On a sweltering morning at a Foodshare mobile pantry in Glastonbury, 68-year-old Boguslawa Radomska, a newly divorced, retired nurse aide, filled up her bags with bread and fresh veggies.
“When I was married, when I was working, I have not taken the food from here,” Radomska said. “Only from [the] grocery [store].”
Radomska is part of a group new data found is especially burdened by food insecurity.
“We know that there is a struggle with the high cost of food right now, and we know that women are being hit particularly hard, and senior women more,” said Sarah Santora, director of community programs at Connecticut Foodshare.
For senior women who are divorced, the risks are even more acute. Researchers at the University of Connecticut are studying a phenomenon called “Grey Divorce,” examining how divorce after the age of 50 disproportionally increases food insecurity risk for women.
The group recently published their findings in the journal “Nutrition.”
“The dataset spans 20 years,” said Tatiana Andreyeva, director of economic initiatives at the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health, and a study co-author. “I didn’t expect that we would not see any impact among men.”
Compared to men, food insecurity among women increased by more than 10% six years after a divorce.
Andreyeva hoped that the findings would create more awareness about how food insecurity post-divorce can disproportionately impact older women.
“They're not in the same position as their spouses to withstand this shock of divorce later in life,” she said. “And so one example is deciding on the amount of alimony and splitting assets. Another is education about resources that are available – [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] SNAP or any food assistance programs.”
In Connecticut, 6.9% of seniors aged 60 and older – about 63,000 people – were food insecure in 2022, according to new data from Feeding America.
Jean Della Rocca, 66, from East Hartford, retired after a career spanning 23 years at the Hartford Institute of Living.
“I did get a chance to save some, but then you have to use it eventually to support ourselves – like for health, to pay house bills, just daily living, ‘cause it’s so expensive to live today,” she said, speaking at the Foodshare mobile pantry in Glastonbury.
Nationally, one in 11 seniors were food insecure. That’s 6.9 million seniors who were not getting enough to eat.
In the senior demographic in Massachusetts, 7.1% (125,200) were food insecure; 6.3% (12,300) in Vermont; 4.1% (11,100) in Rhode Island; 3.7% (16,100) in Maine; 3.5% (15,000) in New Hampshire.
