Low-income families are especially struggling to feed their infants amid the national shortage. A plant shutdown and supply chain issues are to blame.
Like most new moms, 26-year-old Veronica Gutierrez sees her life revolve around feeding her 3-month-old daughter, Alessandra. For the first month, that meant mostly formula. But that formula was hard to find. She drove from store to store, so shaken by the empty shelves that she began pumping breast milk around the clock, in hopes she could draw out enough to feed Alessandra full time.
“I had just gotten home from the hospital, and I was in so much pain — even just having to jump in the car trying to find the formula, I was almost in tears,” Gutierrez said.
“There was that uncertainty whether I was actually going to find the formula,” she said. “That’s why I was working every day latching her on, even if she got just a little bit, because I knew if I didn’t, I would lose my milk supply.”
All night, Alessandra nurses. All day, Gutierrez pumps. Still, she considers herself lucky. Unlike millions of American parents, she’s no longer worried about where her baby’s next meal will come from. Transitioning a bottle-fed baby back to breast milk is a Herculean task. But it’s far from the most extreme measure desperate mothers have taken amid the worsening national shortage of formula.
“Families are having to water down formula or use [cow’s] milk when they’re not ready to,” said Kelly Sawyer Patricof of Baby2Baby, an L. A. -based nonprofit that distributes formula and other supplies to needy families. “They also use juice as a replacement or transition to solid foods before their babies are developmentally ready.”
The crisis has been deepening for months, as millions of parents scramble to feed their children. But low-income mothers such as Gutierrez have been hit particularly hard. About half of all infant formula sold in the United States is purchased through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, which pays for food for pregnant people and children under 5 living in or near poverty. While all kinds of babies get formula for all kinds of reasons, WIC recipients such as Alessandra get it at roughly double the rate of their wealthier neighbors. In South L.A., more than 70% of babies Alessandra’s age are formula-fed; on the Westside, roughly the same proportion receive only breast milk. Across California, about 150,000 infants receive formula through the program. Now, many mothers say they’re struggling to find it.
“Today was my ninth store, and I actually got something,” said Jocelyn Landers, a nurse in Harbor City who buys formula for her 2-month-old daughter, Alaya, under WIC. “I was grateful to even get a can to hold her over. I don’t understand how we got to this point.”
The shortage began late last year, months before Alaya or Alessandra were born. At the time, many formula ingredients were caught in the disrupted supply chain, alongside infant strollers, car seats and cribs.
