Many holiday celebrations center around food, but for many Nevadans, they're concerned about where their next meal is going to come from.

This week on Nevada Week, we look at the bigger problem of food insecurity in Southern Nevada.

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(Kipp Ortenburger) Welcome to Nevada Week.

Well, food insecurity became dramatically worse during the pandemic.

People were out of work for months, and they lined up at schools, churches and community centers to get boxes of food.

But now as people return to work and increasingly normal lives, there is evidence that food insecurity still lingers.

There's many factors contributing to this, but is this going to be the new normal or a sign of bigger kitchen table issues or simply a lingering effect of the pandemic that will right itself in time?

Joining us to talk about this problem are Leslie Carmine, director of media and community relations at Catholic Charities; Jodi Tyson, vice president of strategic initiatives at Three Square; McKenzie Mayor, coordinator for the UNLV Food Pantry, and Ian McDonough, director of graduate studies and economics at UNLV.

Well, thank you so much for joining us; we really appreciate it.

You know, I usually hate to do this on the show, but I think it's really important as a first question to go broad and really get a good definition of what food insecurity means.

Jodi, you have a lot of experience in this.

How do we classify food insecurity to start us?

(Jodi Tyson) Food insecurity is determined by the USDA first, so every state is given a food insecurity rating based on numbers that come to them from telephone interviews about whether or not people worry about getting enough food or being able to afford enough food, or if they're stretching their food resources to cover more meals by either watering it down or skipping a meal, or if they're trying to figure out how to pay for food or pay for rent.

So those are the things that come into play when we talk about what it means to be food insecure.

-Leslie, I mean, is this always just about affordability or are there other factors that we need to be taking into account when we're talking about what food insecurity means?

(Leslie Carmine) I think it kind of drills down to the family itself, you know, whether they have a support system in place or not, and some people are in different situations where they maybe can't get to a pantry to get a meal that we're offering so they may have to look to other sources for that.

So there's a lot of factors involved.

-Yes, so accessibility is a big issue there and Jodi, I want to come back to you really quick.

We hear this term "food desert" where we have communities that don't necessarily have many options of where to get any type of food, but healthy food as well.

Is that a big part of food insecurity too?

-It is a big part of food insecurity nationwide.

When you take a look at the definition of a food desert, in our valley it's about one to two miles.

If you have to travel further than that, like if you are on a bus line, how far do you have to go and how far do you have to walk from the bus stop to your house carrying bags of groceries, right?

But in rural communities, it's 10 miles.

So how far do you have to go to get to a grocery store, and in a state like Nevada where your grocery store in rural communities can be 20 or 30 miles away, we do have food deserts in our state that we are concerned about, whether in urban areas or rural areas.

-Ian, I want to come to you.

I mean, there's so many more factors that we need to talk about.

I mean, transportation then comes to mind if we're talking about accessibility of course.

If you live in a rural or an urban area it could also be something that's in question in addition to affordability.

What are some of the other factors we need to be looking at?

(Ian McDonough) That's a great question.

It's one of these things that I think the immotile person looks at and thinks there's a very easy, clean explanation for why households find themselves food insecure.

This is not-- the determinants of food insecurity are things that we all study, that I study as a researcher, and some of the ones that we know about, right, so the more macro level ones we know.

We know unemployment clearly matters.

We know that the poverty rate in these neighborhoods matter.

But there's a more micro or household level, right?

So we know single-mother homes have a high propensity to be food insecure.

We know that the rate of food insecurity is not the same across say racial and ethnic lines, right?

A colleague of mine and I recently did work on trying to understand whether or not financial literacy matters at the household level because-- excuse me-- at the end of the day, all of this stuff gets back to you have a certain amount of requisite resources to satisfy all of your budgetary needs, right, so you're facing these trade-offs.

So anytime you can bump, you know, income or resources, that's going to help but that doesn't explain everything.

-Yes.

