Welfare’s New Rules Mean Less on Table

Sabina Orozco will proudly tell you that her two strapping teenage boys always have enough to eat. She doesn’t have to take handouts from the local food bank the way so many of her neighbors do.

But talk to her at length and you will soon learn that she has, indeed, felt hardship these last few months. For some staples such as eggs and cheese, she has come to depend on the generosity of better-off friends.

“There are people more needy than me,” Orozco, 36, said in Spanish. “There are people who don’t get any help from the government at all.”

Orozco, a resident of South-Central Los Angeles, is one of thousands of legal immigrants who have made do with less since September, when a federal welfare reform act mandated that noncitizens be cut from the government’s food stamp rolls.

According to a study released Wednesday by county officials and a San Francisco-based nonprofit agency, half of the 120,000 immigrants cut from the food stamp rolls in Los Angeles County have experienced hunger. The study noted that children who have been protected from the cuts by a state program have nevertheless encountered high rates of hunger when adults in the family lost food assistance.

For Orozco, who first came to the United States from Nayarit in central Mexico in 1980 and whose two sons were born here, the cuts have meant not weight loss or the rumbling stomachs of missed meals, but more subtle deprivations.

With $100 less in food money than the $249 the family used to receive from the federal government, they have been able to buy only half of the fruits and vegetables that were part of a special diet that helped Orozco fight diabetes.

“You feel bad because you come to depend on that money,” said Orozco, who sometimes works as a nanny. “It has a big impact on you.”

The new policies have meant greater demand at the local charities that help feed an estimated 200,000 people in Los Angeles County each week, said Doris Bloch, executive director of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.

“The charities that we serve have told us that they are seeing more legal immigrants at food banks in some communities,” Bloch said. “We are expecting to see more unless things change.”

Orozco said she manages to get by, thanks in part to help of another sort: Her sons eat two free meals a day at the high school they attend in the San Fernando Valley.

“They don’t eat breakfast here,” she said. “They get up at 4:45 and are on the bus at 5:45. Sometimes they take juice with them, if there is any.”

The cuts have meant that she no longer buys the packaged foods that many Los Angeles families take for granted--soft drinks, frozen pizzas and the like. Still, on Wednesday her refrigerator was filled with basic foodstuffs, including large jugs of milk and a container filled with pinto beans.

“They used to buy the pizza at the market and heat it in the oven,” she said. As if to put a better face on the situation, she added: “Now their tastes have changed.”

Given the impact of welfare reforms and other laws restricting benefits to members of her immigrant community, Orozco feels fortunate. She has accompanied friends to the food bank at a local church, but hasn’t taken food herself.

“I’m taking care of kids and that helps me a little. A lot of people here don’t qualify for any help at all because their kids weren’t born here. I know people with eight or nine kids who don’t get any help at all.”

Informal networks of friends and relatives help the families in her community get by. For example, some friends who receive eggs and cheese from another federal source--the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children--share their leftovers with her.

During the week, the one daily meal she prepares at home for her sons--dinner--is a throwback to the simple diet that millions of poor and working families put on the table in Latin America.

“They have their tortillas with some beans and rice. Up to now we haven’t run out of rice and beans,” she said. The family can no longer count on being able to add meat and cheese--important sources of additional protein--to that basic meal.

“If my sons have wanted those things, they haven’t complained,” Orozco said.

When she shops, every penny counts. She buys most of her groceries at the nearby Superior Market, where a gallon of milk is $2.29 and large grade A eggs can be had for 99 cents a dozen, but where a package of cheddar cheese is prohibitively priced at about $3.

Orozco takes pride in the fact that she can still afford to make sandwiches for her sons to take to their weekend soccer games. Not all of her sons’ teammates have mothers who are so thoughtful.

“Their friends tell them, ‘You’re mom brought you food but mine didn’t,’ ” she said with a smile.