It was almost a decade ago, but Mariela Hernandez still remembers the scene when a woman from a free Zumba class invited her and her four children to Buns burger restaurant.
“Oh, no problem. I have food at home,” Hernandez said.
“No, it’s not,” her 7-year-old son, Anthony, countered.
“Yes, it is.”
“But I really want it!”
“Anthony, leave me alone. I need to go home.”
“You’ll never let us do this!”
“Anthony, shut up. We don’t know anything. Get in the car.”
She piled the kids into her broken-down red 2003 Nissan Altima and drove home in silence. For dinner they had canned soup and quesadillas. She kept quiet because she didn’t have enough money to buy four burgers on a bun. Their tiny budget was barely enough to pay the bills and buy school supplies and other necessities for the kids.
A single mother of four, Hernandez worked multiple jobs and received food stamps, but she wasn’t sure she could feed her kids nutritious meals for a week. She would get anxious when she had to figure out how to save money on 90-cent cans of tuna and vegetables. She would often cry in the bathroom.
“I had a dry throat, chest pain and felt sick to my stomach,” she said.
Hernandez was one of 44 million Americans who the USDA calls food insecure, meaning they lived in a household where they didn’t have access to enough food to lead an active, healthy life. North Carolina is the 10th most hungry state in the country, with more than 1.2 million people experiencing food insecurity in 2021, according to a Feeding America report.
Hernandez is just one person, but her story illustrates the struggles faced by many North Carolinians who don’t have enough income, family support or can’t rely on government programs to keep their families fed.
Now she works as an emergency rehousing manager for the Orange County Housing Authority, and her older children are grown. But before, her experience with food insecurity was too painful to talk about for a long time. After two years, from 2016 to 2018, of going to therapy, building a support network of friends, and working with others facing similar food insecurity, Hernandez was ready to share her story.
Support from other organizations, such as Chapel Hill hunger relief organizations PORCH and TABLE, went a long way to helping Hernandez feed her family at a time when it would have been difficult for her to do so on her own, and now she connects others in the community facing food insecurity with resources that have brought her back to stability.
“There’s a lot of data and reports about food inequality, but hearing the stories makes it more meaningful,” Hernandez said.
Mariela Hernandez, 45, and her children, Emmanuel Guerrero Hernandez, 5, Carolina Guerrero Hernandez, 20, and Maria Jose Guerrero Hernandez, 24, at their Chapel Hill home. Credit: Photo by Angelica Edwards
Food insecurity can result from illness, an accident, losing a job, or having to choose between food and other living expenses. It often happens when a small event pushes a family from barely making ends meet to a crisis.
The turning point for Hernandez came in January 2016 when her husband was incarcerated.
Hernandez, who did not want to give her name, said her husband was in custody because he was an undocumented immigrant and was also held on charges of theft and assault by a person of the same name. While her husband spent a year and a half in facilities in North Carolina, Ohio and Arizona, Hernandez was left alone with her three children, Maria, then 16, Carolina, then 12, and Anthony. In 2018, they had a fourth child, Manny, now 5.
Their household is among the 70 percent of families that struggle to meet basic needs, including food, after a family member is incarcerated.
Hernandez’s husband was a self-employed carpenter and remodeler who provided for the family, and she worked 20 hours a week for Family Success Alliance, an organization that works to end generational poverty in Orange County. Her hourly wage of $18 helped support the family, along with her husband’s salary.
But two months after her husband was jailed, she was forced to work as a translator and clean houses to help make ends meet. Still, she missed her water bill one month and her electricity the next. Still, they couldn’t afford to pay their mortgage.
Still, she would conserve food to make it last longer, like when her kids wanted five chicken nuggets each and she could only give them three.
Social workers told Hernandez that her mortgage meant she had no money to buy food and recommended she move into low-income housing.
She left the Orange County Department of Social Services in tears. It wasn’t the first time she’d spoken to someone who didn’t understand that food insecurity is not a choice, and that some people worry about whether they can feed their families even while working multiple jobs.
“They see I have a home and they think, ‘She’d rather pay for housing than buy food,’ and that’s the assumption they make,” she said.
Ms. Hernandez made dishes that rarely contained meat because of the cost, usually a Mexican noodle soup called “sopita de fideo.” Instead, she cooked what her children called “chicken patties” or canned tuna patties.
According to U.S. News, the average minimum budget for a family of four is $243.80 per week. Hernandez was able to cover $150 per week in food expenses with food stamps, but paid a maximum of $90 out of pocket. A frequent coupon user, Hernandez would use coupons every time she went to the grocery store to buy everyday items like dairy products and toothpaste, which she often got for free. Sometimes she would resell the coupons for a lower price to get money for meals and snacks at McDonald’s.
