It's kinda hard when you don't live in the state of West Virginia to be able to understand
what really goes on here.
It's like feast or famine at this point, you know, survival of the fittest.
West Virginia.
A state home to idyllic rolling hills, scenic mountain tops and more than 1 million residents.
But look a little closer and you might see something very different.
The state that once housed a robust coal mining industry and supplied 27% of America’s coal
is today the fourth poorest state in the country with rampant food insecurity and a deadly opioid crisis.
And that was before the pandemic.
I’ve pulled myself up by the bootstraps so many damn times that I ripped them off.
I have two jobs and a bachelor’s degree, and I struggle to make ends meet.
Today, West Virginia is a state where 17% of the population relies on food stamps to survive.
Two food banks are tasked with feeding 1 in every 7 adults and 1 in every 5 children.
It’s a place where being poor and without food is pretty much accepted as the norm.
So what happens when a state like this gets hit by a pandemic?
Sometimes I have barely enough.
You know, it's almost like a hamster wheel.
Like that just becomes your norm and it's everyone's norm around you.
Less than a month before COVID-19 hit, we met up with Amy Jo Hutchison to talk about hunger in her state,
and what the Trump administration's proposed $5.5 billion dollar cut from the nation's nutrition program
would mean to the hundreds of thousands of people relying on it.
We have to flip this narrative that the government wants us to feel like we’re doing something wrong.
No one does anything wrong enough to be so hungry they want to die.
And I don’t care, I’ll never believe that anyone has done anything that wrong.
Since coming into office, the Trump administration has worked to cut
the number of people who qualify for food stamps.
The majority of whom are working or in between jobs, and have families with children.
Poverty is a circumstance.
It's really not a character defect, although a lot of people want to make sure that
we feel as if it's a character defect.
A circumstance that has caused nearly 40 million low income Americans to rely on food stamps
because they can’t afford to feed themselves.
I have to expand things out so that I know that they all have food in their bellies and that they're well fed.
If you don't have the necessities up in your cabinet, you will struggle, possibly starve without it.
Kaylyn Fritz is a single mom from McDowell County, the poorest county in all of West Virginia.
Like other SNAP participants, she gets her benefits just once a month.
She lives here with her three kids and receives $600 a month for food.
Now if you do the math, that comes out to less than $5 a day, exactly $1.66 per meal, per person in 2020.
The average meal in West Virginia?
Well, that costs $2.77.
So you can start to see the problem.
I know they say that people who live on food stamps have it made, but you don't, you really don't.
Once you get your food stamps, by the time you feed your kids, it's not even enough for yourself.
You have to still save cash and make sure you have money on the side to get more food.
So no, it's not enough.
When we first visited Kaylyn before the pandemic, it was the end of the month and her car had broken down,
so she needed a lift to her local pantry for groceries.
Pantries are the heartbeat of West Virginia, feeding many residents once their monthly aid runs out.
Over 100 miles north of McDowell County, Tiffany Brashear was prepping her own pantry
to serve folks in her community.
There's limited resources here — not only here, but most counties in West Virginia —
limited resources for any kind of socially necessary service, if it's therapy or food or utility assistance.
A month into the COVID-19 outbreak, the Trump administration tried to remove
nearly 700,000 people from SNAP, the country’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The administration’s goal?
Tighten restrictions on ABAWDs:
Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents.
But a federal judge blocked the rule.
Between the blocked move and the virus not hitting them for some time,
West Virginians considered themselves lucky.
But maybe they spoke too soon.
Our health officials came to me and said now we do have our first positive confirmed.
Food prices skyrocketed during the outbreak.
And so life in food deserts — with no access to grocery stores — became even harder to bear.
We're seeing an increase of people outside the [demographic] of who we normally serve.
Single moms, you know, working parents, grandparents.
We have a lot of grandparents coming to get food for their grandchildren, because they're raising them,
and they're on a set income.
There's just a lot of emergency and a lot of immediate need now that has increased threefold at times.
Whereas before, you know, I was dealing with a few hundred people in an area that was struggling
with food access. Now there may be a thousand people in the same area that have the same struggles —
especially families with children.
Once COVID-19 hit West Virginia, welfare programs actually helped in ways they hadn’t before.
SNAP applications, which normally take time to process, were suddenly being waived.
Recipients, who previously had to show proof of their work hours,
were now getting cleared for the full amount.
West Virginia is in such bad shape that any little tiny thing like that is going to make a huge ripple.
But that doesn’t mean that everything’s been easy.
Populations that we don't talk a lot about are the working class people and the ones who make too
much money to receive assistance but they don't make enough to get by.
And those people are the ones that were very hard hit this time.
That’s because there’s also this phenomenon called the “cliff effect.”
Here’s what it looks like:
Imagine you’re a SNAP participant.
You have a vehicle, and you’re making the monthly 80-hour work requirement.
You’re doing great at your job and because of that, you manage to get a promotion,
raising your hourly wage up 50 cents.
Now after receiving that raise, your income increases ever so slightly above the poverty line.
Well, guess what?
You and your family just lost all eligibility for benefits because you’re making too much.
I mean, they're already struggling to put food on the table.
They don't qualify for SNAP benefits.
You know, they're the ones now that are waiting in the food pantry lines and the soup kitchen lines.
In Kaylyn’s case, it looked like this.
Me working affected my food stamps.
It dropped down.
I was getting like $649 and now I only get like $250 something.
It also caused a ripple effect across most of the state.
About a month after the virus broke out, the state would go from a 6% to an almost 16% unemployment rate.
And school closures meant that kids who relied on subsidized free lunches were now missing meals.
And so what happened was the schools closed down and one of the biggest needs, immediately, was,
oh my gosh, how are we going to make sure that everyone's fed?
I had a friend come to me the other day.
She was like, look, I have five kids and I only have $20.
Is there anything you can do for me?
I received a text message from a young lady, and all she had in her house was peanut butter and crackers
and said, "I've been eating it for a week now. Is there anything you can do to help?"
She was a working class woman that lost her job and was pretty much begging for food.
And with food scarcity so high and people so desperate,
Kaylyn says she fears for the future of local farms like the one she works on.
It’s getting rough.
It’s gonna come a time when people are fighting for food.
People are having to rely on food pantries now.
And so they'll say, "I don't know how to do this. I've never had to do this before."
They start lining up at 10 in the morning because first come, first serve.
Food pantries are just here to supplement what people need for the rest of the month.
We have to be sparse to make sure there's enough food for everybody.
While federal aid has helped countless individuals across West Virginia,
people still rely on food pantries to bridge the gap between where their food stamps run out
and the end of the month.
And that’s caused an increased strain on smaller pantries like Tiffany Brashears.
We was able to get rid of 51,000 pounds of food in one day.
When are we, as American citizens, going to get so fed up with it?
Of being told that we just don't deserve that equity?
But despite the hunger, the poverty, the pandemic and the decades-long fight for economic security,
somehow the state of West Virginia and its people remain strong.
And it’s this strength that has unified the state and its communities.
If somebody's struggling with food, but they know their neighbor needs food,
they would rather give to their neighbor than eat it their self.
So West Virginia, people's really good about taking care of one another.
It may be a small town, a small ghost town, but at the same time, you do have your community to rely on.
I really hope I get to see it, but I really think that things are going to turn around.
We just have an awful lot of heart and right now it just happens to be breaking.