Food banks across the nation are seeing a post-pandemic wave of demand for food driven by working people caught in America’s cost-of-living crunch.

“This is a new era of food insecurity,” said Emily Engelhard, vice president of research at Feeding America, the largest U.S. hunger relief organization. “This isn’t an unemployment issue.”

As prices have risen, so have the share of Americans reporting they don’t have enough to eat. And despite robust economic growth and historically low unemployment, those figures have remained elevated in 2024, U.S. census data shows.

The rise in hunger highlights what’s at stake in the sharp-edged choice Federal Reserve officials must make in the coming months. If they keep interest rates elevated to push down inflation, they potentially risk a further cooling of the jobs market, including slower wage growth and higher unemployment. If they cut rates too much in an effort to support hiring and boost workers’ paychecks, they risk inflation remaining stubbornly high.

Policymakers held rates steady when they met this past week and have signaled they may not lower borrowing costs again for a while — at least until they see signs that inflation progress has resumed.

“Everyone sees prices getting high — for food, clothes, everything,” said Kersstin Eshak, who once a month visits a food pantry in Loudoun County, Virginia, to stretch her family’s budget, in an interview at a food pantry run by Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington. The aid lets her budget for other purchases, she said, like clothing for her three children.

The inflation surge that has driven food insecurity among working people is partly the result of one of the biggest policy experiments in decades.

Faced with a global pandemic and the risk of a deeply damaged economy, the U.S. government passed roughly $5 trillion in stimulus and relief measures from March 2020 to March 2021. Among other things, the aid kept workers on payrolls and helped small businesses stay afloat.

That set the stage for a powerful recovery with a rapid return to full employment — a sharp contrast with the crippling jobless recovery the U.S. experienced from 2010 to 2016.

But booming demand “significantly exceeded the economy’s ability to supply goods and services between mid-2021 and mid-2022,” wrote Harvard University economists Karen Dynan and Douglas Elmendorf, causing an inflation surge.

Congress entrusted the central bank with the responsibility to keep inflation under control. Fed officials called the price increases transitory at first, pointing to supply chain tangles that made goods scarce. As a result, they kept borrowing costs near zero through early 2022. Their forecasts were wrong.

By mid-2022, price increases had spread into domestic services as well, and Americans were facing an inflation surge unlike anything seen in decades.

“The Fed failed to carry out its mandate of fostering price stability,” said Andrew Levin, a Dartmouth College professor and former special adviser at the Fed’s Board. “The consequences of that 22% rise in the price level haven’t gone away because lots of families still haven’t caught up with the higher cost of living.”

Since then, Fed officials have generally been encouraged by the decline in inflation, though progress toward the central bank’s goal has been uneven.

While that may seem low, any increase in prices is like adding water to the swimming pool where millions of families are already standing on their toes and trying not to financially drown.

Grocery prices have climbed nearly 28% in the past five years. That’s roughly as much as food costs rose in the 15 years preceding the pandemic. Wages have also grown in recent years, but many Americans have seen those gains wiped out by inflation.