SENIOR HUNGER: Rise in senior poverty means a rise in food insecurity
Mariano Arquieta is diabetic. When he’s hungry, that can be a problem.
The disabled senior on a fixed income runs out of money by the third week of the month. With no money, comes no food; with no food, comes potentially dangerous blood sugar spikes.
“It goes up to 300 sometimes when I don’t eat,” said Arquieta, referring to life-threatening blood-sugar levels.
Arquieta hadn’t had a meal yet Thursday when he arrived at the monthly food distribution at Campesinos Unidos Inc. on the eastside of Brawley.
It wasn’t until around 2 in the afternoon when he finally received his bag of frozen diced carrots, a can of beef stew and various other items delivered in a box truck by the Imperial Valley Food Bank.
“I’m gonna go eat right now,” Arquieta said.
For seniors like Arquieta, not eating is a dicey proposition. Just a week earlier, during a similar distribution at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Calexico, an 80-year-old man collapsed and 911 had to be called, said Alba Sanchez.
“He had been out there waiting in line since 7 a.m. He hadn’t eaten, his blood pressure dropped and he fainted,” explained Sanchez, who was on site that morning as the U.S. Department of Agriculture commodities distribution manager for the Food Bank.
At 64 years old, Arquieta is a relatively young and healthy senior. He can carry away his limited haul unassisted, heading toward his home to feed his wife and the 20-year-old granddaughter he is supporting. But he is also among an exploding senior population that is one of the fastest-rising segments of the impoverished, and as a natural consequence, the food-insecure.
Food insecurity is defined as a spectrum of severity establishing where Americans will find their next meal.
In 2008, 12.2 percent of Imperial County senior citizens age 65 and older were living in poverty. By 2012, the latest local numbers available, that rate rose dramatically to 18.2 percent in poverty.
It is difficult for local advocates for seniors and the hungry to get their head around the issue. While officials know a greater problem exists, it’s hard to put a number to it. Officials say a lack of firm data, a consistent lack of funding and limited public awareness is only hinting at the growing dilemma.
Sara Griffen, executive director of the Food Bank, said the poverty rate has risen so fast among seniors that the data isn’t available to truly come to grips with how many of them are going hungry month after month.
“The man passing out in Calexico did start making us look at things differently; we’re going to turn a good into a bad, hopefully,” she said. How that happens, though, is still in question.
Getting a grip without hard data
For the time being, senior advocates are working with huge, sweeping numbers compiled by think tanks and associations like Feeding America and the National Foundation to End Senior Hunger.
NFESH’s most recent study released Thursday cites 5.3 million seniors in the U.S. as food-insecure based on data from 2013; that rate that has doubled since 2001.
Numbers for California remained relatively stable. About 16 percent of seniors faced the threat of hunger between 2012 and 2013, according to the study. Still, California’s senior food insecurity is among the highest in the country, in the top 25 percent of the nation.
One of the problems is getting local-level numbers on the true nature of senior hunger. At the time, there isn’t any. That is key, Griffen said, because it is those on fixed incomes — mostly senior citizens, but also the disabled — that she sees in growing numbers at the Food Bank.
Sanchez said about 65 percent of the 550 to 600 people being served in Calexico by the USDA commodities program are senior citizens, with Brawley coming in a close second. In all, the Food Bank serves about 18,500 to 20,000 county residents a month.
Mary, 72, who asked that her last name not be used, lives alone in Brawley. She only has about $250 a month from her Social Security check to spend on food once she pays rent, utilities and other expenses. By Thursday, she was flat broke.
“Everything’s gone,” said Mary, a few minutes after collecting her bag of food. Some months she is able to make her food stretch, but just barely and not often.
It’s Mary, Arquieta and others like them whom Griffen is seeing more of every day.
When it comes to seniors, Griffen said the Food Bank is not allowed to build any statistical models, because the USDA commodities program has decided the kinds of detailed information needed to obtain food stamps, for example, risks violating the public’s civil rights.
Everything the Food Bank gleans from seniors and their situations must be done voluntarily. Griffen said a lack of volunteers is a problem in undertaking such a survey.
Also, she said seniors have a great deal of pride and don’t easily want to share their struggles in any detail — hence, Mary’s reluctance to share her full name.
The struggle up close
Laurie Edwards sees the same seniors five days a week. She knows their struggles, she hears their concerns, and she sees that as demand increases at home, state and federal funding decreases.
Edwards, manager for Catholic Charities’ senior nutrition program, tells a story of when she started working for the agency 13 years ago that says it all.
She made homemade bingo cards for a recreational activity at one of Catholic Charities’ congregate meal sites where seniors come in for a low-cost hot lunch. As bingo markers Edwards used dried macaroni shells that began to disappear after each session.
“They put the macaroni in baggies and took it home to make soup,” Edwards recalls. “That’s desperation, and you see it all the time.”
Catholic Charities runs congregate meal sites five days a week in multiple locations in every Valley city; and once to twice weekly in outlying areas.
At the sites the program will serve anywhere from a dozen or fewer to as many as 65 seniors a day, such as at the Desert Villa apartments in El Centro where Edwards’ office is located.
Funding for the program comes from private donations, some from the Catholic Diocese of San Diego and some from the donation of the seniors themselves, who pay anywhere between nothing and $1.50 a day for their meals.
