it's because we ourselves have not been an older adult.

- I think it's because I am so young, I see the old and find them so unrelatable.

- Did you have forks or knives in the old days?

- Forks and knives?

Oh sure.

- And so, it's really hard for us to put ourselves in their shoes when we haven't been there and have no context for that.

- And then there's self-esteem, and self-respect, and self-worth.

- Many of the senior adults are very proud and they don't wanna take a handout even though they're probably the most deserving.

- When we interview patients, nobody wants to admit, none of my adult patients want to admit that they don't have the resources to buy food.

There's a shame involved in that.

- Many of our older adults in the Texas Panhandle who are struggling with hunger and food insecurity are doing so silently, right?

They are quietly suffering.

- And that's another challenge with our senior adults, is it's hard to find out that they're struggling.

(bell dinging) - [Brenda] Do you want first and last name?

- Yes, ma'am.

- Brenda Preston.

I am 77-years-old.

And my husband is 90, will be 91 this week.

(laughs) - [Interviewer] How long have the two of you been married?

- 48 years.

I was living in Guymon, was on the verge of a divorce, and I needed a job very badly that could support my daughter and I. I went to the Amarillo College truck driving class.

He was teaching his first class.

He allowed me to get in, even though I was a week late in registering.

And I went through the class, and after my husband and I got together, (clears throat) which was not during the school (laughs), let me clarify that, yeah.

Thanks to that, I went on to be the first woman truck driver in the Safeway store in Amarillo.

Then after my husband and I got together, we were going from coast to coast delivering airplane engines.

I retired, he tried to retire, and just that was not for him.

He just couldn't stay at home.

And he'd been a truck driver his whole life.

When he was 85, he took a fall and was injured.

Not terribly, but he was injured and we decided that he needed to do something besides truck driving, and started living on Social Security.

I wish I could say that it was wonderful and we get along just fine, but...

So we had our house auctioned and the contents auctioned.

We saved a few things, and had to rely on some amazing people to get us through it because neither one of us was physically able to pick up boxes and go do what needed to be done.

With the money that we got for the house, we bought an RV and paid off what we owed.

Our kids used to, well, grandkids and anybody really used to come to us to help them out.

Well, (chuckles) my kids are paying part of my bills and I just hate to think that they are gonna have to take care of me one of these days if something happens to our Social Security, because that's the only income we have.

- A lot of our seniors have tried to make good decisions.

They've tried to be good savers through their career, and they've gotten to this season where they thought, "Oh, I've got enough, it's gonna be fine."

And then all of a sudden, cost of living rises, their whatever was in their pension or whatever their retirement, it's just not enough to make ends meet.

- If somebody is 35 and they face a serious financial shock.

Is he or she oftentimes can go and work somewhere and make up for that large decline in income.

Okay.

If somebody's 75, yeah, some of them, many of them are still in the workforce, either by choice or not by choice, but a lot of them really are out of the workforce and there's not really that response that they can make.

So they face a constraint that many other younger people do not face.

- Fixed income.

- Fixed income.

- Fixed income.

- Their income is fixed.

- [Narrator] The key to a happy retirement is simple.

All you need is at least three streams of fixed income allocated as follows, 40% devoted to savings and investments, 30% devoted to pensions, and another 30% devoted to Social Security.

- It's surprising that a lot of the folks that we serve and have on our services are those people who have worked all of their lives, who have done everything that, you know, I think people would say that you're supposed to do, but still aren't able to make ends meet for whatever reason.

- [Jessica] So in the Texas Panhandle, we have the top 26 counties, and kind of central in that, we have Potter and Randall County, you know, and Amarillo is between both.

Some of Amarillo is in Potter County and some of it is in Randall.

And so there are still places of Potter and Randall County that are rural, but by and large we consider Amarillo to be kind of the city and then the other 24 counties outside of that to be rural.

- If you take say south parts of Amarillo and Canyon and stuff like that, you know, there's more affluence there, things are going pretty well.

- [Jessica] If you even just look at Potter and Randall County, Randall County is often wealthier in terms of the data and the research.

If you look at the United Way of Amarillo and Canyon's Community Impact Report, often you'll see that Randall County has better outcomes than Potter County.

And so there is a big distinction between Potter and Randall in and of itself.

