Even with money to spend, getting to food is not easy.
For low-income individuals, physically getting to food during COVID is a challenge even for those with physical mobility or financial means to provide for themselves and their families.
As corner stores hike up prices and supermarkets run short on inventory, our respondents must travel further from their homes, make more stops at different stores, and increase the frequency of their shopping trips to put enough food on the table.
Many of our respondents without cars rely on family and friends for a ride. Mary is a mother of five, including a six-month-old infant. The nearby stores have been running low on milk, eggs, frozen foods, and vegetables – essentials that Mary needs to feed her family. Mary’s family has been carpooling with her mother to a different supermarket 30 minutes from her home, which has a better selection, including, “mixed vegetables, peas, broccoli, etc.” As a recipient of WIC and $800 monthly in SNAP benefits, Mary has the means to make larger, less frequent grocery runs, but transportation and childcare are real challenges. Because Mary’s mother can’t always offer a ride, Mary hopes that the City of Boston can provide
“[transportation] help [to] people that don’t have cars to get to grocery stores, to have a good amount of food, because that’s the only thing [she is] having trouble with.”
Mary also described the difficulties of shopping with children: even when she can get a ride with her mom, without childcare, she had to make the difficult decision of bringing all five children to the grocery store. It was not an easy family outing: Mary described the situation as “stressful”, adding that, “[her children] would not leave their masks on.” Mary plans to continue to go to this grocery store due to their wider selection, but without childcare, she may have to continue bringing her family and risking infection.
Others cannot so easily find a ride and must rely on public transportation, which increases the risk of COVID infection even when social distancing rules are in place. Betty relies on the T to get around, buying weekly passes from the MBTA. As a single mother of three kids, she feels constant fear when out in public, worrying that she could get infected with Coronavirus and that her children would end up alone. Of her trip to the grocery store, Betty said,
“It’s been really difficult because you go with fear of not knowing if people are sick. You practically don’t know anything. You have to care for your mouth and hands. It’s very frustrating because you don’t know if the person ahead or behind you is infected and it’s scary.”
As the state reopens and more people go out, she worries even more about how much riskier it will be to use public transportation when she goes back to work cleaning houses throughout various Boston neighborhoods: “I use the bus and train a lot. But I’m scared riding because it’s already on my mind. It’s scary because my young boy has asthma and I don’t want him to get sick.”
*Names and some details changed to preserve confidentiality