California is often portrayed as one of the most immigrant-friendly states in the nation. While the state has a history of creating more inclusive policies for immigrant populations than at the federal level, it’s also true that undocumented immigrants are largely blocked from state programs that would enable them to access basic necessities. Understanding why—and why many immigrant communities remain afraid of accessing benefits—requires a bit of a history lesson.

‘Immigrants don’t belong here’ 

Undocumented immigrants—including children—have never been eligible for food stamps, and over the years federal officials have implemented policies to reduce other immigrant populations from accessing food assistance. 

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This law harshly restructured the nation’s entire welfare system, but was particularly devastating to immigrant communities, forcing Lawful Permanent Residents—who had previously been fully eligible—to wait five years before they could access federal public benefits. Research shows that after PRWORA became law, eligible immigrants’ participation in safety net programs fell sharply, likely because of the fear and stigma that became associated with them. PRWORA is also shown to have increased the proportion of uninsured immigrant women and children–this is in spite of the more inclusive approach later adopted by states like California that removed the five-year wait for qualified immigrants. 

But California is a mixed bag. 

Two years before PRWORA, California passed Proposition 187 which sought to punish undocumented immigrants by denying them access to public education and health care. The ballot measure, which was eventually struck down for being unconstitutional, also required police, health care professionals, and teachers to verify and report the immigration status of all individuals, including children.

“The message that these kinds of laws send is, ‘You don’t belong here and we’re closing our door to you,’” said Benyamin Chao, a policy analyst at the California Immigrant Policy Center. “That narrative has become so deeply ingrained that even when people are eligible and it’s safe for them to use public programs, they don’t enroll because they have been told over and over again that they don’t belong, these services are not for them, and they will be punished.” 

There’s also no overstating the chilling effect that anti-immigrant laws can have on communities. Take the “public charge” rule, for example. This exclusionary and racist test has been part of federal immigration law for over 100 years; it’s designed to restrict immigrants from adjusting their status or entering the United States if it is determined they are likely to depend on the government as a source of support. In 2019, the Trump administration expanded “public charge” to include a broader scope of “government assistance.” Under Trump, this included non-citizens who received one or more public benefits for more than 12 months. The administration also added requirements that would have made it even more difficult for people to immigrate. For example, characteristics like disability status, English proficiency, and income level would be judged more harshly. 

Trump’s regulations were struck down about a year ago, but a recent survey found that three out of four immigrant families were unaware that the previous administration’s public charge changes were repealed. The good news is that 50 percent of respondents said that knowledge about the reversal of the rule made them more likely to use safety net programs when necessary.

“There’s a lot at stake here,” Estudillo said. “Food is a human right. Everyone deserves to eat, but there is still so much stigma associated with food assistance programs and so many false narratives about who needs access to these programs.”

‘Everyone should have access to food’

Nearly half of the farm workers in California’s Central Valley report that they experience food insecurity—and this is the community that Senator Hurtado had in mind when she introduced SB 464. 

Hurtado’s district is in the Central Valley, known as the “salad bowl” because it produces a fourth of the nation’s food. The senator said it’s a “cruel reality” that the farm workers who toil in the fields to keep Americans fed cannot afford to put food on their own tables. As the daughter of immigrants who grew up in poverty and experienced food insecurity, she wanted to do something about it. 

“These are people who feed us, and they are people who have worked through the pandemic and deal with the effects of climate change; they work through extreme heat, droughts, and wildfires,” Hurtado said. “It should not be controversial to say that everyone should have access to food, documented or not.” 

Yet it clearly is controversial, but there are a number of groups in California that operate from the understanding that food is a human right. Take Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative, for example. The Fresno-based organization connects undocumented farm workers to services like local food distribution programs. Clarissa Vivian-Petrucci, special project coordinator at the immigrant integration organization, told The Counter that farm workers often stand in line at food distribution sites two to three hours in advance, fearful the food will run out and they won’t be able to bring anything home to their children. 

“The situation is very serious. People are going hungry and even those who can enroll in a [government] program because they have U.S. citizen children will not because they are still afraid of the public charge,” Vivian-Petrucci said. 

