Coronavirus adds to already widespread hunger in North Carolina. It’s time to fix this for good.

North Carolina’s food banks know how to respond to hurricanes: They concentrate their aid and send it to a stricken area. But now they’re responding to a “perfect storm,” a COVID-19 crisis that has hit every part of the state at once.

This storm will affect more people, last longer and create greater hunger than anything the charitable projects have faced. “It’s overwhelming,” said Mike Darrow, executive director of Feeding the Carolinas, an association of 10 food banks that includes seven in North Carolina.

The numbers will stay high as long as social distancing takes its toll on the economy. “Some small businesses are not going to recover,” Darrow said. “Those folks will be clients of us for a while.”

Food banks and the hundreds of smaller food pantries they supply face a three-pronged problem: Unemployment has spiked, driving up demand for food; volunteers have decreased as they practice social distancing, and supply lines are disrupted as supermarkets and restaurants have little excess food to donate, or even to sell in large quantities.

Nick Robertson, who oversees food distribution for Urban Ministries of Wake County, said his pantry has more than doubled the food boxes it gives to families daily and the supply is gone by 10:30 a.m. “It’s an absolute madhouse,” he said.

“There are people who never had their back against the wall and now they have their back against the wall,” Robertson said. “It’s scary, especially if you have kids, because nobody knows the end game.”

As this food crisis touches people who previously didn’t worry about finding food, It should drive new thinking about how to end hunger that is widespread in North Carolina even in ordinary times. Among the steps that could help would be a higher state minimum wage, a sharp reduction in food waste, tax incentives to eliminate food deserts, cutting the red tape that makes it hard for small local farmers to sell their products and more generous funding for low-income people to buy food.

N.C. State University’s Institute for Emerging Issues presented an online forum last week on the topic “Food and hunger in North Carolina in the time of pandemic.” It presented sobering statistics about how the coronavirus crisis is striking a state where access to food was already a problem for many.

According to those statistics, one in seven adults in North Carolina is “food insecure,” meaning they sometimes don’t know where their next meal will come from. For children, it’s worse. One in five are food insecure and one in four children of color. A 2017 analysis of USDA data by Bread for the World listed North Carolina among the nation’s 10 hungriest states.

Now those numbers have soared. One day last week, 300 cars formed a traffic jam at a Union County drive-thru pantry, double the usual number served.

“A pandemic exacerbates what we were already seeing on a normal basis,” said Tessa Thraves, a participant in the forum, who coordinates a farm-to-school food supply program at N.C. State. “The numbers that were already high are ballooning.”

For such a widespread problem, hunger in North Carolina has received little attention from state lawmakers. Indeed the legislature moved to tighten eligibility for food stamps in 2015, a change that pushed an estimated 100,000 North Carolinians out of the federal program.

Now hunger may be getting too common to ignore. It’s not just a problem for the longtime poor. It’s also a problem for the newly jobless in a battered economy that may take years to recover. Finding ways to make it easier to get food to the needy should, at long last, become a priority for lawmakers.

This story was originally published April 23, 2020 at 3:10 PM.