New study confirms jump in food insecurity on Long Island

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A new study has confirmed the reports of a jump in food insecurity on Long Island.

The newly released 2022 “Map the Meal Gap” study from Feeding America reported an estimated 221,190 people on Long Island were food insecure, an increase of 58.3% from the 2021 estimate of 139,760 people. In 2022, the estimated number of children living with food insecurity was 44,780, a 63.4% increase from the estimated 27,580 children living with food insecurity in 2021, according to the report.

Experts at both Island Harvest Food Bank and Long Island Cares – The Harry Chapin Food Bank said that the 2022 study underscores the need for increased funding to address food insecurity, especially on Long Island where the cost of living is higher than other regions.

The study “affirms what we already knew here on Long Island: food insecurity is moving in the wrong direction and, ironically, is worse now than during the dark days of the pandemic,” Randi Shubin Dresner, president and CEO of Island Harvest, said in a news release about the report.

“Far too many Long Islanders are struggling to provide their families with basic, nutritious food on the table mainly due to higher food costs and the region’s high cost of living — and it’s not getting better,” she added. “We are appealing to our elected representatives at every level for increased funding for, and access to, emergency food programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP), and Nourish New York, among others.”

Paule Pachter, president and CEO of Long Island Cares, said in the news release that the “data from the Map the Meal Gap report is quite disturbing and should be of concern to government policymakers at all levels of government.”

Pachter went on to say that it “seems that every year food banks in New York State must advocate for a permanent increase to support the Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program (HPNAP) that provides the majority of funding for hunger relief.  While we proposed a budget of $64 million for HPNAP, the current [New York State] budget provides $57.8 million for this vital program, far less than what is needed to respond to a 58.3% increase in need.

“While the federal government has increased funding for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) as part of a more than $1 billion increase for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we still must address the deep discrepancies on Long Island when it comes to poverty,” Pachter said.

He added that the “current federal poverty level doesn’t account for the cost of living by region. A one-size-fits-all formula to determine poverty is inadequate, and that’s why Long Island Cares has been advocating for Congress to pass legislation to regionalize the poverty level so that families struggling with food insecurity would receive an increase in their benefits, including SNAP, that would reflect the high cost of living in the Northeast as opposed to a lower cost of living in other states.”

Together, Island Harvest and Long Island Cares distributed more than 31 million pounds of food to their networks of more than 300 member agencies during 2023. If the food banks on Long Island could reach every person who is food insecure with that food, those in need would receive about 141 pounds of food a year, less than half a pound of food a day.

“Feeding America’s ‘Map the Meal Gap’ isn’t just a study, it’s a call to action,” Dresner said.

“Everyone from the federal government to New York State to Nassau and Suffolk counties, along with Island Harvest and Long Island Cares, must do more to close the meal gap and ensure no one living on Long Island lives with the trauma of food insecurity,” she added.