Cross-Sectional Age Group Comparison of Experiences, Barriers, and Trade-Offs in Minnesota’s Emergency Food System

The emergency food system, including food banks, food pantries and shelves, and meal sites, is a critical part of the nutrition safety net. Age is an important factor that may impact the experiences of emergency food system shoppers. Despite this, there are a dearth of studies quantitatively comparing the experiences of households with and without the presence of an older adult in the household accessing this resource. We aim to fill this gap by describing differences between households that accessed food shelves in Minnesota that did or did not have someone aged 65 years or older. To do this, we used data from the 2022 Minnesota Food Shelf Survey (n = 4,508). We modeled outcomes related to experiences, barriers, and trade-offs as a function of older adult household status adjusting for demographics using hierarchical logistic regression models with a random intercept for food shelf. Compared to non-older adult households, older adult households were more likely to have accessed the food shelf longer and more frequently, were less likely to report hours or transportation as barriers, and were less likely to have to choose between food and paying for utilities, transportation, housing, child care, and education. These findings expand our understanding of households with and without older adult members who receive emergency food and could be used to inform interventions in the emergency food system to better address inadequate food access.