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Rise In Food Insecurity Projected In Western Massachusetts

Andrew Morehouse, Executive Director of The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts.
Paul Tuthill
/
WAMC

   A study projects a sharp increase in the number of people going hungry in western Massachusetts this year as a result of the economic hardships brought about by the pandemic.

   In its latest projections, Feeding America, the non-profit network of food banks, estimates that 11 percent of the people who live in the four western Massachusetts counties -- roughly 100,000 people --will struggle with food insecurity this year.

   The report said the number of children in western Massachusetts who are food insecure will increase by 30 percent from pre-pandemic levels to roughly 15 percent of the region’s child population.

   WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill spoke with Andrew Morehouse, Executive Director of the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts.

Paul Tuthill is WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief. He’s been covering news, everything from politics and government corruption to natural disasters and the arts, in western Massachusetts since 2007. Before joining WAMC, Paul was a reporter and anchor at WRKO in Boston. He was news director for more than a decade at WTAG in Worcester. Paul has won more than two dozen Associated Press Broadcast Awards. He won an Edward R. Murrow award for reporting on veterans’ healthcare for WAMC in 2011. Born and raised in western New York, Paul did his first radio reporting while he was a student at the University of Rochester.
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