The answers at a food distribution site in Annapolis were as simple as the questions.
Why do you need help putting food on the table? Why are you going hungry?
Because the crab house cut back shifts for servers. Because disability makes it hard to work anymore.
“Because we don’t have jobs!”
In all the rhetoric spilled over suspension of food benefits during the federal government shutdown, I never heard a discussion about the root causes.
Why, in a wealthy nation — why, in wealthy Maryland — do people go hungry?
“From our perspective, hunger spiked during the pandemic, and those levels have not come down,” said Meg Kimmel, president and CEO of the Maryland Food Bank. “They’ve started to increase even more now.
“So, this is the worst we have ever seen.”
Most people who work in food relief will tell you they thought COVID would be the worst food crisis they would ever see.
They couldn’t imagine that hunger would become a political weapon.
President Donald Trump is using it against Maryland and 21 other states, cutting off management funds for SNAP programs, sometimes known as food stamps, unless they hand over the names and immigration status of people asking for help with food.
This is happening just weeks after the administration let funding for those benefits lapse during the federal shutdown, breaking a law that requires it to find a way to pay.
New requirements, restrictions on who qualifies and pressures on the state budget all mean more people are likely to go hungry in Maryland in 2026.
Food stamps go to about 28% of the households in Somerset County, the highest rate in the state, according to the U.S. Census. In Baltimore it’s about 23%.
It’s not just rural and urban poor communities where people go hungry.
“We have about 150,000 residents who live in that gap, who make too much to qualify for federal assistance programs but don’t make enough to make ends meet,” said Heather Bruskin, director of the Montgomery County Office of Food Systems
“So those families are constantly making choices between paying their rent, covering their utilities, their credit card bills, or putting food on the table.”
The reasons are not surprising, even if they come as a revelation.
Maryland unemployment hovers in the low single digits. The functional unemployment rate — adding people stuck in a part-time job or whose paychecks keep them below the poverty line — is closer to 25%.
Just look at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport, where thousands of people take part-time concessions jobs, pouring your coffee or serving your burger when you’re on the way to a flight.
Turning that into a full-time paycheck can require multiple positions. No wonder the union representing workers wants a $20 minimum wage at the airport.
Even if you have a good-paying job, food prices have been rising since the pandemic. Housing is relentlessly expensive.
You need transportation for almost everything, including getting to that job or someplace to buy food.
Even when everything is on track, and you get sick or injured, medical bills can drive your budget into the ditch.
And in many places, there are food deserts — 17 in wealthy Anne Arundel County.
“Those with the least access to food are more likely to be receiving SNAP benefits, and are also more likely to be in the areas where other social determinants of health are worsening,” wrote Pamela Brown, author of a semiannual needs assessment in the county.
Maryland is a costly place to live. Despite what conservatives say, it’s not driven by taxes. It’s driven by people and the services they need.
The important thing to remember about hunger is that it’s not a permanent state for most people.
“It can show up as not enough financial resources to purchase food. It can show up as buying less expensive food or cheap food, because that’s what is affordable,” Kimmel said. “It can show up as skipping meals, or like we hear all the time, parents skipping meals so that their kids can eat right.
“It’s not a binary, black and white situation.”
This is going to get worse before it gets better.
We’re just starting to see the impact of new work rules for SNAP benefits. Climate change will affect food sources. Inflation is difficult to resolve, and tariff uncertainty under the Trump administration isn’t helping.
There’s a leadership vacuum in Maryland.
Only Montgomery County has an agency dedicated to addressing the causes of hunger. The idea for it came out of the pandemic, and Bruskin’s office has a $14 million budget this year.
“We’ve been blessed with leadership that recognizes that access to nutritious food is a basic human right, and something that we need to center as its own issue area,” Bruskin said.
Her agency doesn’t just hand out food and support local pantries; it works on boosting local food production, providing financial aid at the grocery checkout for people outside the federal income test. It teaches people how to eat healthy.
“If we want to really move the needle on these priorities, we need to both look at food from a systemic perspective and also from a strategic perspective,” Bruskin said.
Hunger is hard to track because it is so transitory. Surveys of people who use the county’s food relief programs show 7% say they were able to get jobs or better jobs because they worried less about going hungry.
You can’t replicate what Montgomery County is doing in the rest of the state. The county’s population is larger than Delaware and six other states.
The Maryland Food Bank plans to look for a more strategic leadership role next year, building on the expertise it’s gained working with 780 food banks and community groups that are focused on hunger.
“We want the optimization and the alignment of the resources that we have in our state,” Kimmel said.
The question of why people go hungry is real. So is the opportunity to answer it.
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