Senior Hunger: Finding Enough Food Is A Struggle In Denver

DENVER, CO – Hunger among senior citizens is in many ways an invisible crisis, but the troubling reality is that 5.5 million older Americans, including 15,120 in metro Denver are skipping meals or going entire days without eating anything. And with more Baby Boomers leaving the workforce every year, the problem is getting worse, not better, even with a strong economy.

Colorado is among the best states for reducing the number of food-insecure seniors, but that's also because there are fewer seniors in Colorado in general.

“Oftentimes, all food insecurity is under the radar, but this is a really, really important topic,” said Craig Gundersen, the lead author in The State of Senior Hunger report released Tuesday by Feeding America, a Chicago-based nonprofit that operates 200 regional food banks and 60,000 food pantries around the country.

“I don’t think we’re talking nearly enough about this issue,” said Gundersen, also the director of undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois, who has spent his career researching issues of food insecurity and making policy recommendations on how to curb it.

For these senior citizens — your parents and grandparents — aching questions about the availability of food never go away, and many go at least a day without eating to stretch their limited incomes farther, Gundersen said. As with America’s hungry kids, depression rates and medical costs soar when older Americans don’t have enough nutritious food in their pantries.

The basis of the report is USDA and Census data, which has also been used in Gundersen's ongoing Map the Meal Gap study. The senior study was conducted with James Ziliak of the University of Kentucky. They've been working with Feeding America for the last three years to understand where seniors don't have enough to eat.

Colorado had the second-lowest rate of food insecurity among seniors with a rate of 3.2 percent, but in the Denver-Aurora area, the food-insecurity rate among seniors is 5.4 percent.

The 10 states with the highest rates of food insecurity among senior citizens are:

1. Louisiana, 12.3 percent
2. Mississippi, 11.8 percent
3. New Mexico, 11.5 percent
4. North Carolina, 10.5 percent (tie)
4. Texas, 10.5 percent (tie)
6. Alabama, 10.4 percent
7. Rhode Island, 9.6 percent
8. Kansas, 9.4 percent
9. South Carolina, 9.3 percent

However, senior hunger soared high above those rates in several metropolitan areas, even if their states weren’t among the top 10 states for food-insecure senior citizens.

Related: America’s Hungry Kids: 13M U.S. Children Don’t Have Enough To Eat

The hungriest senior citizens in America are in the Memphis, Tennessee, metropolitan area, which reported a stunning 17.3 percent of older Americans struggle to find enough food to eat. That is consistent with a finding in the report that food-insecure senior citizens are most likely to be found in the South. The top 10 metropolitan areas for senior hunger are:

1. Memphis, Tennessee, 17.3 percent
2. New Orleans, 12.8 percent
3. San Jose, California, 11.5 percent
4. Orlando, Florida, 11.1 percent
5. Charlotte, North Carolina, 10.4 percent
6. St. Louis, Missouri, 10.1 percent
7. Raleigh, North Carolina, 9.8 percent
8. Louisville, Kentucky, 9.6 percent
9. Indianapolis, Indiana, 9.5 percent
10. Jacksonville, Florida, 9.2 percent

On the other end of the spectrum, the states with the lowest rates of food insecurity among senior citizens are:

1. Minnesota, 2.8 percent
2. Colorado, 3.2 percent
3. Idaho, 3.3 percent (tie)
3. North Dakota, 3.3 percent (tie)
5. Hawaii, 4.4 percent
6. Virginia, 4.5 percent
7. Delaware, 4.8 percent (tie)
7. Wisconsin, 4.8 percent (tie)
9. Washington, 5 percent
10. Montana, 5.2 percent

That doesn’t mean senior hunger isn’t a problem in these states. Though Wisconsin is one of the lowest states for senior hunger, at a rate of 4.8 percent, some 7.2 percent of older Americans in the Milwaukee area worry about their next meal. In Virginia, with a 4.5 percent rate of senior hunger, the number worried about their next meal is significantly higher — 6.5 percent — in the metropolitan area of Virginia Beach, Norfolk and Newport News.

Feeding America’s food banks — including Food Bank of The Rockies — help close the gap, but for people like Diane, a 77-year-old Bradenton, Florida, woman, finding enough food to eat is a constant struggle. She worked her entire adult life in home care, and now lives on a fixed income of $700 a month. Once she pays her rent, electricity and other bills, there’s not much left for food, she said in a story featured on Feeding America’s Facebook page.