- Randall County, it is a higher-income county when you get closer to Canyon, but Randall County goes all the way into 45th and Amarillo.

So you also pick up two low-income housing units.

I mean, there's a very diverse economic system there.

- My name is Glenn Backus, I'm the Director of the Market on Tierra Blanca, Randall County's only full service food pantry.

- [Interviewer] Was there ever any pushback from anybody who felt like a place like The Market didn't need to exist in Randall County?

- Well, we still get that on occasion.

- I think that there's pushback for organizations that are working to address hunger and food insecurity in many of the communities because individuals don't see the need.

And when you don't see the need, there's no reason to support an effort.

- Feeding America came out with some stats that Randall County, 11.3% of the population was food insecure.

You know, given the size of Randall County, it's a sizable population, 15 to 20,000 people.

We have found that just in the last year alone, that has increased from 11.3% to 13.9%.

So we knew there was a need.

- My son's school let me know that they existed and that they would be more than happy to help us because he and I, we were homeless and living with family members and different friends, and having a hard time coming up with food.

- We oftentimes think about children and we think about seniors as being the sympathetic food insecure.

Okay?

That 55-year-old man is kind of, in many ways, lonely and everything, nobody thinks about him being this, or oftentimes nobody thinks about the 53-year-old woman who, you know, for the first time in her life, her kids are out of the house, but she's struggling financially over many different dimensions.

- A lot of the programs in this area, you have to be at least 65, or you have to have school-aged children.

But if you're 50 and your kids are grown and gone, you have no help.

- Really, our definition of an older adult goes back to the Older Americans Act of 1965.

- [Tauhric] So the Older Americans Act is a piece of federal legislation that was signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

And what it did was it created a framework for specific services to help keep older adults aging in place, or, as I like to say, in their own homes for as long as possible.

- Some people count that as 65 plus, some people say 62 plus, some people say 60 plus.

- But that 50 to 59 age group has substantially higher rates of food insecurity than the 60 plus group.

And I think it's for a number of different reasons.

You can't get Social Security until you're at minimum 62, and therefore you don't have that social safety net.

Similarly, with Medicare, can't get Medicare until it's what, 65 or whatever.

You don't have that social safety net.

On the other hand, a lot of the social safety nets that people have when they were raising children, those to some extent are no longer quite as present.

I mean, SNAP is still there, but there's different rules in terms of with and without children.

- At 53, I still have a 15-year-old, so I have a little bit of leeway.

I do get food stamps, it's just very limited.

- Another factor facing this group is that there's been a large increase in multi-generational households.

- [Reporter 8] 1/4 of Americans, 25 to 34, reported living in a multi-generational household in 2021, up from 9% 50 years ago.

- We have two or 3,000 kids in Amarillo being raised by their grandparents or great-grandparents.

- And some of those multi-generational households will be headed up by somebody who is 65 or older.

But a lot are coming to that 50 to 59 age group.

- My 15-year-old, as amazing as he is, and as much as I love him, he is adopted.

- And these are oftentimes multi-generational families whereby it was not like, "Oh, we had planned this entire time as my daughter was gonna move in with me with her kids when I became 55."

No, what this oftentimes is is the daughter is struggling, the daughter may not even be present in the children's lives, and then the grandmother is taking things over as the grandparent.

- A grandmother who lived in one of our communities here in the Texas Panhandle, pulled up to one of our mobile food pantries and she had children in the back and she said, "You know, thank you very much for this help.

I'm now the legal guardian of my grandchildren and my husband just recently passed away.

And so I didn't know what I was going to do to make ends meet, 'cause now I'm pretty much a parent again."

- Remember, earlier I was talking about people who are, you know, 75 years of age, and they may struggle to get a job 'cause they've been out of the labor force.

Those in that 50 to 59 age group, you know, if they lose their jobs, it's really, really hard to get another job that pays as well as what it was previously.

- [Reporter 9] Half of American workers older than 40 say they faced age discrimination, and 27% say they were denied a job because of their age.

- People think that in order to be food insecure, it means that you don't work.

That's simply not true.

The majority of people who turn to us for help have at least one job, sometimes more than one.

- I've worked a lot of different jobs my whole life.

I usually try to one full-time job and two or three part-time jobs at the same time.

So I've worked up to four jobs at a time.

