High cost of food creates stress, tough decisions for Yakima Valley families

YAKIMA – Reyna Mendoza Lopez pushed a stroller packed with bread, watermelon and fresh produce up Euclid Avenue in Grandview. Two women walked beside her. They, too, pushed strollers and they, too, carried groceries.

All three were on their way back to an apartment complex where Mendoza Lopez was visiting her sister. They had come from a free food distribution at Immanuel Lutheran Church.

Mendoza Lopez came from Mexico to help her sister, Jorgina Mendoza Juarez, who is blind and on dialysis. Mendoza Juarez lives with her husband and cannot work because of her medical conditions.

While her family is visiting, someone can take Mendoza Juarez to dialysis treatment three times a week. It gives her husband a chance to work full time and bring in income. But when it’s just the two of them, he has to come home early. It’s the only way she can get the treatment she needs.

Right now, the small family has enough to buy food and pay rent, but that’s not always the case. Stress and worry lurk. Mendoza Juarez said winter will be harder.

“We have enough because my husband is working right now, but in the winter when the snow falls and no one works, times are more difficult.” Mendoza Juarez said in Spanish. “We have enough right now. Thank God we have enough.”

Rising grocery prices have increased stress for families across the country. While prices for gasoline and some other necessities have fallen in the last month, inflation continues to climb for food, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The price of food at home has risen 13.1% in the past 12 months. Expensive food may be particularly impactful in Yakima County, where more than 1 in 5 households receive food stamps or supplemental nutrition assistance. That’s nearly twice the rate as the rest of the state.

Those prices come with a cost in the Yakima Valley.

Delno Hoptowit walked into the parking lot outside the Big Lots and Dollar Tree in Yakima last week. He and one of his children put plastic grocery bags into the back of his truck.

“Everything is going up,” he said of food prices. “Everything feels like it’s more.”

Hoptowit said he and his family have had a tough summer. He and his wife work in the fast food industry. At times over the last year, it’s felt as if they’ve barely scraped by.

This year has been particularly difficult, he said. There were weeks when they weren’t able to get quite enough food, he said. Meals were getting smaller.

At the end of August, Washington began to process and distribute pandemic-EBT, or P-EBT, benefits for children younger than 6 or to school-age children during the summer.

Hoptowit said the benefits arrived just in time.

“We got that P-EBT, which helped out,” Hoptowit said. “We were close. Our fridge was getting empty. It was stressful.”

Maria Gonzalez and Sandra Valencia work in the fields of the Lower Valley. They spend their days growing food for people across the country. But they say it’s become harder to buy groceries.

Prices are high and it’s becoming difficult to purchase enough nutritious food, said Gonzalez and Valencia as they loaded groceries into a car in Sunnyside. It makes it harder to get through the workday.

“We’re buying less,” Gonzalez said in Spanish. “I’m more weak and more tired.”

For Gonzalez and Valencia, increased food prices are compounded by other costs. Gonzalez said her landlord raised the rent by $100. Now, as harvests wind down in the Valley, they are worried about what the winter may bring.

“Winter is difficult,” Valencia said. “There’s little money and little work.”

Maria Serna shades her eyes from the sun and puts her drink down on the hood of her car outside Fiesta Foods in Yakima, where she just finished shopping with her son. Like Valencia and Gonzalez, she’s facing difficult choices between food and rent. Like Valencia and Gonzalez, she’s had to change what she’s buying.

“It’s all expensive, too expensive,” she said in Spanish. “I buy a few groceries and it’s $100.”

Serna said her family hasn’t missed meals, but it also hasn’t been easy. They have cut things out of their weekly shopping list, looking for the cheaper foods and purchasing less.

For starters, it means buying fewer snacks and comfort food, but it also means she’s picking between vegetables and meat when she would normally buy plenty of both.

Rosa Abundiz also shops at Fiesta Foods in Yakima. Food prices have changed what she buys.

“I always worry,” she said in Spanish. “Before, I would buy more papaya, elote and pepino. Corn was 10 or five for a dollar.”

Now, corn is more than twice that price, Abundiz said. She doesn’t buy most of those fruits and vegetables anymore. Like Serna, she now has to make choices between the fruits, vegetables or meats she can bring home.

Her grocery shopping has become limited to a few items. Abundiz won’t buy beef, which is much more expensive than pork. She’s been able to substitute it so far, but that doesn’t stop her from worrying.

“What if prices continue to go up? What if she can buy even less in the future?” she asks.

In parking lots outside shopping centers, an agreement runs through Yakima County residents. Food is expensive and this year has been particularly difficult. Some residents have yet to be seriously impacted by inflation, but many are holding on by choosing to go to cheaper markets, picking lower-priced foods or buying less.

As seasonal agricultural work slows down for the winter, those families could face even tougher decisions.