The biggest portion (85 percent, if Edwards had to guess) comes from the Imperial County Area Agency on Aging, which funnels money through the state, starting as Title III funding from the federal Senior Nutrition Program, a byproduct of the Older Americans Act of 1965.
That is where sweeping cuts began to occur over the last decade, AAA interim manager Karla Flores said.
When Flores started working at the AAA eight years ago, funding levels were between $650,000 and $800,000 a year between the congregate meal sites and home-delivery services, also done by Catholic Charities.
For the current fiscal year, Flores said, funding is down to $284,000 for the congregate sites and $169,000 for the home deliveries.
Although there has been a 60 percent increase in the number of seniors in the U.S. between 1980 and 2010, there has been a 34 percent decrease in federal funding, according to the AAA. In Imperial County, there were about 20,400 senior citizens as of 2013, or 11.5 percent of the county population.
Edwards can’t understand the cuts, especially to the home-delivery program. She said there are meal sites that go underutilized, but she has a 50-person waiting list for the deliveries. She is limited to 129 spots, down from 300 several years ago.
“It’s hard. It’s the most difficult part of our job, deciding who gets it and who doesn’t,” Edwards explained. She said the nonambulatory often have the greatest need.
How to handle a growing problem
Moving forward, local agencies are trying to get their bearings in this newer, hungrier and older landscape.
Griffen said the data on senior nutrition will be slow to come. Only in the last few years has the National Foundation to End Senior Hunger attempted to provide hard numbers.
Children have long been the focus in the U.S. because there is an established set of data from federal school meal programs that require complete information, Griffen said.
There is nothing on that scale to track seniors. Griffen said California residents on Social Security and the state supplement, SSP, have no access to CalFRESH, the state’s version of food stamps. As such, the detailed family and dependent information gathered as part of the application process is nonexistent.
What’s more, seniors have not recovered from the overall increase in poverty numbers as a result of the recession, Griffen said.
“Because there was such a slide-up,” she said, “we haven’t caught up with how bad it is.”
In the meantime, Griffen explained, any movement to improve conditions for seniors will have to come on the grassroots level through the coordination of local agencies’ efforts.
“I need to work with Norma (Saikhon, Imperial County public administrator and supervisor of the local AAA) and Catholic Charities, and do more of a program for seniors,” she said.
The consequence of senior hunger
Senior health as a result of hunger is one of the more pressing issues to be addressed, according to studies. In its “Spotlight on Senior Health,” NFESH and Feeding America found that food insecurity can increase risk of heart attack by 53 percent, asthma by 51 percent, congestive heart failure by 40 percent and depression by 60 percent, which NFESH says is a leading indicator of overall well-being.
Imperial County AAA contracts with Los Angeles-area consulting firm Nutrition Ink to ensure all of Catholic Charities’ meals are compliant with USDA dietary guidelines.
And recently, the Food Bank focused a portion of its efforts on a smaller scale to senior diabetes. The Food Bank’s “Box of Basics” program, which allows low-income people to buy a box of food at the start of the month but pick it up at the end of the month when their money is gone, has a specialized box for diabetic seniors called the “Menu D” box for $15.
Although those at the local level are trying their best, it remains to be seen if enough is being done to improve conditions in the remaining lifetime of the nation’s poorest seniors, who in the face of food shortages plead for more help.
Bent under the weight of her bag of USDA commodities Thursday, 87-year-old Felicitas Surbida of Brawley leans against a wooden utility pole, waiting for her son to bring around the car and help her inside. She ran out of money for food several days ago, and is hoping her son will take her to buy some rice and beans with some of his food stamps.
“They should give us a little more,” Surbida said of the food distribution. “I have too many bills to pay; I have to borrow money. That’s where my money goes.”
Her doctor keeps insisting that she drink more milk or juice to keep her health up, but Surbida said she hasn’t bought milk or juice in months.
“I don’t drink milk anymore, it costs too much,” she said. “But I drink water; a lot of water.”
5 things you can do
1 Ask a senior the hard questions: “Are you getting enough to eat?” “Are you running out of money?” Take that information to the Imperial Valley Food Bank, 760-370-0966; Catholic Charities Senior Nutrition Program, 760-353-6822; the Area Agency on Aging, 760-339-6450.
2 To get a senior through the month, buy a $15 “Menu D” food box for diabetic seniors or a $25 traditional box of staples from the I.V. Food Bank; donate to Catholic Charities’ Meals on Wheels program.
3 Contact your U.S. Rep. Juan Vargas, 1605 Longworth House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515 or call 202-225-8045; local office: 380 N. Eighth St., Suite 14, El Centro, CA 92243 or call 760-355-8800.
4 Contact state Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, State Capitol, P.O. Box 942849, Room 2137, Sacramento, CA 94249-0056 or call 916-319-2056; local office: 1625 W. Main St., Suite 220, El Centro, CA 92243 or call 760-336-8912.
5 Contact state Sen. Ben Hueso, State Capitol, Room 4035, Sacramento, CA 95814, or call 916-651-4040; local office: 1224 State St., Suite D, El Centro, CA 92243, or call 760-335-3442.
Photos by Elizabeth Varin.
This story originally appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, April 26, 2015.