McKenzie, I want to come to you.

There might be this stereotype also of what food insecurity means, which is waiting in line for food distribution potentially or a Meals on Wheels program, but of course it's not, and you're running the UNLV Food Pantry.

I mean, talk about again, who is food insecure at UNLV?

(McKenzie Mayor) I'm glad you asked this question because as you mentioned, not all those who are food insecure may be homeless.

More people now than ever, especially as a result of the pandemic, have found themselves in a position that they may have not previously before.

But food insecurity does not discriminate.

It could affect anybody, including college students to some surprise.

But just because you go to college doesn't mean you could necessarily afford it, as there are many other factors we all discussed.

Being able to afford bills, housing, transportation, those are all things that are affecting people's access to food which is, by definition what food insecurity is, getting enough access to safe and also nutritious food.

-And because this access is so important, Jodi, I want to come back to you.

The question comes up about food choice and flexibility here.

We have so many different ethnic backgrounds, different cultures here in Nevada.

Our census numbers just came out, and we're becoming more and more diverse every single decade that we have here.

How does that affect then food insecurity, being there might be some foods that you can obtain and eat and other ones that you can't?

-Absolutely.

In our sphere here in Southern Nevada, we have a very diverse population, and that definitely impacts the things we look to procure from a food bank standpoint to help feed the 180 agencies we distribute food to so they can get it to those who are in need.

As a food bank, our job is to bring that food in and warehouse it and then send it out to those agencies so they can get it into the hands of people who need that help.

We think a lot about the clients that are served by pantries like UNLV and Catholic Charities, and the clients that they serve are used to certain foods being available in their home.

So we try to mimic that as much as possible to make sure that people have access to the things that are culturally appropriate for their families or those joyful things we love to have during the holidays, right?

So we think a lot about how do we bring in the things that are most expensive for families are also most expensive for the food bank, so we rely a lot on government commodity.

So thinking about pork and chicken and beef and ham and all of those things we like to have, those proteins are very expensive for the food bank to buy and it's very expensive for families to buy.

So as the cost of those things have gone up, we've turned a lot to some support for government commodities, and we have seen that as farmers have not been able to sell that product they grow or manufacture overseas, it's more available to us through those government commodities.

So we've been able to get foods in for the first time that many families love and enjoy, like blueberries and walnuts and fun things like that.

But also great things like cantaloupe and persimmons and things that families might not also be super familiar with.

Some families are really familiar with those but not other families, so it's a great opportunity to think about sharing in that abundance of food and giving some nutrition education as part of that as well.

-Absolutely, because as you said, if you get a persimmon, you've never prepared a persimmon before... (laughter) The very first time we got a truckload of butternut squash, they were whole butternut squashes, and I-- Leslie remembers that.

So we were handing it out, and people thought well, I don't even know what that is because people normally will see a butternut squash all chopped up, right?

So it's a great opportunity to work with our pantries and our UNLV partners in nutrition to think about how do we also provide some great nutrition education so people know how to prepare those foods.

Because the worst thing we could do as a community or a food bank is bring in food that ends up being wasted, right?

So we want to make sure that healthy foods are really available in our community, and we have a goal at the food bank to make sure that 70% of everything that we distribute is that highest form of nutrition that we call "foods to encourage."

-That's great.

I want to talk a little bit about the scope of the problem here, and Leslie, let's go to you.

Let's just talk about kind of where we are now.

You know, are you seeing more severity?

Are you seeing the population that you're serving at Catholic Charities changing at all?

-Well, we have a few different programs that we operate at Catholic Charities, not just a food pantry but also a Meals on Wheels program that delivers food to homebound seniors in their home and also a free daily meal that we serve every day at 10 a.m.

Almost across the board, those programs have increased in numbers, and they've all faced challenges with the pandemic and food supply chain and all of those things that are happening now.

We've kind of had to get creative a little bit in how we procure the food and deciding on what menus we can utilize.