Even if community members don’t mention the public charge rule by name, it’s clear there is a looming fear about repercussions associated with accessing programs. 

Guillermo and Augustina, who are only using their first names for safety reasons, are undocumented California farm workers who said that food insecurity is a real issue for their family and people in the Indigenous farmworker community.  

The married couple are Mixtec and hail from the town of Santa Cruz in the Mexican state of Guerrero. According to the Indigenous empowerment organization the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP), California is home to an estimated 170,000 indigenous migrants from the Mexican states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Michoacán, including Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and Purépechas. These Indigenous populations often only speak their native, pre-Hispanic languages.

Guillermo and Augustina, who speak Mixtec but not Spanish, settled in California with their two children in 2019 and almost immediately went to work in the strawberry fields. They joined thousands of other Indigenous migrants in the agricultural industry, earning seasonal wages and receiving no benefits. Through multiple layers of interpretation, the couple explained to The Counter that their food costs aren’t exorbitant because they rely on inexpensive staples like beans, rice, and maseca to make tortillas, but as their workloads decrease during the off season, purchasing even basic necessities is a hardship–and produce is often out of the question. 

The couple is lucky to live in a tight-knit community that includes relatives, so when they don’t have enough money for food, there are people they can turn to. However, Guillermo and Augustina’s family members also struggle with food insecurity. 

“In bad years, we may only work four hours a day and that’s all the work we can get–and that’s when the difficulty starts when it comes to accessing food,” Guillermo explained. “We always want to buy vegetables, but the cost is more than we can afford during these times. These are the circumstances that many people in my community find themselves in.” 

Removing immigration restrictions from California’s food benefits program has the ability to drastically improve the quality of life for undocumented farmworker families. Research links food insecurity to harmful outcomes for children, including poor physical and mental health and adverse effects on development. Guillermo said that if the law changed to provide access to food for undocumented families, that would be “great,” but he had concerns about how participating in the program could later be weaponized against his family. 

“What if the next [official] changes the law in the future, would we have to pay back the support they gave us? That would be our biggest worry. When our children become adults, would they have to pay back the food benefits? We would sign up for the support if it was guaranteed the law would not change to hurt us in the future,” Guillermo said. 

But there are other barriers, too. Augustina explained that sometimes agency representatives of public benefits offering help to farm workers only speak English and Spanish. “We need help from people who can speak our language. We would need support to fill out the forms and we would need to know in advance what kind of documents would be needed to access this support,” she said. 

These are issues that are already on Vivian-Petrucci’s radar. The special projects coordinator said that if the California Food Assistance Program expands to provide state-funded nutrition benefits to undocumented immigrants, efforts to reach families who speak Indigenous languages should be a priority. However, this would require collaboration between organizations and government agencies—and thinking outside of the box. In the past, live Facebook presentations have proven to be a powerful tool for reaching communities, and Vivian-Petrucci said that organizations without Indigenous language speakers can coordinate with consulate officials who have access to translator databases.

“There are people in the community who don’t speak English or Spanish, who cannot read, and who do not know how to use a computer,” Vivian-Petrucci said. “There will be obstacles, but if we can work together we can eliminate these barriers and make sure people have equitable access to food.” 

SB 464 is unlikely to move this year, so those behind the Food4All campaign have set their sights on the state budget. California currently has a budget surplus of $68 billion and thanks to a proposal from Assemblymember Miguel Santiago, advocates hope Governor Newsom will include funds in the state’s June budget to expand CFAP to undocumented immigrants of all ages. 

In the coming days, Newsom will unveil the updated 2022-23 California state budget proposal. Meanwhile, the surplus has prompted a flurry of spending proposals from lawmakers, including a plan to send $200 checks to California taxpayers to help with soaring gas prices. Estudillo said she hopes Newsom ultimately moves away from these kinds of short-term, one-off efforts. 

