Mothers Who Rely on Federal Food Aid Struggle to Get Groceries Safely During the Covid-19 Outbreak

Every time she has to buy groceries lately, Lily Marquez gets worried. She lives in a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco with her two young children, her husband, her chronically ill mother-in-law, and her husband’s grandmother. Both of the older women are at high-risk of becoming severely ill if they get COVID-19, and she doesn’t want to be the one to infect them. But while many Americans have switched to online grocery shopping to avoid crowded spaces during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, that’s not an option for Marquez—or the millions of other low-income women and children who rely on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC. The federal program requires that WIC participants, or their designated proxies, complete their purchases in person, in front of a cashier. “At Safeway, I went in and out because it was just literally chaotic,” Marquez says. “I’m like, there’s no way that I could do that because when I go out, I don’t take the kids so I have to leave the kids with the elderly and my husband is trying to work. So I’m trying to just be quick about it.” Anti-hunger organizations and advocates for low-income families have been working toward making online grocery shopping possible for WIC families for years, and as the coronavirus spread this spring, those efforts accelerated. Federal lawmakers have backed the idea, and the U.S. Departm...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news