So looking at everything, it has been more challenging, but we're looking at just trying to be more efficient with our time and utilize great partners so we're able to get the processes that we need done so we're able to serve the partners that come in.

-McKenzie, same question.

Let's talk about what's going on at UNLV right now.

-Yes.

UNLV, we've actually seen a lot more students and staff utilizing pantry services prior to the pandemic, which is okay, and thankfully we've actually had enough resources available to us to help meet the demand of those who may be needing extra food.

Not only that but hygiene products, school supplies and as Jodi was mentioning, nutrition resources.

So we're addressing not only the issue of hunger, but helping spread the knowledge about education on how to prepare food and the nutritional aspect to help guide people into healthier eating choices which will help them in the long term with managing chronic disease and maintaining what a pandemic or food insecurity could do to you if affected for a long period of time.

-Ian, I want to come to you.

Let's talk a little about the data here.

I know you have spoken recently that the numbers that are provided by some of our federal agencies maybe are not as severe as what maybe we're seeing in some of our own data gathering.

Talk a little bit about that, and maybe for context I want to mention Feeding America ranks us as the eighth-most food insecure state in the U.S. so extremely insecure already, but tell us a bit more about those numbers.

-Certainly.

So as you noted, Feeding America, fantastic organization, tremendous work, by the way.

They put out this meal gap sort of data and projections, and the current numbers I've seen from them have Nevada around 12%, 14% food insecure broadly.

Now, without getting too technical, they use national-level data to impute down to the local level, and what my colleagues and I and then Jodi have found in these research projects we've engaged in is as you noted, the severity is seemingly much worse than what those numbers would present.

And so fresh off the press, the numbers we have for a survey that was conducted in 2020, end of the year so mid-pandemic, and I think this is important for everybody to understand because these are our neighbors, and these are the people residing in our communities, right?

The overall food insecurity rate according to our data is about 30% in data collected December and November 2020.

That burden, while high for everybody, is not shared equally amongst everybody.

The white food insecurity rate is about 23%, the nonwhite Black food insecurity rate is 41%.

The nonwhite Hispanic is 53%.

Keep in mind 53%, 41% -- that's a coin toss, right?

And then the area we've been focusing on because I think it is somewhat a neglected population is the senior population.

These are individuals living on fixed incomes, right?

So if we talk about the idea of inflation, the vast majority don't have the luxury of seeing these cost of living adjustments to their fixed income.

So, you know, pre-pandemic, we did a survey in 2019 and the senior food insecurity was right around 28%.

Using our most recent data-- and noting these have to be sort of interpreted a little bit cautiously, a sample size is much smaller and whatnot-- was right around 37%.

So even amongst this vulnerable group, we have seen an uptick.

-A huge increase, but when you look at those racial disparities there, I mean, those are phenomenal.

Some of those are almost double, getting close to double numbers.

Let's talk again, I mean, you're the economics expert on our panel.

I mean, is this reflective of much bigger problems we should be looking at, and then the food insecurity question is just an outcome of a much bigger issue?

-I think the broad answer is yes.

The details are things that I think we need to think through, right, because like I said, I mean, in general food insecurity is this incredibly simple yet difficult concept to understand.

I mean, even think about measuring food insecurity, right?

Currently in the U.S. we use this, as Jodi mentioned, USDA Food Security Module, where people answer questions and depending upon how we sum those up, we can put people in different bins of food insecurity, right?

It's probably capturing food insecurity, but is it really measuring what we think it's measuring?

I don't know.

These are bigger questions.

But to your point about these racial disparities, some other work of mine, it's not only these gaps in levels, right, so you can see almost a double, like a doubling of the gap, right?

But if you actually follow households through time using longitudinal type studies, and you say okay, given that I'm food insecure today, what's the probability I'll still be food insecure say a year from now?

So even that type of analysis reveals disparities in these dynamics.

