Amid the widespread destruction, brutal heat, heavy rain and ongoing outages along the Gulf Coast, relief organizations are scrambling to ensure people stay fed in the wake of Hurricane Beryl. Since the storm made landfall in Southeast Texas, causing millions to lose power, local churches and supermarkets gave away meals and football stadiums became grocery distribution points.
The hurricane, which caused catastrophic damage as it barreled across the Caribbean and the Yucatan Peninsula, hit southeast Texas. on July 8 before tornadoes, rain and flooding spawn as far north as Vermont. All told, the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded claimed the lives of at least 20 people, including 10 in southeast Houstonand at least cause $3.3 billion in harm’s way. That figure is sure to rise in the weeks and months ahead.
So is the hunger crisis.
With Beryl long since past, the biggest threat facing Texans – especially the nearly 300,000 of them still without power on Monday — is brutal heat and unrelenting humidity. The heat index for some areas has approached 106 degrees Fahrenheit Friday and stayed above 90 all weekend. Widespread outages did more than knock out air conditioning when it was sorely needed. It also caused food to spoil in homes, supermarkets and warehouses.
To help combat this, the Houston chapter of the national nonprofit Feeding America has deployed a fleet of about 60 refrigerated trucks each day to distribute food. It works with more than 300 organizations to provide more than 700,000 pounds of food daily. Such efforts will surely continue as the region slowly recovering.
“There are immediate needs that are happening because of the storm. ‘I have no strength. What am I going to cook?’” says Brian Greene, president of Houston Food Bank. “Then it really moves to the households that don’t have that financial cushion that have taken the hit. For those households, we may work with them for many weeks.”
The outages caused about a quarter of the organizations the food bank normally works with to be closed until electricity was restored. But international nonprofits, including World Central Kitchen mobilizedthe federal government has approved additional SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, advantages, and the Texas Department of Emergency Management provided the Houston Food Bank with prepared meals. About 500 American Red Cross volunteers operate 18 shelters throughout Harris and surrounding counties. In the past week, they have distributed more than 56,000 meals and snacks to thousands of people.
But these resources do not always reach everyone. The elderly and homebound, immigrants, those with disabilities and families with children often have challenges accessing them, said Kassandra Martinchek of the Urban Institute. Language barriers also create an obstacle to getting help. It worsens what is a chronic problem, such as almost half of the people who struggle to afford food in Texas also do not qualify for federal aid such as SNAP. (Texas has the most food insecure population in the country, according to a 2024 Feeding America report.)
Although emergency food relief does not reach everyone, it remains essential. “There may still be barriers for households, but this immediate response by charitable providers and by federal nutrition programs is an important part of the broader patchwork of programs that help families after a disaster,” said Martinchek, who researches food access. “[Food insecurity] is really this household economic condition in which families cannot get the food they need to live a healthy and active life.”
Disasters magnify that crisis. Poverty rates tend to rise in areas affected by them because many people, especially low-income households, are less able to prepare for an impending storm or recover from the emotional and physical damage they cause. It deepens existing breeds and socioeconomic divides and exacerbates the food insecurity most experienced by communities of color, those with disabilitiesand households below the federal poverty linebecause research has shown that food tends to be one of the first expenses for financially unstable households cut during economic turmoil. (They not only buy less food, but the quality decreases too.) The enormous cost to repair a storm like Beryl can deepen the plight of families already suffering from hunger and those who stand on the brink of it, about the “hungry cliff.”
A 2023 analysis examined 43 counties across the country in which black and Latino families face food insecurity and climate risk and pegged the average per capita cost of climate disaster over the past decade at $1,822. This is about double the average cost for all other provinces that have experienced such events. This suggests that those who are already struggling to meet their food needs bear the economic burden of climate hazards. Meanwhile, to 37 percent of American households not the savings to cover a $400 emergency expense.
All of this makes lighting critical. In a federally declared disaster like Beryl, emergency SNAP benefits and charity efforts are intended to deliver food in the weeks, and sometimes months, after the disaster. D-SNAP, or disaster SNAP, which the government issued on July 12 for those affected by Beryl, offer temporary additional help.
While such efforts provide a buffer against the increased risk of food insecurity creating a disaster, they do little to address the underlying factors that drive hunger. Aside from the mass mobilization of food in the wake of a crisis, the US government offers little more than programs with fragmented eligibility systems to help households struggling with reduced food purchasing power, said Kristen Wyman of the nonprofit organization WhyHunger.
“We know that hunger is solvable,” Wyman said. “But we still live in a system designed to have an emergency food response as the constant band-aid around hunger and poverty.”
The country’s disaster response plans should look beyond immediate needs and include efforts to promote equitable long-term food access, Sommer Sibilly-Brown said. She founded the nonprofit Virgin Islands Good Food Coalition, which advocates for farmers and food justice. Brown would like to see relief funds allocated to rebuilding community food infrastructure and more comprehensive aid programs that include expanded funding mechanisms for lower-income households, producers and food industry workers.
“We’re addressing emergency shelters and household needs with food,” Brown said. “It is a period of 90 days to six months, depending on the level of disaster. But food insecurity persists based on which systems are affected. Could people go back to work? Have people moved and been displaced? Do people still have power?”
In the coming weeks and months, as the extent of Beryl’s impact is assessed and the cleanup continues, the urgency of the recovery will begin to wane – and so will the hunger relief efforts. This will leave the most vulnerable communities behind struggling with economic downtowns create a disaster inevitably, leave many of them worse off than they were before the storm. And, undoubtedly, no less hungry.
