It happened almost a decade ago, but Mariela Hernandez still remembers the scene when a woman from her free Zumba class invited her and her four children out to Buns, a burger restaurant.
“Oh, no thank you. We have food at the house,” said Hernandez.
“No, we don’t,” countered her seven-year-old son, Anthony.
“Yes, we do.”
“But I really want it!”
“Anthony, let it go. We have to go home.”
“You never let us do this!”
“Anthony, shut up. We ain’t getting it. Get in the freaking car.”
She pushed the kids inside her 2003 red Nissan Altima, which had a history of breaking down, and drove home in silence. They sat down to canned soup and quesadillas for dinner. She was silent because there was no money for four burgers from Buns. On their slender budget, there was barely enough to pay the bills or buy necessities for the kids, such as school supplies.
As a single mom with four children, Hernandez was working multiple jobs and receiving food stamps—but it was never enough for her to feel certain she could feed her children nutritious food all week. Anxiety gripped her when she had to figure out how to stretch the 90¢ can of tuna or vegetables. She often cried in the bathroom.
“I had this dryness down my throat, my chest was hurting, and a pit in my stomach,” she says.
Hernandez was one of 44 million Americans the USDA calls food insecure, living in a household where everyone lacks access to enough food for an active and healthy life. North Carolina is the 10th hungriest state in the country—more than 1.2 million people were food insecure in 2021, Feeding America reports.
Hernandez is one individual, but her story is a testament to the challenges that many North Carolinians face when they don’t make enough money, don’t have family support, and can’t depend on government programs to ensure their families are fed.
Now, she works as the rapid rehousing case manager for the Orange County Housing Department, and her oldest kids are grown—but before, her experience with food insecurity was too painful to talk about for a long time. After receiving therapy for two years from 2016 to 2018, building a support network of friends, and working with others who also faced food insecurity, Hernandez was ready to tell her story.
Assistance from PORCH, a hunger relief organization in Chapel Hill, and others such as TABLE were instrumental in helping Hernandez feed her family when it was difficult for her to do so alone. Now, she connects others in her community facing food insecurity with the resources that brought her back to stability.
“There’s so much data and reports done about food inequities, but when you hear a story, you can make it more meaningful,” Hernandez says.
Food insecurity can result from an illness, accident, job layoff, or any situation where someone must choose between food and other life expenses. It often happens to families where one small incident moves them from barely making ends meet to crisis.
For Hernandez, the tipping point was her husband’s incarceration in January 2016.
Her husband, whose name Hernandez doesn’t want to disclose, was detained for his undocumented status and a charge of theft and battery attributed to someone with the same name as him. While he spent a year and a half in facilities across North Carolina, Ohio, and Arizona, Hernandez was alone with their three children at the time: Maria, then 16, Carolina, then 12, and Anthony. She had a fourth child, Manny, who’s now five, in 2018.
Theirs became one of the 70 percent of households that have difficulty meeting basic needs, including food, after a family member has been incarcerated.
Hernandez’s husband was the breadwinner as a self-employed carpenter and remodeler. She was working 20 hours a week at Family Success Alliance—a group of organizations working to end generational poverty in Orange County. She made $18 an hour, and when combined with her husband’s salary, it supported their family.
But two months after his incarceration, she was forced to pick up interpreting jobs and clean houses to help pay the bills. Even then, she’d skip the water bill one month and electricity the next. Even then, she couldn’t afford the mortgage.
Even then, she rationed food so it could last, like when the kids wanted five chicken nuggets each, but she only had enough to give them three.
A social services worker told Hernandez that her mortgage was the reason she didn’t have money to buy food and suggested she move to low-income housing.
She left the Orange County Social Services Department in tears. It wasn’t her first time speaking with someone who didn’t understand that food insecurity isn’t a choice and that someone can hold multiple jobs but still worry whether they can feed their family.
“They saw me with a house, and they’re like, ‘She’d rather pay for her house than buy food’—it’s those assumptions,” she says.
Hernandez made dishes with little or no meat because of the high cost, usually sopita de fideo—a Mexican noodle soup. She cooked canned-tuna patties, or chicken patties, as the kids called them, instead of meat.
The average low-cost weekly budget for a family of four is $243.80, according to U.S. News. Food stamps covered $150 of Hernandez’s food weekly, but she spent at most $90 when it came from her pocket. An avid coupon user, Hernandez used them on each trip to the grocery store to buy dairy products and household items such as toothpaste, which she usually got for free. Sometimes, she resold the items for a lower price to get money for food or a treat at McDonald’s.
Her pantry shelves were bare and contained a few canned goods and boxes of spaghetti. Gone were the days when it was full of enough rice and beans to last a month and her children’s favorite foods like Nutella. The fridge no longer chilled the string cheese or Yoplait yogurt they enjoyed.