“The question I always go back to is whether we are helping those most in need—especially low-income, undocumented immigrants who have been on the frontlines of the pandemic and are shut out of safety net programs,” Estudillo said. “This budget surplus is unprecedented and I think it’s important to use our state’s resources wisely and not lose sight of the long-term investments we could make that would really get to the root of so many injustices and inequities in our state.”

In a statement to The Counter, a spokesperson for the governor’s office said that California has made “historic investments” to support immigrant communities, including expanding access to health care and anti-poverty programs, bolstering pro bono immigration services, and supporting entrepreneurship and educational opportunities. 

“The Governor has built upon this by proposing to expand Medi-Cal to everyone eligible regardless of immigration status, expand food assistance to all eligible older adults regardless of immigration status, invest $500 base deposits into college savings accounts for millions of immigrant families, expand migrant child care, and created Universal Transitional Kindergarten free for all four-year-olds,” the statement said. 

The spokesperson did not respond to The Counter’s question regarding whether Governor Newsom would use the budget surplus to expand the California Food Assistance Program to undocumented immigrants of all ages, or comment on how the administration weighs short-term assistance like $200 gas payments with long-term investments.

“Gas rebates for people like me who have cars? Sure, that feels really nice,” Estudillo said. “But are we truly supporting those who are most in need? Not just people who don’t have cars, but people who regularly struggle to put food on the table? You can’t eat a gas rebate.”

The post California is moving toward food assistance for all populations—including undocumented immigrants appeared first on The Counter.

Some groups that sell seeds and food-bearing plants say the option is being used. Through her work at Tilth, Cacciata says she has had a number of people purchase edible plant starts — broccoli, beets, leafy greens and beyond — with SNAP benefits at events like Tilth’s annual Edible Plant Sale and the seasonal farm stand. 

Locals like Slighte are so passionate about this option that they make instructional videos to share online as a way to expand awareness of it. Using online platforms like TikTok, Slighte — under the handle @NeurodivergentGranny — shows people how to double the value of their SNAP benefits at farmers markets, where she purchased tomato plants last year, from which she saved seeds for future harvest. Even during the winter, the foods she harvested and dehydrated from her first year of having a “major” patio garden provide about 10% of her food, she says. In the early fall, she was able to grow about 30% of her own food. 

DeLong says the process of using SNAP at farmers markets can be awkward, involving tokens and Monopoly-style money. “I want to use the state’s money at the farmers markets to support local farmers. But it’s really just like a strange belittling interaction,” they said.

Not every seed and start retailer participates in this program, let alone realizes they might, which can add to the awkwardness of trying to use SNAP benefits for gardening. Cacciata says grocery stores are more likely than nurseries or garden centers to accept SNAP, since they already handle food purchases made with SNAP, but even grocery clerks might not know it’s a viable option. 

“If you’ve got cashiers that don’t understand that you can do that, then you’re met with an immediate barrier, immediate judgment. And so all your plans are completely thwarted before you even start,” Slighte says.

Aimée Damman, director of marketing and communications at Swansons Nursery, says she doesn’t know of anyone who has used SNAP to purchase seeds or plants. While the nursery donates plants to the Ballard Food Bank and seeds to the Giving Garden Network, among other organizations, it doesn’t accept SNAP. “I don’t think [the option] is very widely known,” she says. “We haven’t had any demand.” If demand arose, Swanson’s would need to adjust its sales technology, and may actually have to offer more food-related items to even become eligible to accept SNAP benefits. 

Urban Feed & Garden in Beacon Hill doesn’t accept SNAP benefits, but General Manager Risa Wolfe says she thinks using the benefits on seeds and starts sounds like a great idea. Urban Feed & Garden donates seeds to community gardens, and donated about $1,200 worth of seeds to Nurturing Roots last winter. She thinks her staff would be willing to accept SNAP benefits, but no one affiliated with SNAP has reached out to educate the staff on the business side of the program. “If somebody came to me with SNAP benefits, I wouldn’t know what to do,” she says. 

Other hurdles to growing food

Once someone has seeds in hand, they need gardening maintenance supplies, time to garden and container space or land. 

