On a Tuesday morning in mid-August, Mary Hynes was blasting her air conditioner. Hynes has walking problems, and she said she has passed out “a few times” in the past. The problem went away after her pacemaker was adjusted, but it was enough to make her nervous about leaving her apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. And then experiencing New York a particularly hot summer with multiple heat waveswhich makes her even less likely to go outside.
“Thank God for these guys,” she said, referring to the volunteer who drops off her weekly meals. Hynes is one of more than 20,000 New Yorkers 60 and older who receive meal deliveries from Citymeals on Wheels, a nonprofit founded in 1981 to fill the gaps in the city’s public meal assistance program for older, homebound New Yorkers. Her experience is an example of how, during heat emergencies, food aid can provide a lifeline to vulnerable communities. “I didn’t think they were going to do deliveries because of the heat” at one point this summer, she said, “and I would have understood.”
For older adults living with disabilities or mobility issues, heat can exacerbate the challenges of going outside, getting groceries, and cooking for yourself. By delivering meals during extreme weather, including heat waves, food distribution organizations like Citymeals act as a line of defense against the worst climate impacts.
“Emergencies have become a sweet spot for us,” said Citymeals CEO Beth Shapiro.
New York City’s Department on Aging facilitates home-delivered meals for older New Yorkers who cannot prepare their own meals, but only on weekdays. “The city funds meals Monday through Friday, and our founder believed that people should eat every day of the week, as we still do,” Shapiro said. In addition to weekend and holiday service, Citymeals, which works with 30 senior centers in all five boroughs of New York City, also delivers food to older adults during localized emergencies. To qualify for Citymeals, recipients must be 60 or older and have a physical or mental health condition that prevents them from regularly buying food or cooking for themselves.
Citymeals volunteers and staff have delivered meals during major disasters — for example, 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which flooded lower Manhattan, damaged buildings and left hundreds of thousands without power. But extreme heat works on vulnerable populations in ways that are more subtle but just as dangerous. For adults 65 and older, who live with certain diseases, or take certain medications, may affects the body’s ability to tolerate increases in temperature. Older adults with cardiovascular problems and other diseases that can cause weakness are more susceptible to heat-related illnesses. In addition, the social isolation that many older adults experience becomes life-threatening during a heat wave. Home meal deliveries are one way to engage older people during heat emergencies — and as climate change makes summers hotter and hotter, the need for such high-touch services is growing.
“One of the things we talk about during heat events is to look at your neighbor,” said Heidi Brown, professor and program director of epidemiology at the University of Arizona’s college of public health. Volunteers who bring food to homebound people can help break up the social isolation they face. For example, volunteers can see a meal recipient appear on a hot day, check for signs of heat-related illness, and ask if they have enough water or have any problems cooling their home. (Citymeals instructs volunteers who observe severe problems to contact the meal recipient’s case manager.) Check-in may not be the express “mandate” of meals-on-wheels organizations, Brown said, “but it is part of what they do. They bring resources and make sure that person is OK. And if not, reach out and get them to a cooling station, or make sure they know where cooling stations are.”
The volunteer serving Hynes’ building said one thing he might pay attention to is whether or not a meal counter has AC on. Even during a heat wave, that’s not a given: Citymeals recently partnered with the City University of New York’s Urban Food Policy Institute to survey recipients of meal assistance services for older adultsincluding Citymeals. Nearly half of respondents reported experiencing food insecurity in the past 12 months, and more than 60 percent lived on less than $15,000 per year.
“If I live on it, can I buy food, pay for medicine, turn on an air conditioner if I have it?” Shapiro said.
In addition to exacerbating financial burdens, extreme heat can complicate mobility issues for older people facing hunger. “Which makes sense,” said Michael Flood, the president and CEO of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. “None of us want to go out when it’s 98 degrees.” Across California, the heat in July shattered records and became the state’s hottest month on record. For Los Angeles, the most brutal heat of the summer is yet to come: this week Southern California is expecting her longest and hottest heat wave of the summer.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made the Southern California food bank more aware of how public health crises affect older adults’ mobility and ability to access food distribution centers. Now the organization deliver groceries on low-income people 60 or older.
Older adults are not the only population that experiences an increased need for food banks and meal delivery services during extreme weather events. People who are not housed and families with children may also rely more on food assistance programs during a heat wave.
The Silver Lake Community Church in LA has a food pantry program designed with the needs of homeless people in mind. When it’s really hot outside, homeless people may decide not to come to the church for food assistance, office administrator Stephanie Young said. But volunteers will also pick people up from wherever they live and bring them to the church for programming, whether it’s the food pantry or the church’s shower program.
Homeless individuals participating in a free breakfast program at the St. Francis Center in downtown LA, can stay and chat with other community members on particularly hot days and enjoy the center’s AC, according to program director Cesar Argueta.
Summer also presents a twofold challenge for food insecure families, especially those with children. “We see hunger increase a lot in the summer,” said Celia Cole, the CEO of Feeding Texas, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting hunger in the nation’s second-largest state by population, “because what happens is that those children come out of school where they would have access to free breakfast and free lunch.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress granted waivers that expanded the ability of schools and community groups to offer free meals to young people during the summer months, but that waiver expired in 2022. There are currently no websites in Texas that offer free meals and snacks to children through the US Department of Agriculture’s Summer Food Service Programaccording to the latest data listed on the program’s website.
“At the same time,” Cole added, “people’s utility bills are going up,” reducing the income they have available for groceries.
Cole pointed out that there can be many barriers to food access — for example, many people don’t apply for food stamps because they don’t realize they’re eligible, or because they may feel a sense of stigma about accepting government benefits. However, Cole said the main cause of hunger is mostly wealth inequality and the high cost of living. “Connecting people to all the benefits they’re eligible for is the first step to dealing with the food part of the problem,” she said. “But at the end of the day, the underlying problem is the money problem.”
In practice, disability, financial need, and climate impacts can all strike unexpectedly or all at once—and they can all make it harder for people to get the nutrition they need. Rubem Dasilva, a New Yorker who started receiving deliveries from Citymeals during the pandemic, said the service helped him a lot. The 79-year-old, who lives not far from the theater district in Manhattan, struggles to afford groceries. And he avoids the matinee crowd on Wednesdays and Sundays for fear of being bumped by pedestrians, making it more difficult to go to the grocery store. “I’ve been bumped three or four times,” he said.
So the food program was a lifesaver. “The meals are just great,” he said. “I’m so grateful.”
For Dasilva, his mobility concerns do not prevent him from trying to live life to the fullest. “I’m very adventurous,” he said. “If the weather is great, I go to Central Park. I take my favorite form of travel, which is the Staten Island Ferry.” But even he has his limits. “When it’s too hot outside? I stay at home.”