So not only are there gaps in levels along say race and ethnicity, but nonwhite minorities tend to get stuck in a state of food insecurity, and when they do make it to a state of food security, they tend to fall out of that state relatively quickly.

So big questions.

-Some of that is around resilience and what we can do to create a more resilient community.

One of the things that is often looked at too in terms of research about Feeding America's projections around food insecurity is the difference between people that rent homes and people who own homes.

So when we think about what helps to build our resilience, and what helps to build wealth, or that ability-- not wealth as we think about wealth, but wealth in terms of being able to have your car break down and have the ability to still get to work every day.

The ability to afford all of your prescription medications.

So even something as simple as looking at the difference between renters and homeowners can often help to bridge that gap because we start to build equity when we own our own home.

So we're not subject to the fluctuations of the rental economy, as we have seen in Southern Nevada, that has grown so much, right?

And that extends not only just beyond our communities of color, which are disproportionately affected of course by that, but also our seniors as well.

So when we are-- Congress actually increased the amount of SNAP benefits that people were receiving.

It was to help cover the fact that not only was food getting to be more expensive, but rental housing was actually becoming more expensive across the nation, and we saw that play out here in Southern Nevada in a way that I'd never seen before.

And it not only affected people who are of working age but people who are retired as well.

So when our community was having meetings around what should we do with the federal recovery money that was coming in, there was whole lines of seniors who were at these meetings telling elected leaders their rent as a senior in an affordable living apartment was going up $50 but their Social Security wasn't increasing, and their ability to have other income streams coming in was not increasing and that this would definitely have an impact on their ability to buy enough healthy food to live a healthy life.

So those are the kinds of extraneous things that kind of happen even in communities where we wouldn't expect that their income levels fluctuate, given employment and unemployment.

It really does also disproportionately impact our seniors.

-Disproportionately impact seniors, and I think we need to talk about it.

I'm going to come to this side of the table too.

There's a shortening of the middle classes, something we talk about a lot here, but a broadening then of who is food insecure because a lot of these elements that we've been talking about over here, and I want to come to both of you.

Leslie, let's talk to you first.

I mean, let's go to the individual that's looking for food support here, or maybe the individual that's not looking for food support.

I mean, are you seeing more people that you typically wouldn't get maybe at Catholic Charities that are reaching out and need some form of food support?

-Yes, especially in our food pantry.

When the pandemic hit, there were people coming in asking for help that never had to ask for it before, so we're hoping they know where to ask.

If they know that the resources are out there, especially with food partners like Three Square where we had food distribution sites opening up to make it easy for people to get access to food where they didn't have to go out into maybe a dangerous situation or something.

But just in terms of our food pantry, our number of senior clients is going up as well.

So that's a little scary because we're all going to be getting older, but if we can help solve some of these problems they think, you know, when we work together, it'll help everybody.

But we really have to kind of pay attention to that kind of thing because we are still, you know, a retirement destination.

A lot of people are coming here and deciding to reside here and build families here, and if we can really look at this and get down to the issues that are causing the problems, maybe we can start to solve them.

-McKenzie, I want to come to you too.

As we already mentioned, awareness is very important too, but we are dealing maybe with populations that necessarily have never sought this type of support.

There might be some stigma around that.

Are you seeing that?

Again, you've mentioned this is staff, and this is also students here.

-Correct, yes.

We're seeing an increased level of staff utilizing our services, which the pantry is open not only to students but staff and faculty as well, since anybody on the university side can utilize our services.

Even if you are a working staff member part time or full time, you're welcome to also get what you need to help support your family.

Many have taken pay cuts or have been furloughed, so there are many staff members who have found themselves food insecure or struggling with access or may not even know how to access SNAP benefits.

So we're here to help direct people in the right direction and promote the services that can help get them back on their feet.

-Let's talk more about solutions here.

We've kind of been intersplicing this in the conversation already.