“Land access is the big one,” Matter says, stressing the importance of accessible community gardens. “Time to garden can be an impediment, but if folks have growing space at their home or nearby, this makes it more practical.” 

“You could get a pack of carrot seeds, but if you don’t have land for the carrot to grow into it, then it’s not really worth much,” adds DeLong.

People in King County have unequal access to these resources. Backyards are increasingly scarce, not all multifamily housing residents are able to grow plants in containers or on roofs, and while Seattle’s P-Patch program makes many acres of land available to the community for gardening, including food gardening, the P-Patches can have yearslong waitlists. 

People also need educational resources to be successful. In addition to distributing fresh fruits and vegetables, a number of local organizations also provide gardening education, including Tilth Alliance, The Beet Box, Solid Ground, Nurturing Roots Farm, Black Star Farmers and the Black Farmers Collective’s Yes Farm. 

The King County Seed Library system and Plant Based Food Share also share seeds and starts. 

Bill Thorness, coordinator of the seed library, says the popularity of gardening during the pandemic reduced the seed library’s seed supply. “Because the seed companies have been so busy, we haven’t had as many donations. And part of our model includes holding seed swaps where gardeners can bring seeds to share, but we haven’t done that for two years. We are talking about holding an outdoor one this spring,” he says. 

Some food banks also share seeds. Mara Bernard, the community farms and facilities manager of the White Center Food Bank, says the food bank last year distributed 4,000 seed packets and 2,000 plant starts.

In Slighte’s experience, growing any amount of food with whatever space and time people can find during a time of great anxiety is valuable for producing more than just fresh produce. 

“When you use SNAP benefits for gardening, you’re experiencing a type of self-sufficiency that you don’t get to experience when you’re low-income,” Slighte says. “And it’s that nontangible benefit that is so incredibly helpful to your mental health.”

Update: This article was updated at 12:38 p.m. on March 3, 2021, with language clarifying that many nurseries and plant stores may not currently be eligible to accept SNAP benefits. The program as it stands requires retailers to qualify based on either providing a certain number of food products, or making a certain amount of revenue from selling food products. 

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TSM: A lot of the communities were on strict lockdown. You weren’t supposed to leave your home. Going on a couple years now, these communities are still reeling and still having to figure out what to do. We also saw a real big uptake in direct farm-to-family. You could buy a cow in your neighborhood, or in your community, where before you couldn’t. Those farmers were selling to stockyards, who were then selling to big processing plants. Your meat could go three states before it would return to your community. Instead, we saw more direct sales. And the federal government allowed that. It hasn’t happened at that scale in a long time.

HCN: The gap in food security seems to have most impacted medium-income households as opposed to the poorest households. Is that correct? 

TSM: Yeah. … When we receive this data, and we look at the income level of the respondents, that doesn’t correlate to the requirements to participate in some of the food assistance programs that exist in the federal government, and then trickle down to state and tribal governments. So, for instance, to qualify for what used to be called the food stamp program, SNAP, or WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) or free school meals, all those programs are income-contingent. And they get continued servicing. 

For those that could qualify, income-wise, those programs weren’t obstructed in a way that the general food access (was) — getting a food distribution box versus going to a grocery store where everything is gone, everyone has purchased the goods from that grocery store. We saw it with toilet paper, but we saw it with food, too. There was a huge shortage of meat, or the meat was so expensive that it disabled people from being able to get the full nutritional value of each of their meals. They had to pick and choose. Those are, in our respondents in our survey, largely the ones that identified as being food insecure and lacking nutrition.

HCN: FRAC — the Food Research and Action Center — talks about opportunities to address food insecurity with the Build Back Better plan, or through Congress. But your organization seems more focused on tribal efforts, saying that instead of increasing benefits, the federal government should increase support and empowerment of tribal governments. Why is that distinction important?

TSM: Well, unfortunately, we have to do both. When we saw in the report that people were turning to their tribal governments, not their state governments, for assistance, it’s just another indication of the ability of tribes to administer those program dollars and keep an alignment with the requirements and mandates that come from receiving federal funding.

