'We don't know how it will end': Hunger stalks amid coronavirus

WASHINGTON -- When all this started -- when the coronavirus began stalking humanity like an animal hunting prey, when she and her husband lost their restaurant jobs overnight as the world shut down to hide, when she feared not being able to feed her family -- Janeth went outside with a red kitchen towel.

It was Passover. Her pastor had told her about the roots of the Jewish holiday, about Israelites smearing a lamb's blood on their doors as a sign for the plagues to pass them by. So Janeth, an immigrant from Honduras, reached up to hang the red towel over the door of her family's apartment on the edge of the nation's capital. It was close enough, she figured, "to show the angel of death to pass over our home."

Pass us by, coronavirus.

And pass us by, hunger.

At night now, it's the worry over food that keeps Janeth's mind racing, and her heart, she says, hurting. "I spend hours thinking, thinking, about what we will do the next day, where we will find food the next day," she says weeks into the coronavirus outbreak, her family's food and cash both dwindling.

Janeth is handed a bag of donated food from a Methodist church, Tuesday, April 21, 2020, in Washington. She was pleased that the bag contained a bit of chicken and rice to cook. When she went home she cooked the chicken immediately. Most food giveaways have been of fresh produce, which they are grateful for, but doesn't keep them full for long. The couple finds most food banks by word of mouth, or driving and looking for lines of people. Language barriers, unfamiliarity with the charity network, and a lack of access to technology can keep some immigrants from accessing food aid. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Janeth and her husband, Roberto, are part of the greatest surge in unemployment in the U.S. since the Depression, setting off a wave of hunger that is swamping food programs nationwide. The couple and every adult member of their extended family in the U.S. have lost their jobs in the economic lockdown prompted by the pandemic.

They are among the tens of millions in America -- more than 1 out of every 6 workers -- abruptly cut off from paychecks.

The Associated Press is withholding the couple's full names because they are in the country illegally and could face deportation. Their immigration status, their problems with English and scanty access to the Internet all combine to block them from accessing the U.S. government benefit programs that millions more newly jobless citizens are able to turn to during the outbreak.

Before the pandemic, food policy experts say, roughly one out of every eight or nine Americans struggled to stay fed. Now as many as one out of every four are projected to join the ranks of the hungry, said Giridhar Mallya, senior policy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for public health.

Immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, households with young children and newly jobless gig workers are among those most at risk, said Joelle Johnson, senior policy associate at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

"They're more vulnerable to begin with and this situation has just exacerbated that situation," she said.

When the global economy clamped down, Roberto, a cook in his mid-30s, and Janeth, who keeps water glasses filled at another restaurant and is in her mid-40s, spent $450 out of their final paychecks to stock up. Weeks later, their diminished cache includes two half-full five-pound bags of rice, an assortment of ramen noodles, a half-eaten bag of pasta, two boxes of cornbread mix, four boxes of raisins and cans of beans, pineapple, tuna, corn and soup.

"Cookies?" Roberto and Janeth's 5-year-old, gap-toothed daughter Allison still asks them, always getting a gentle "no" back. "Ice cream?"

Janeth and Roberto have cut down to one meal a day themselves, skipping meals to keep their daughter fed.

On a good day recently, after Roberto landed four hours of work preparing take-home meals for a grocery store, they had enough for what constitutes a feast these days -- a can of refried beans split three ways and two eggs each, scrambled. Janeth also made tortillas from their last half-bag of masa flour.

Janeth placed aluminum foil over two of the plates; she and Roberto would eat later. Tears sprang to her eyes as she watched her daughter wolf down the meal.

"Where can we get enough food? How can we pay our bills?" she asked. Then she repeated something she and her husband emphasized again and again over the course of several days: They are hard-working people.

Loading their pickup truck to take food to Janeth's sisters, husband and wife dip into the pockets of their jeans to display the cash they have left -- $110 total.

That's gas money. Without that, living on the outskirts of town, there's no getting to food banks, to one-day cash jobs, to stranded relatives facing eviction and hoping for food.

On the drive to Janeth's sisters in Baltimore, Janeth hands Allison a small container of applesauce. The girl savors each taste, dipping in her finger, licking every last bit. "More?" she asks hopefully, tilting the container toward her mother.

Janeth answers regretfully, tenderly.

No more.