Just over a half century ago, one of South Carolina’s most formidable political leaders toured some of the state’s poorest areas and returned with a warning about one of humanity’s oldest scourges — hunger.
“I hope by this book to make you believe that hunger exists in this land, that hunger poses risks to our nation, and that hunger is costing this country far more in dollars than the most elaborate array of feeding programs,” U.S. Sen. and former S.C. Gov. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings of Charleston wrote in his 1970 book, The Case Against Hunger. It got national attention.
He continued, “I hope that some of the facts I present, some of the personal observations I make, and some of the examples I cite will make all of you rise and say: ‘I do believe it, and I must do something about it.’”
Today with grocery prices spiking and federal food assistance on the chopping block, Palmetto State food advocates say that’s a lesson some S.C. political leaders may need to relearn.
“Yes, we still have real hunger in this state,” said Sue Berkowitz, policy director for the S.C. Appleseed Justice Center, on Aug. 6. “Every night, we have children going to bed hungry because they don’t have enough to eat.”
What’s more, she said, the face of today’s hunger problem is very different than most assume.
“It’s not just somebody we see on the street who’s homeless,” she said. “We’re talking about people in families — your mother, your child, the kid sitting next to your child in school. People who think we’ve solved this problem are just wrong.”
To understand how that happens — how seemingly middle-class families end up hungry in South Carolina — Statehouse Report spoke this week with one such mother of three.
And because the longtime Richland County resident doesn’t want her now young-adult children to know what she endured when they were young, we’ll let her tell her story as Yvonne.
‘You can’t sleep. You can’t think. And you get angry.’
Yvonne’s story is far from the stereotype, but experts say it’s typical of how hunger can appear without warning in regular people’s lives.
Raised in a loving working class family, Yvonne never knew hunger as a child. And as a married adult with a successful home-based small business and three young children, she never expected to experience it firsthand.
But then, she said, the bottom fell out.
Without telling Yvonne, her husband stopped paying the one bill she said he was responsible for — the mortgage.
Soon, she lost the home in which she lived and the small business she relied on to pay her bills.
“I no longer had a place to live and I no longer had a means of income,” she said. “And I had to find both in a short period of time for my children.”
Thanks to some savings, she said, she was able to keep a roof over their heads with an apartment that costs more every month than her old mortgage. But as those savings dwindled, the job she landed barely covered the basics.
“There just wasn’t much left over for food,” she said.
And because she earned just $25 a month too much to qualify for what were then called food stamps — now SNAP — she soon found herself facing what she called ‘hard choices.’
One of those choices? Skipping meals so her children could have the food they needed — a situation she said lasted for years. At the dinner table, she would tell the children she wasn’t hungry because she’d eaten at work.
“I never wanted them to know that I had to go without food so they could have enough to eat,” she said.
Today, Yvonne has a better job and her children are pursuing careers in the military and business. But she says she’s never forgotten what it felt like to be hungry.
“You can’t sleep. You can’t think. And you get angry,” she said. “But you have to hide it for your children.”
A web of support under stress
Roughly 700,000 South Carolinians — about 15% of the state’s population — are what experts call “food insecure,” meaning they’re either currently going hungry or consistently struggling to afford enough food. A disproportionately high number are children, seniors, and rural residents.
To address that need, the state depends on a complex web of food assistance programs that serve different populations in different ways. But the largest by far, experts say, are the big three: school meals, food banks and SNAP.
In Charleston, for instance, county schools provided almost 7 million free meals to eligible students in 2024, according to district spokesman Andy Pruitt. And in that same year, the Lowcountry Food Bank (LFB), which serves the state’s 10 coastal counties, distributed more than 45 million pounds of food — or 33 million meals.
But that safety net is under strain, LFB leader Nick Osborne told Statehouse Report.
“We’re seeing an increasing number of food insecure people,” Osborne said. “No one wants to be hungry. No one makes the choice to be hungry. It’s just a situation — an untenable situation — that people find themselves in.”
That’s why groups like Wholespire, a wellness-focused nonprofit based in Columbia, have worked with the state legislature on several bills to expand nutrition and food programs, according to executive director Meg Stanley.
Specifically, she points to three initiatives she said have made a difference.
First, under the state’s Healthy Bucks program, SNAP recipients are allowed to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables and receive additional healthy food credits in return.
Next, the state began covering the full cost of reduced price school meals, making them completely free to qualifying students.
And finally, Stanley said, the new requirement that every eligible school district offer free meals to all students has resulted in large-scale improvements to child nutrition in affected counties.
“In the legislature, this is a very bipartisan issue,” Stanley said. “And the common thread we see [across both parties] is that there’s no excuse for a child in our state to be hungry.”
But despite state-level progress, food advocates warn that steep SNAP cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump in July could undermine the entire system — with nearly 300,000 South Carolinians projected to lose benefits, according to a new Urban Institute study.
Charleston Democratic State Sen. Ed Sutton, who said he keeps a copy of Hollings’ book on the shelf at his home, called the cuts “unacceptable” as lines at food banks continue to grow.
“We’re the wealthiest country in the world, yet bread lines are still a common thing,” he said. “And this administration is just pouring gasoline on the fire.”
And it’s those SNAP cuts that most worry the Appleseed Center’s Berkowitz as well — particularly, she said, when SNAP provides nine meals for every one supplied by food banks.
“SNAP is the foundation,” she said. “When you pull that out, the whole system collapses.”
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