SNAP benefits we've already mentioned too, but let's talk about maybe some more immediate and maybe even some long-term solutions.

Ian, I want to come to you.

Obviously, lifting all boats is the easiest, these root-cause changes we can make that are improving a lot of these other economic downstream or upstream factors.

But policywise, is there something that maybe we could do better here?

-That's a big question, and really because I think most people draw a direct connection, or almost in a synonymous way food insecurity and poverty.

But it's quite interesting when you actually look at the data, right, there are people who are above the poverty line that are classified as food insecure and vice versa.

So thinking about policy levers is challenging.

Circling back, I think what somewhat gets at this idea of the middle class, so Raj Chetty at Harvard et al, they've done this incredibly cool study looking at income mobility and seeing how they said, you know, dependent upon your birth cohort, what is the probability that you'll be making more in earnings by the time you're 25 and 30 relative to your parents?

So back in 1940, if you're a 1940 cohort, by the time you're 25, between 25 and 35, there's about a 90% chance you'll be making more in terms of earnings than your parents.

Well, you know, speed forward to 1980, that number has fallen to about 50%.

So it's basically a coin toss as to whether or not you'll be making more than your parents by the time you're 25 and 30.

So this does speak to the middle class, right?

I think-- what do they call it-- the fading American dream, right?

This notion of income mobility isn't necessarily there, and again, well, income doesn't explain everything, right, just resources in general.

So what can be done?

-Let me toss that over to Jodi because, you know, the big question here is that an organization like Three Square is not going to more than likely be serving less people.

You're going to have to broaden your service, so let's talk about that.

I mean, what kind of challenges are before you?

What are some of the solutions to make sure that you're able to accommodate a much broader service population?

-Well, one thing that's really clear to all of us through the pandemic is it's still the charitable network of people who provide that safety net that is really the last resort.

So it is benefits like SNAP benefits, like Medicaid services that help because we know that, you know, medical debt is actually one of the things that is really big in people falling off and into poverty.

So benefits like SNAP and Medicaid services, things like that, are really that first line of defense against hunger.

Even at the food bank, people start to say well, I don't think there's much of a need anymore because now I don't see those four-mile-long lines of cars at food distributions, right?

But that was actually because so many of our agencies had closed, you know, to go home and be safe.

And then once they reopened, that meant people had access right in their neighborhood, and the huge distributions didn't happen anymore.

But through that whole time period, you can actually look to see when people got a little bit of a stimulus check, when people got that boost in SNAP benefits.

It really directly impacted the numbers that we were seeing that following month.

So as we look into 2022, we know the extra amount of SNAP benefits that people were receiving to help cover more meals is actually going to be ending the end of December.

So as we move into 2022, SNAP benefits are going to decrease a little bit, and that's going to hit around the same time that we expect to be receiving less government commodities at the food bank.

So we really need the community support, continued support, to help make sure that we continue to have an abundance of food to share with our agencies across the network.

One of the things I'm really excited about in terms of policy too is our state.

You know, Nevada has really stepped up its game and put us in a class of a very small number of states that are looking at economic development opportunities to make sure we can support not only our food banks and those that are in need but also food manufacturers and growers in our state.

So we passed the Home Means Nevada Program, which means we will get to pay-- our state will get to pay growers and food manufacturers to donate food to the food bank.

-That's great.

And the resources for all the organizations around the table we're going to have on our resource page for both volunteering support and for those that need access.

We will have those resources provided.

I want to thank our guests Leslie Carmine with Catholic Charities, Jodi Tyson with Three Square, McKenzie Mayor from the UNLV Food Pantry, and economics professor at UNLV, Ian McDonough.

Thank you so much.

And thank you, as always, for joining us this week on Nevada Week.

For any of the resources discussed on this show, please visit our website at vegaspbs.org/nevadaweek.

You can also always follow us on Facebook and Twitter at @nevadaweek.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next week.

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