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Feeding an army: Addressing food insecurity at Fort Liberty
- Details
- Tuesday, 03 September 2024
- Written by Jimmy Ryals, CityView Today
People come to Detrice Rogers when they need help getting food. As an administrative officer with Cumberland County Public Health, it’s her job to distribute baby formula to new moms and grocery debit cards to struggling families.
For the last 16 months, Rogers has spent two days a week dispensing wisdom and WIC cards at the former Fort Bragg, America’s largest Army installation. In March 2023, Cumberland County opened a WIC clinic on the post to respond to high rates of food insecurity among soldiers and their families.
Previously, Army families had to go to WIC offices in Spring Lake, Hope Mills, or Fayetteville, each at least a 15-minute drive from the installation.
More than 31 percent of Fort Liberty soldiers and family members report having trouble accessing enough food, according to data compiled by the Military Family Advisory Network and cited by civilian public health staff at Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Liberty.
Nationwide, 25 percent of military members and their families experience food insecurity, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s 2.5 times the rate of food insecurity in the general population.
McDowell traces his own family’s food struggles to the effects of a transfer at the end of 2022. He’d asked to relocate from Army Garrison Ansbach in Germany because of his 2-year-old son’s health issues.
When the family arrived at Fort Liberty, their on-post housing wasn’t ready, and their car was still making the three-month trip over from Germany. For several weeks, McDowell, his wife, and their two children stayed in hotels and got around in a rental car. He covered those costs and later ones with an Army-issued travel credit card and Army emergency relief loans. Repaying the loans and credit card charges put the family in a financial bind that they’re only just escaping, McDowell said.
“I’d budget my money one day at a time,” he said. “Every day I’d have to drive to the store and go pick something up. You’re wasting gas and you’re wasting more money. But that’s the only way I could do it.”
A Transient Population
Financial problems and food insecurity often stem from transfers that uproot soldiers and their families, said Shannon Gettings, a supervisory public health nurse at Womack Army Medical Center, the healthcare facility at Fort Liberty.
The Army has “gotten a lot better with providing government travel cards and reimbursing moving expenses or paying them in advance,” said Gettings, who’s also part of the Cumberland County-Fort Liberty Food Policy Council. “But you definitely still go in the hole any time you [transfer].”
A 2022 MFAN study of the causes of military food insecurity echoes Gettings’ observations. Two of the most common food insecurity scenarios identified by MFAN entail slow reimbursements for moving costs, delays in finding housing and childcare at new bases, and military spouses’ struggles with finding work after transfers.
“Food insecurity is a reality for many in the U.S., and our dedicated soldiers and families are not immune,” said April Olsen, a Fort Liberty public affairs officer.
The Army’s own efforts to curb food insecurity at Fort Liberty include Operation Helping Hand, a food distribution program run by the Religious Services Office. Emergency grants and loans (like the one McDowell took out) are available to soldiers and families in need, as are classes on financial management.
“We encourage soldiers to speak up so they can get help,” Olsen said. “The Army is committed to taking care of our soldiers and their families. No amount of food insecurity within the force is acceptable.”
For McDowell and his family, on-post dining facilities have been an Army-provided lifeline. His meal plan entitles him to breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day at one of eight cafeteria-style dining facility administration centers at Fort Liberty.
While the DFACs help alleviate food insecurity for some, their true purpose is to fuel a dominant fighting force. And the Army is in the middle of revamping them.
Forthcoming force reductions are one major factor driving that reassessment, according to Col. David Rigg, division chief at Army Materiel Command, the unit that manages the Army Food Program. Starting in 2027, the Army plans to eliminate 1,600 chef positions. It’s part of the “Army of 2030” plan, which aims to reorganize the service for large-scale combat, rather than counterterrorism. The Army also wants the remaining culinary corps to focus on feeding soldiers in the field.
Army chefs “are really not meant to run an installation dining facility,” said Brig. Gen. John B. Hinson, commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps’s 3rd Expeditionary Sustainment Command, which shares responsibility for feeding the 43,000 active-duty soldiers stationed at Fort Liberty.
At Fort Liberty, seven DFACs serve a 251-square-mile installation where many soldiers don’t have cars and their work schedules don’t align to the 90-minute breakfast, lunch, and dinner windows when most DFACs are open during the week. On weekends, three or four DFACs are open with limited hours.
“We can’t continue to feed soldiers like we have in the past, where you have soldiers go through a line, sit, and eat,” Hinson said. “We’ve got to figure out what soldiers want to eat and how they want to eat.”
Seeking Sustainable Solutions
A long-term solution to the DFAC conundrum will likely include some privatization, Rigg said, although the timeline for such a dining transformation isn’t clear. Rigg said he and his team are taking time to make sure accessibility, quality, and ambiance measure up.
Funding is a question, too; the current version of the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that funds the military, includes no new money for the food program transformation.
In the interim, Fort Liberty and other Army bases have augmented their DFACs with food trucks and “culinary outposts”—small shops that offer grab-and-go salads, sushi, and sandwiches made on base, alongside frozen food, chips, and other convenience store fare.
For Shammond Woods, a sergeant with the 19th Field Artillery Brigade at Fort Liberty, the outposts save time and money. He sometimes visits the outpost three times a day, stocking up on food to store in his barracks and avoiding lunch rushes in the DFACs.
“If I don’t eat everything I get, I can save it,” he said. “The outposts are just more convenient.”
Army food leaders are also working to make on-post soldiers’ meal benefits more flexible. Soldiers who live in Army barracks are required to buy into a meal plan that includes daily breakfast, lunch, and dinner at DFACs or culinary outposts. But there are other eateries on Army bases that aren’t covered by the plan. While the Army doesn’t manage those, Rigg said it’s working to get them to accept the meal plan, too.
Every enlisted soldier gets a $460 monthly food stipend, but the mandatory meal plan eats up nearly all of it for soldiers who live in barracks. By contrast, those who live off base can use the $460 stipend as they see fit.
Clifton Johnson, co-chair of the Fort Liberty Cumberland County Food Policy Council, thinks the Army should continue liberalizing the meal plan and give the full food stipend to on-post soldiers.
“That’s the one thing I’d change, if I could change it today,” said Johnson, who retired in May as a Special Forces commander.
Putting money into the pockets of junior enlisted soldiers, a group which accounts for 87 percent of the soldiers living on post at Fort Liberty, is the key to reducing food insecurity. A junior enlisted soldier living on a military installation earns between $24,000 and $39,000 per year.
“Ultimately, you have to pay a living wage,” Gettings said. “We can provide all the healthy foods and nutrition education. If you can’t afford it, it’s not going to happen.”
Army leadership knows low pay is a factor in food insecurity, Hinson said.
“In the future, you’re going to see some pay raises for lower enlisted,” he said.
While feds weigh possibilities, the WIC office is hard at work. Through May, it has seen 406 monthly help-seekers in 2024, a 54 percent increase over the 10 months the office was open in 2023.
Rogers attributes the spike to a combination of increased need and growing awareness that WIC is available on base. Her team expects demand to grow even further. In response, they’re planning a move to a more central location on post, and looking into adding a third day of service.
Editor's note: This article has been edited for space. To see the full length article, visit the CityView Today website at https://bit.ly/4fV6Yl0
