In a matter of five months, 47-year-old Aquanna Quarles saw her personal finances implode. In December, she totaled her car. In February, the car she replaced the totaled one with was stolen. And in early March, her kitchen flooded, destroying the food in her cabinets and the small appliances on top of them. Quarles remembers thinking, “Oh my God, like what else could go wrong?”
Then the novel coronavirus began spreading across the United States. In mid-March, the state of Ohio, where Quarles lives, began issuing stay-at-home orders, shuttering shops and businesses, and by the end of the month, the rest of the country had followed suit, pushing millions of Americans out of work. Quarles, who works for a home health care company doing both office work and caring for elderly and disabled individuals, saw her hours—and weekly earnings—cut in half.
In April, for the first time in her life, Quarles felt she had no choice but to lean on a food bank to make ends meet. “This was really my first time ever doing it,” Quarles says of her decision to seek assistance from a food charity. “Because if I don’t need it, I’m not gonna go. You know what I mean? But I needed it.”
On April 21, Quarles lined up in her car with thousands of other Ohioans in the parking lot of Wright State University’s football stadium where Dayton’s Foodbank, Inc. had set up an emergency drive-thru food distribution site. On that day alone, the food bank served 1,381 households and more than 4,500 individuals, according to its chief development officer Lee Lauren Truesdale. After four hours, Quarles returned home with about a couple week’s worth of chicken cutlets, chickpeas, cucumbers, eggs, peach-flavored protein shakes, potatoes, rice and watermelons.
Quarles’s recent hardship has become all too common in recent weeks, as tens of millions of working- and middle-class Americans like her—bartenders and servers, childcare providers and hairdressers and hotel staff—have found themselves suddenly with decreased or eliminated incomes for the foreseeable future. On April 23, new unemployment numbers showed another 4.4 million people filed unemployment claims last week, bringing the total since March 14 to more than 26 million. Though Quarles did not lose her job completely, her reduced hours may make her eligible for partial unemployment insurance. Like millions of Americans, Quarles has faced difficulties accessing that benefit. Though she says she applied for the assistance at the end of March, she hasn’t yet seen the payment hit her bank account.
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Stories like Quarles’ underscore the fragility of the American economic landscape. Until recently, the U.S. economy was sailing through the longest expansion on record—trumpeting record-low jobless rates and a bull stock market. But after just five weeks of recession, tens of millions of Americans are suddenly without the most basic necessities, including food and medical care. While incomes have vanished, the trappings of middle class life—car notes, mortgages, rent obligations and utility bills—have continued to pile up, forcing Americans who until very recently had full-time jobs to the brink of true poverty. With nearly 40% of U.S. adults unable to afford an emergency expense of $400, according to a 2019 report by the Federal Reserve, many have turned to food charities for help.
