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It’s 100 degrees on a late Tuesday in June, but 79-year-old Elisabeth — she asked that her surname not be used to protect her privacy — is in line at St. Patrick’s Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, waiting to get a bag of groceries.

“I don’t have enough comida (food),” she tells Truthout in a mix of English and Spanish. “You know, leche (milk), pan (bread), pollo (chicken), cereal —everything es muy caro (very expensive).”

Her rent, she says, is $1,200 a month, and she pays approximately $300 per month for electricity, gas, phone, and internet service. The total, she adds, exceeds her monthly income: a $229 retirement pension from her job as an office assistant and $849 in Social Security. “My daughter has to help me, but it’s hard for her, so I come to the church every week to get what I can —a container of milk, pasta, bread, and maybe a package of meat. It helps.”

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Like Elisabeth, 74-year-old Lin — she, too, asked not to disclose her surname — has trouble making ends meet, but she goes to a senior center in her New York City neighborhood almost every weekday for a meal. She’s been doing this since 2011. “We’re a family here, and if I have a problem, there’s someone to help me,” she told Truthout. “If it’s something small, there’s always someone sitting near me to make me laugh and remind me not to take my troubles too seriously. If it’s a big problem, I can go upstairs to see a worker who will help me figure out what to do.”

The center, she says, asks for a voluntary contribution of $2 per meal. “It’s a good, square, balanced lunch,” Lin says.

Lin says that the combination of camaraderie and affordability will keep her coming back to the center for as long as she’s physically able. “My income — a $1,400 Social Security check and a pension of slightly more than $300 a month — doesn’t leave much left over. My rent is $1,000 and I have to pay for utilities and a phone,” she says. “So many of us seniors live doubled-up or in substandard housing. We deserve better, but the government, and Donald Trump in particular, treat us like garbage.”

Low-income seniors and their advocates agree and say that pending cuts to food and nutrition programs — including funding for meals at senior centers, and cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Meals on Wheels —will increase hunger and malnutrition.

Both are already big problems.

According to Feeding America, a national network of food banks and pantries, food insecurity is nothing new, and even before Trump’s Big Bad Bill championed slashing social welfare spending, 6.9 million people over the age of 65 faced hunger in the U.S. The group estimates that in 2022, one in 11 people aged 60 and older, and one in eight between the ages of 50 and 59, lacked adequate food.

Part of the reason is poverty, but isolation, the inability to shop or cook, trouble chewing and swallowing, cognitive decline, depression, a diminished sense of smell and/or taste, and the side effects of medication can also contribute to malnutrition in American seniors. These factors, in concert with economic precarity, make it difficult for many elders to remain healthy and well-nourished.

But money, unsurprisingly, is crucial to eating well, and many seniors like Elisabeth and Lin have........

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