So working hard was not the issue.

I had two surgeries where our apartment complex evicted us during that time.

- What's the leading predictor of food insecurity in the United States?

It's disability status.

- We have a lot of disabled people for one reason or another here in the Panhandle of Texas.

- All of their money is going to take care of healthcare, so they're having a hard time.

And so, when they have a tragedy, they're not prepared for that.

- I mean, I had one surgery on January 10th and one surgery on January 24th, one of them being an open eye procedure.

So I couldn't very well see, but I was required to move out of my apartment the day after my surgery.

So that's how we ended up with not having a place to live.

- When they did the Community Health Survey, what they found was that the number one health issue in our community was not diabetes, it wasn't hypertension, it wasn't obesity, it was behavioral health.

And behavioral health means different things to different people.

So what I would say in general, for us, it tends to have the overlaps of depression, anxiety, sometimes trauma, PTSD.

- When my family would be without food growing up, my mom would get really, really anxious and depressed.

And so I've tried to stay away from that, knowing what I've seen as a kid so that my son doesn't see it.

So he doesn't realize, when we were homeless, he thought we were camping out.

He thought we were camping out and having a good time.

He didn't know the difference.

So I try to make sure that my son doesn't know and doesn't experience the anxieties that I did growing up.

- I talk a lot about loneliness, I talk a lot about mental health challenges and those things go together, and I think that's really especially important for seniors.

- [Interviewer] So, you're not surprised that the latest numbers show that 25% of healthcare for seniors and older adults is spent on mental healthcare?

- Right, it doesn't surprise me at all.

Yeah, no, no.

And I would've, yeah, and that's just gonna increase over time.

- Most of us like to think that we're proactive, we're thinking about the future, what's gonna happen, you know, maybe next month, in six months, in a year, maybe we think about, you know, our retirement, whatever that's gonna be, the long play.

But when things get tight, when trouble comes, when resources aren't available, what tends to happen is people go into what I call chaos mode.

- You can't think, you can't focus, you can't work, you can't learn, you can't begin to get organized because food is something you gotta have every day.

It doesn't take a holiday, it doesn't take a vacation, it doesn't take a weekend off.

And so without food and consistency, it's chaos.

- When you don't know where your next meal is coming from or where your child's next meal is coming from, I think that that causes a lot of anxiousness, and our world has come to an anxious society for a lot of these reasons.

Yeah, I was just hospitalized as little as four weeks ago for anxiety and a heart rate, an extensive heart rate.

- [Reporter 10] According to BMC Public Health, researchers studied the connection between food insecurity and mental health during the pandemic.

They found that food insecurity nearly tripled the risk of anxiety and caused a 2.5 times higher risk of depression.

- In fact, PTSD is a big one because you can imagine not having food for yourself or your family is almost like having a trauma.

- I do think it can be really discouraging when you look at the reality of what hunger and food insecurity among older adults looks like.

You know, when you hear stories of individuals who are literally training their bodies to eat less and less and less and less, and ultimately going hungry, that hurts.

You know, when you hear stories about older adults who are so hungry that they are digging in dumpsters to try to get their next meal, that's really discouraging, that's really hard.

- I met a girl here that goes to my church and it was totally unexpected for both of us to see someone that you knew coming to the food bank.

And at first I thought, "Oh, somebody else is here besides me."

And she's not a senior, but she has kids.

There are places that will help, you know, they will jump right in and help you out.

And all you have to do is ask.

But sometimes that's hard for people to do as well.

- It's too much for any one person to take care of.

And I think it's where a lot of people do get frustrated.

This is so big, I can't even do anything about it.

Oh, when you talk about rural, it is even worse.

- The rural communities, our rural 24 counties have different challenges than Potter and Randall County, our two here.

- Not to say that the urban and suburban communities don't have challenges too.

They do, but they're more pronounced in a rural setting like the Texas Panhandle.

- There's a lot of challenges that faces rural Texas and really rural West Texas and the Texas Panhandle.

- [Craig] Problem is we just don't have the resources that an Amarillo, a Dallas, or Wichita Falls, a Lubbock has.

- [Zach] Frankly, I think it's gonna be very difficult to overcome those challenges.

(birds chirping) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided by the Mary E. Bivins Foundation and viewers like you.

Thank you.