IFAI — the Indigenous Food and Ag Initiative — and FRAC and NAAF came together to provide the data that will help educate Congress when they’re making decisions about food implementation and agricultural production across the country, in particular Indian Country.

HCN: Why is self-sufficiency so much more effective?

TSM: Because they intimately know their neighbors. They know culturally how their communities function. And they know how to get to their membership in the best possible manner. So, in one community, it might be working through mobile slaughter (units). In another community, it might be distribution of food boxes. In another community that’s not so far removed from a town or city, it might be working with food banks. And so those community members, the tribal governing authority — they know that better than an outside entity, better than a state entity.

A lot of our tribes have economic arms of their tribal government that have some type of food- or agricultural-based business. They utilize those businesses to get that food to their community members. And that’s the model we want to see. Those producers within those communities can sell their food locally. It reduces transportation and storage costs, it reduces or works toward eliminating issues that you would see in long transportation. In the end, they will save money, because these communities will have additional dollars, so the value of their dollar will remain stronger, won’t be chipped away by having to go through multiple states or processing plants or transportation companies. And again, if we have natural disasters, we have a pandemic, then the communities can stand up and serve their citizens, as opposed to waiting for Washington, D.C., or even the state capital to try to get to them.

If you look at eastern Washington, the Yakama Nation and the Colville Confederated Tribes, collectively, we have close to 10 million acres. The export industry in cherries and apples alone is in the billions — and yet our tribes are not billionaires. So there’s an opportunity there to pivot and diversify away from, say, gaming, and work towards making agriculture not only a food-security issue, but an economic development opportunity.

HCN: Are you optimistic that Congress is going to take this data into account and begin to more deeply or meaningfully empower tribal communities to support themselves through their own agricultural infrastructure?

TSM: We hope so. Our overall vision document is, through this regional agricultural infrastructure, about standing up everything that these communities or regions will need in order to feed themselves. That’s grain elevators, it’s rail transportation, it’s kitchens and processing plants. But it’s also marketing, packaging and distribution. And so having access to all of those in a regionalized manner will unburden the individual tribe or individual farmer or producer from having to stand up that infrastructure themselves. it would all be done in a regenerative, climate smart manner. And again, reducing the amount of transportation, all of those things moving towards helping the environment and helping these rural tribal communities at the same time. We’re asking tribes to reach out and engage with us if they’re applying for federal funding, to use our work as a model of how we can all come together and actually leverage private and federal funding and expand and unify our mission, which is to feed our communities, but do so in a manner that supports those community members and not necessarily a corporation.

This is just the beginning. We’re going to continue to do more data-related research. For the first time, we’re going to take ownership of our data, and also the messaging and how that data is going to be interpreted. A lot of this generation has benefited from the work of our ancestors. And we’re in a place where a lot of tribal communities are working toward large scale, either cultural development, gaming, you name it, government contracting. These tribes are moving into spaces they’ve never been before, they’re able to support their communities better. We have higher rates of participation in higher education and vocational education. And we want to continue that upward trajectory and supply the celebration of our traditional ecological knowledge. So this is just an opportunity. And it’s our first step going after and providing this type of data.

And we’re not just working with tribal entities; we’re working across the spectrum. We’re working with other large-scale agricultural industry groups, and nonprofits and federal agencies. And our hope is that we can do some focus work, to stand up agricultural infrastructure in rural communities and show the world that it can work and that these communities can have ownership over their food and food security.

The post The first answer for food insecurity: data sovereignty appeared first on The Counter.

While in a medium-security prison in West Virginia, Nuevelle “erred on the side of anorexia.” She notes, too, that many other women she served time with exhibited trauma-induced behaviors: hoarding, drinking coffee all day to suppress appetite, “eating and eating and eating,” and bingeing and purging.

Weight gain is an even bigger challenge than weight loss for many; Nuevelle calls the bellies of women who eat the high-starch meals off the chow hall trays “‘tray babies.’ It’s not uncommon for women to gain 70 pounds. You literally watch their bodies grow.” 