Her pantry was bare, just a few cans of food and boxes of spaghetti. Gone were the days when it was filled with a month’s supply of rice, beans, and her kids’ favorite foods like Nutella. The fridge no longer contained the string cheese and Yoplait yogurt her kids loved.
They only ate out once every two or three months, at the request of Ms. Hernandez’s sister, but the kids still ordered takeout from Burger King, Monterrey Mexican Grill and Chinese food, and each time her sister refused.
“It was a shock to them to learn that money isn’t always there,” Hernandez said.
Despite those dinner invitations, her family never called to ask if the children had had enough. Community members and friends, including Maria Plotkin, were Hernandez’s biggest supporters.
The two were neighbors when they met in 2014. Plotkin would go to the grocery store and buy an extra bag of every item to give to Hernandez, who encouraged her to do the shopping after learning about her family’s food shortages.
She has asked family and friends on several occasions to buy her gift cards from grocery stores, but she says what has helped her most is setting up a GoFundMe campaign to raise $4,000 for her family.
Plotkin herself is a single mother raising two boys, and was most concerned about her family’s mental health.
“The thought of not being able to feed your child sends any mother into a state of panic,” she says. “It’s a basic need that you can never compromise on as a parent.”
Each child was seeing a therapist through their school. Hernandez’s daughter, Carolina, cried because she feared she would end up homeless. Maria had suffered from anxiety and depression most of her life, but became even more isolated after her father died and her mother struggled alone.
Hernandez spent many sleepless nights, plagued by thoughts of losing everything and becoming homeless. The anxiety became so unbearable that he had to go back on anti-anxiety medication.
She was diagnosed with fibromyalgia after her husband was released in May 2017. Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that is often triggered by physical or mental stress and causes pain and tenderness throughout the body.
When Carolina was a fifth-grader at McDougle Elementary School in Carrboro, she had to drink two Ensure Nutrition shakes every day because of dietary issues and an iron deficiency. Hernandez couldn’t afford the shakes, so Carolina asked her school social worker for help, who gave the family a $35 gift card to buy the shakes every few weeks.
Mariela Hernandez with her daughters Maria (left) and Carolina. Photo by Angelica Edwards
A social worker referred Hernandez to PORCH, a hunger-relief organization in Chapel Hill, which became one of Hernandez’s most frequent resources for getting food. There are federal food assistance programs that people in need can apply for, such as SNAP (formerly Food Stamps) and WIC, but eligibility takes into account several factors, including household size, income and even immigration status.
In addition to these potential limitations in access to food, Hernandez said some local residents may be wary of government assistance programs because they don’t want their identity revealed to the government. Programs like PORCH may be more approachable because they don’t ask as many personal questions during the application process, such as requesting Social Security numbers, Hernandez said.
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.
“That karma has come back to me in the good I can do in my community,” Hernandez says.
Joy was living in Chase Park, a subsidized apartment community in Chapel Hill, when she met Hernandez in 2017. He was a single father with disabilities who often struggled to or couldn’t provide enough food for the two of them, along with his 7-year-old daughter, Makayla. Because of his disability and the need to care for her, the jobs he could take were limited to those in IT.
Hernandez also told Joy about TABLE, a program that provides healthy food to children in Orange County, and the Inter-Faith Council for Social Services in Carrboro, which donates food throughout the year. Joy said she was surprised that Hernandez understood the difficult times she was going through.
“Any time I picked up the phone she was there, and that really helped get me out of survival mode,” he says.
During her time working at Family Success Alliance, Hernandez also served on the PORCH Advisory Committee, which sought input from PORCH participants and community members about the program, including how to better communicate and what types of foods people would like.
Susan Friedman, a PORCH volunteer, joined the council in 2021 at the same time as Hernandez.
“Her care and concern for those in need of her services is extraordinary, as is her willingness to share that with others,” Friedman said. “She is a powerful, positive force for change.”
In 2015, Ms. Hernandez started two WhatsApp groups called Parent Solidarity Network to connect members with local organizations that provide food, one for English speakers and one for Spanish speakers. The groups have about 120 members combined and have grown by word of mouth, Ms. Hernandez said. She finds that demand for food is highest among the groups during the holidays.
Hernandez said Anthony, who plays football and lacrosse at Chapel Hill High School, is always happy to help with food distribution in the community.
He was in elementary school when food insecurity cast a dark shadow over his family. But even as a third-grader, he knew the sacrifices his mother made for them. She was a ray of sunshine when their lives were shrouded in darkness. In a letter to her, he wrote:
My mother is my influence because she gave me everything and she is also the mother who gave me life.
She gave me the bed, food and water I needed to stay healthy.
What my mother taught me as a person is that children must be treated fairly in order to grow up to be good people in life.
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