Others, like a Rockford, Illinois, couple living on a fixed income, are a home-repair or doctor bill away from food insecurity. They had some money saved up, but when their furnace went out and doctor bills mounted up, “there’s just not much left over after,” they told Feeding America.

Recession Lags For Many Older Americans

One of the many aspects of the report that nags Gundersen is that older Americans haven’t recovered from the Great Recession to the extent that others have. The current rate of food insecurity among older Americans is substantially higher than it was in 2007 (6.3 percent), and the rate is more than double the number it was in 2001, when 2.3 million senior citizens didn’t know where they’d get their next meal.

If nothing changes, more than 8 million senior citizens will be food insecure by 2050, when the population of older Americans grows to 104 million, the report said.

Perhaps surprising, younger senior citizens ages 60-64 were two times more likely to lack enough food than those aged 80 or older (10 percent, as compared to 4.7 percent, respectively).

That’s because many of them were still working when the Great Recession hit and experienced big losses in their 401(k) and other retirement plans.

“As folks recover from the recession, this is a group that hasn’t had the opportunity to benefit from increased employment and wages,” said Amy Crumbaugh, the director of population studies for Feeding America.

Grandchildren In The Home Make A Difference

Also troubling to Gundersen is that older Americans who are living with grandchildren are more likely to be hungry than those who are not. In generational households, one in six, or 15.7 percent, worry about their next meal, compared to 7.3 percent of seniors who don’t live with grandchildren.

“Having a grandchild in the household makes a senior worse off, but the children do better,” Gundersen said. “There’s something positive for the grandchildren — having someone at home while their parents are bringing in an income.”

In many cases, he said, grandparents go without food so their grandchildren have enough to eat. They may be helping to care for children whose parents haven’t found full employment since the recession, or they may have seen their own accumulated wealth disappear with the recession. For whatever reason, “a lot of these seniors were not anticipating having to care for grandchildren,” Gundersen said.

SNAP A Lifeline For Senior Citizens

For Gundersen, the conundrum is simple: Pay now to increase the availability of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to senior citizens, or be prepared to pay more for rising health-care costs.

SNAP, he said, is of “critical importance” to senior citizens and has by all accounts been successful in alleviating senior hunger. Yet, he said, there is “more and more recognition that SNAP is not sufficient for struggling households.”

“The most important things are to make sure seniors are participating, and that it’s easy and seamless to get on and stay on the program,” Gundersen said. For these food-insecure older Americans, “it’s not an option to go into the labor force, and one of the few things they have is access to SNAP,” Gundersen said.

Great misconceptions surround the SNAP program, Gundersen and Feeding America’s Crumbaugh said.

“People don’t realize the majority of people receiving SNAP are seniors, the disbled and children,” Crumbaugh said. “Making sure people have the resources to access food is one of the cheapest interventions from a policy standpoint.”

The study didn’t delve into it, earlier research by Ziliak and others that show rising health-care costs often come at the price of groceries.

“Higher drug costs do make a difference,” Gundersen said. “If you look at the portion of those who have had to cut back on medication or couldn’t afford to pay for it, there are much higher rates of food insecurity.”

As more Americans become eligible for Social Security and Medicare, Gundersen worries about the direction of policy discussions.

“We know the income support of Social Security is critically important,” he said. “In these debates, we often don’t talk about the most vulnerable, but we should be, and one of the implications is increases in food security.”

Some other trends identified in the report:

• African-American and Hispanic senior citizens were more likely than white and non-Hispanic seniors to be food insecure. The report said 17.2 percent of African-American seniors are food insecure, compared to 6.5 percent of white seniors, and 16.3 percent of Hispanic seniors are food insecure, compared to 6.6 percent of non-Hispanic seniors.

• Among food-insecure seniors, more than two-thirds (69.4 percent) are white, nearly one in four (23.5 percent) are African-American and 7.1 percent are some other race.

• Seniors who are unemployed or disabled are significantly more likely to experience food insecurity, compared to those who are employed or retired. Among them, 21.6 percent are unemployed and 25 percent are disabled. That compares to one in 20 food-insecure seniors who are employed or retired.

Read the full report.

Reported and written by Beth Dalbey, Patch national staff