Before her time in that West Virginia facility, Nuevelle spent two years in a federal prison camp some 200 miles south called Alderson—the facility where Martha Stewart served time in 2004 and that’s considered swank by prison standards. “My first Thanksgiving there, I couldn’t believe it. We had turkey, and they gave us ham and green beans and collard greens,” Nuevelle said. “At Christmas, we had Cornish hens and shrimp, and there was real cutlery and salt and pepper shakers.” 

Corrections departments often claim that better food is financially beyond their means. In 2016, California spent $3.14 per day per inmate while in Texas in 2019, 4 percent of the corrections budget went to carceral food. But the example of Alderson “tells you that there is a baseline for doing better, and the only reason that [Alderson] is the way it is is because the people that come there were not society’s undesirables before they went to prison,” Nuevelle said, referring to the fact that the Alderson tends to house people accused of white-collar crimes.

Wayne Williams was actually able to learn more about nutrition during the 35 years he was imprisoned in federal prisons. Today, he’s project coordinator at The Food Trust in Philadelphia, which offers trauma-informed nutrition education, shopping, and cooking classes for the formerly incarcerated. He remembers the poor-quality carceral meals as well as the preponderance of “junk” like ramen noodles from the commissary. His journey to more healthful eating started with “looking at the deterioration of other inmates’ health, [which] began to cause me to be concerned, like sugar, diabetes, high blood pressure. I didn’t want to take medicine,” he said. “So I started paying more attention to what I was eating.” 

He read magazines such as Men’s Health and swapped nutritional information with other men he was serving time with; that information formed the basis of the work he does now with people returning home after incarceration. 

Trauma-informed nutrition education goes beyond simple cooking classes and connections to food resources. It addresses mental and emotional wellness, with an eye toward how stressful and traumatic experiences can shape a person’s relationship to food, and the ways in which shame, anxiety, and tension around eating can be reduced, according to Leah’s Pantry, a San Francisco nonprofit that trains nutrition ed facilitators. 

This kind of education can be a long haul and requires those who offer it to understand the wider implications of trauma. “I had to broaden ‘nutrition education’ to the idea of a better quality of life and connect it with, not just physical health, but mental health, spiritual health,” Williams said. 

He starts by telling those who take his six-week class that he shares their experience within the system, in order to forge trust. Afterward, he aims to stay connected with them as a mentor, helping them sign up for SNAP benefits, referring them to health clinics where they can receive additional nutrition counseling. 

“Eating healthy helps me to have a healthy attitude and value my own life,” Williams said. “When you are concerned about what you eat, then you’re concerned about yourself. That’s the beginning [of healing]; you’re not thinking short term anymore.”

After she returned home from prison, Gantan gained a lot of weight as she attempted to navigate her bingeing and hoarding. “I had to get back into the motion of meal planning. Once I was able to lay out what I was going to eat, and how much [food] do I need for these meals, it helped me put down the extra box of pancake mix and think, ‘Okay, I don’t really need [this] because [it’s] going to be there the next time.’” 

Now studying for a master’s degree in public policy, she sees benefit in connecting the formerly incarcerated with things like CalFresh—California’s version of SNAP, which matches $10 worth of fresh produce purchases per month (notably, California has lifted the SNAP ban for those with drug felonies). She wants to see people who are coming up for parole automatically given CalFresh signup sheets and lists of other food resources, in addition to trauma-informed nutrition ed.

Nuevelle would like to see initiatives start much, much earlier. “At the federal level, [prisons] have residential drug-abuse programs. Can you imagine if we had trauma treatment programs in carceral spaces?” she said. For that matter, “what would it look like if, right from the moment you get arrested, [judges and lawyers] asked, ‘What is it that this person really needs?’ And nine times out of 10, it’s not going to be incarceration; it’s going to be trauma treatment.”

At Food & Abolition, Kathuria works to abolish the carceral system outright. But in the meantime, the organization is aiming to connect prisons and jails with urban and small-scale farms. It hopes the farms provide more nutritious food to those who are incarcerated and also meaningful, sustaining jobs, to those coming back to their communities. A pilot project to do just this was waylaid due to the pandemic.