If they went out to eat, it was once every two or three months when Hernandez’s sister invited them. Still, the kids asked for Burger King, Monterrey Mexican Grill, and Chinese takeout, but she said no each time.
“It was a rude awakening for them to learn that you don’t always have money,” Hernandez says.
Despite these dinner invitations, her family never called to ask if the kids had enough to eat. Community members and friends, including Marya Plotkin, stood by Hernandez the most.
The two were neighbors when they met in 2014. Plotkin bought an extra bag of everything when she went to the grocery store and gave it to Hernandez after she learned about the family’s food insecurity.
On a couple of occasions, she asked her family and friends to pick up gift certificates for them at the grocery store. But she says she helped the family most by creating a GoFundMe campaign for their needs that raised $4,000.
As a single mom of two boys herself, the family’s emotional health concerned Plotkin the most.
“The idea of not being able to provide food for your children would set any mother into an absolute panic,” she says. “It’s a basic need that you feel as a parent you can never compromise.”
Each of the kids had therapists through their schools. Hernandez’s daughter Carolina cried out of fear they would end up homeless. Maria struggled with anxiety and depression most of her life, but with her dad gone and her mom struggling on her own, she isolated herself more.
Hernandez had many sleepless nights; the thought that she would lose everything and become homeless consumed her. The anxiety became unbearable to the point where she had to get back on anxiety medications.
She was diagnosed with fibromyalgia—a chronic condition that causes pain and tenderness throughout the body, often triggered by physical or psychological stress—after her husband was released in May 2017.
Carolina was a fifth grader at McDougle Elementary in Carrboro when she had to drink two Ensure nutrition shakes daily because of a food intake issue and low iron. Hernandez couldn’t afford the shakes, so Carolina went to the school social worker for help, who gave the family $35 gift cards every few weeks to buy them.
The social worker connected Hernandez to PORCH, a hunger relief organization in Chapel Hill, which became one of the resources she used most frequently to get food. While there are federal government food assistance programs those in need can apply for, such as SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, and WIC, several factors are considered for a person to be eligible. These can include household size, income, and even immigration status.
Along with these potential limitations in accessing food, Hernandez says some community members may be wary of government assistance programs because they may not want to be identified by the government. Programs such as PORCH, she says, don’t ask as many personal questions during the application process, such as requesting a Social Security number, which might make them more approachable.
When Hernandez worked at Family Success Alliance as a navigator connecting families in crisis to resources, she recommended PORCH to many of the program’s clients, including Regi Joy.
“The karma came back in the good things I’m able to do in my community,” Hernandez says.
Joy lived in Chase Park, a subsidized apartment community in Chapel Hill when he met Hernandez in 2017. He was a disabled, single dad to his seven-year-old daughter, Makayla, and often didn’t have enough or couldn’t afford food for them both. His disability and having to care for her left him limited to the jobs he could hold, which were in IT.
In addition to PORCH, Hernandez informed Joy about TABLE, a program that delivers healthy food to children in Orange County, and Inter-Faith Council for Social Service in Carrboro, which provides year-round food donations. Joy says it was amazing how she understood the rough time he was going through.
“Anytime I picked up the phone she was there, and that was really instrumental in getting me out of survival mode,” he says.
While Hernandez worked at Family Success Alliance, she was also a member of the PORCH advisory council. The group wanted input from PORCH participants and community members about the program, such as how to communicate better and the type of food people wanted.
Susan Friedman, a volunteer with PORCH, became a member of the council at the same time Hernandez did in 2021.
“The care and concern she showed for the people she knows are in need of services is exceptional, as is her willingness to convey that to people,” Friedman says. “She’s a strong, positive force for change.”
Hernandez started two WhatsApp groups, one for English speakers and the other for Spanish speakers, in 2015 called the “parent solidarity network” to connect members with local organizations that provide food. Together, the groups have about 120 members, and Hernandez says word of mouth has helped them grow. During the holidays, she sees the need for food in the groups at its greatest.
Hernandez says Anthony, who plays football and lacrosse at Chapel Hill High School, is always willing to help her give away food in the community.
He was in elementary school when food insecurity cast a dark cloud over his family. But even as a third grader, he knew the sacrifices his mother—the sun when their lives were cast over by clouds—made for the family, as he wrote in a letter to her:
My mom is my influence because she gives me everything and she is my mom that gave me my life.
She gave me what I need a bed, food and water to keep me in good shape.
My mom teach as a person is that a child has to be treated fairly so they can grow up to be a good person in life.
Comment on this story at [email protected].
You must be logged in to post a comment.