Crypto News: A new era of food insecurity in the US

Food banks across the US are seeing a post-pandemic wave of demand driven by working people caught in America's cost-of-living crunch. In Flagstaff, Arizona, a pantry that served 127,000 meals in all of 2015 now serves 40,000 meals a month. In the Washington, DC, metro region, the Capital Area Food Bank distributed 5 million more meals than it did the previous fiscal year.

The rise in food insecurity follows stubbornly high inflation, with grocery prices surging 28% over the past five years. Paychecks have not been able to keep up, despite robust economic growth and historically low unemployment.

For Federal Reserve officials, growing hunger among the middle class further complicates their decision in the coming months to cut rates or keep them elevated (and risk cooling the job market). Meanwhile, food banks are warning that the rise in need is becoming unsustainable, Craig Torres reports. Today on CityLab: Working Americans Turn to Food Banks as Fed Inflation Battle Drags On

— Linda Poon

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