A new survey from the National Council on Aging found that 71% of older adults say affordability is the main barrier to buying healthy foods.
Amy O’Sullivan is the senior director of mission advancement at All Thrive 365, a nonprofit that supports aging Arizonans.
"We see that one-in-six Arizonans are experiencing food insecurity, with affordability being the major barrier," she says. "But older adults are especially vulnerable because most of them do live on fixed income such as social security and it makes it difficult to afford fresh and healthy foods."
They also run into transportation barriers and she says thousands of older Arizonans have reported they’ve been unable to access SNAP.
"Even though we have seen that those have been reinstated, the delays are really, really difficult right now. There's 54,000 applications backlogged in Arizona and 18,000 have been waiting for more than 30 days."
And she says many of those applications belong to seniors.
"So, many of our seniors are left without critical nutrition assistance. The reason for that is also not only the qualifications that have become a little bit more tight, but staffing shortages due to the reduction in federal funding."
O’Sullivan says there are currently tens of thousands of backlogged SNAP applications. She says many Arizona seniors report they’ve been left without critical nutrition assistance as a result.
