Transcript: The Bethlehem Project — The American affordability squeeze

This is an audio transcript of the Swamp Notes podcast episode: ‘The Bethlehem Project — The American affordability squeeze’

Volunteer

Uh, bagels?

Tiffany Chase

Yes, please.

Sonja Hutson

Tiffany Chase is going grocery shopping, not at a store, but at a food bank.

Volunteer

This is your meat.

Tiffany Chase

I want to bag it.

Sonja Hutson

We’re in Easton, Pennsylvania. One town over from Bethlehem in the Lehigh Valley. Tiffany’s wheeling a plastic cart around the warehouse and a volunteer is picking food off the shelves for her.

Volunteer

Do you want any?

Tiffany Chase

Just one or two for Blake? I don’t wanna take from everybody else.

Volunteer

Yeah. OK.

Sonja Hutson

Tiffany has a young son named Blake and a daughter in college. Tiffany is 43 years old and she started coming to the LINCS food pantry about three years ago after she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. It’s a chronic inflammatory bowel disease and it meant she could no longer work her job at her son’s school anymore. Her family became totally dependent on her boyfriend’s salary. He works for the postal service.

Tiffany Chase

When I first came here, I came here with tears in my eyes, completely humiliated, because I work hard every day and never thought I would have to come here to depend on this.

Sonja Hutson

She’s since been able to go back to work part-time. But rising grocery prices have made the financial squeeze even tighter for Tiffany and her family.

Tiffany Chase

So know, these fruits, these vegetables, you go to Giant right now and it’s like $19.99 for fruit. Who, I don’t know who in the American economy can afford that.

Sonja Hutson

And it’s not just Tiffany. A steady stream of people wind through the shelves and pick up other necessities from a line of folding tables.

Lisa Briedinger

As you can see, it’s very busy out there today.

Sonja Hutson

That’s the food pantry’s director, Lisa Briedinger. She says she’s seen more and more people who have jobs come in for extra help.

[VOICE CLIP]

And overall, the food bank has seen 140 per cent increase in people using the service since 2022.

Lisa Briedinger

We may have 50 people standing out there, you know, and they’re lined up at 8, 9.30 in the morning. Some people come at 6 o’clock and they sit in their cars and they park down the street.

Sonja Hutson

Tiffany — the shopper we heard from earlier — says the people who come here are worried that the increased demand means they won’t be able to get enough food.

Tiffany Chase

And as you can see right now, things are dwindling right down here at the food pantry. Things are . . . they’re almost completely out of fruit. The boxes at the bottom are all empty. There’s a lot of traffic outside right now. People trying to get in and out, but we’re all waiting patiently. There’s no issues, no fighting. I have seen it at some food banks, people verbally and physically attacking each other just to get food, which is really devastating to see.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Sonja Hutson

This trip to the Lehigh Valley has got me thinking a lot about how we talk about the economy. There’s the big headline numbers that get a lot of attention. Inflation has cooled since the pandemic. The stock market is hitting record highs and unemployment is still relatively low. But behind all of this good news are people that are still struggling to afford basic necessities.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Today we’re hearing stories about how people in this community are dealing with the high cost of living from food to healthcare to housing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I am Sonja Hutson and this is Swamp Notes: The Bethlehem Project, the series where we look at the biggest US political and economic issues through the lens of one city.

Before we get to our next story, I wanna bring in the FT’s US economics correspondent Myles McCormick to give us some context here. He went on the trip with me. Hey, Myles.

Myles McCormick

Hey, Sonja.

Sonja Hutson

So stepping back, what are the factors that are contributing to this affordability crisis we’re seeing in the US? You know what’s behind it?

Myles McCormick

So there’s really a confluence of factors behind it. I mean, first and foremost is inflation. We’ve had years of high inflation since the Covid-19 pandemic. And while it’s come down significantly since then, it’s still elevated. And the nature of inflation means that prices are rising.