Amy Beros and Liz Reasoner discuss the growing food insecurity during Hunger Awareness month

Thanks to soaring prices and big cuts to federal food assistance, hunger is quickly growing worse across North Carolina. The latest conservative estimate is that one out of seven North Carolinians is “food insecure” – a number that’s way up in just the last five years and now even higher than during the pandemic. How did we get into this situation, how are food aid organizations trying to respond, and what more should all of us be doing? Recently, as part of Hunger Awareness Month, Newsline explored those questions and more in a special extended conversation with a pair of experts: Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina President Amy Beros and Food Bank of the Albemarle CEO Liz Reasoner.

In Part One of our recent extended conversation with North Carolina food bank leaders Amy Beros and Liz Reasoner we explored the remarkable and unhappy fact that – thanks to the toxic combination of rising prices and big cuts to federal funding for food assistance, the scourge of hunger is on the rise in North Carolina, and is now worse even than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Part Two of our chat, we dug deeper into the scope of the crisis, the huge practical challenges that many struggling households face in acquiring healthy food, the daunting problems that food banks and pantries face in serving the growing number of people in need, and how ultimately, it’s incumbent upon all of us to ask and expect more from elected leaders – particularly in Washington – if we’re going to see any meaningful improvement in the situation.

Click here to listen to the full interview with Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina President Amy Beros and Food Bank of the Albemarle CEO Liz Reasoner.