“A person going into prison, even if they’re healthy, is likely going to leave with chronic health conditions, whether physical or mental,” Kathuria said. “What are the implications of that amongst the millions of folks who are incarcerated in this country every year? How do you even measure that impact?”

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Barron said she had been looking forward to getting P-EBT payments again, especially after federal unemployment benefits ended in September. Right now, she told The Counter, her only income is from SNAP and the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. She’s struggling to stretch every dollar and find cheaper ways to keep everyone full. But Barron discovered this month that she wouldn’t be getting that help in a phone call with the Minnesota P-EBT hotline.

Unlike Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Barron’s district offers virtual learning families the option to pick up five days’ worth of meals once every week. But Barron moved a 40-minute drive away from the pick-up location in October, when she found an affordable home through the federal Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program. (It’s worth pointing out that even when districts do offer grab-and-go meals for virtual students, the option might not be feasible for families whose schedules don’t align with pick-up times, or for those without regular access to transportation.)

But not all schools offer grab-and-go meals to virtual learning students. It’s a choice made on a school-by-school basis, not a requirement, said Bridget Lehn, nutrition services director at White Bear Lake Area Schools. She explained that other schools might have a wide range of reasons that prevent them from doing so. In recent months, school nutrition programs have been hit hard by staff shortages, rising food costs, and supply-chain disruptions, for example.

Lehn estimated that, of the more than 240 students enrolled in White Bear Lake’s distant learning program, one quarter would have qualified for P-EBT last year, when all of the district’s students were participating in some level of remote learning, and there was not yet a formal, separate virtual school in place. Barron’s is just one of 60 families now cut off from P-EBT, because they’re now attending a fully virtual school.

“It basically made me feel like I’m being penalized because of the choices that I made, that I, as a parent, assumed was the best option for my children in my situation,” Barron said.

Right now, only eight states have been approved to administer P-EBT for the 2021-2022 school year. According to a Washington Post report earlier this week, 17 more have applied to participate. If approved, the dilemma that parents like Brewer and Barron are facing could soon play out across half the country: With students enrolled for in-person learning being eligible for school meal funds when they switch to online learning, but students enrolled in dedicated virtual schools getting left out.

Anti-hunger advocates argue that excluding families from P-EBT just because they attend a fully virtual school within their district contradicts the program’s original aims.

“The intent was to provide meals for kids who are going to virtual school because of the pandemic,” said Crystal FitzSimons, director of school and out-of-school-time programs at the Food and Research Action Center (FRAC), an anti-hunger group. “If a child is enrolled in a virtual academy, that may have been the only option that the school district gave them if they wanted to go virtually. [Now] they would lose access to benefits. It is a problem, and we’re hoping USDA might reconsider this interpretation.”

Unless that happens, kids who qualify for free lunch will continue to be excluded from P-EBT when enrolled in virtual schools. And their families, as a result, will continue to bear the emotional and financial toll.

“What happens when families experience food insecurity is that parents do everything they can to try and protect kids,” FitzSimons said. “But how it plays out is a reduced number of meals, reduced amount of food you’re eating, looking to emergency food resources if they’re available to you, but they aren’t always [….] It’s a huge gap for families to have to fill, and if they’re struggling already or close to the edge, it can really push families over.”

Brewer, the mother of four in Charlotte, North Carolina, said that the loss of P-EBT is the latest in a string of financial blows that have strained the household grocery budget, following reduced income and rising food costs at the grocery store.

“It’s adding insult to injury to injury to injury.”

On some days, she said, she has to make the painful decision to tell her kids that there’s simply no food for lunch.

“There are times when I just have to look at them and—I hate to say this—but I have to tell them, ‘There’s nothing I can do, baby,’” she said. “I can make dinner a little earlier, but there’s nothing I can do until dinnertime. Because if I feed them during the day, sometimes I may not have food for them in the evening, or I may not have it for another day later that month.”

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Today, increased demand for food driven by the pandemic is putting even more pressure on food banks. Those in the Feeding America network reported a 60% increase in demand early in the pandemic and continue to see steady or increased demand compared to the month before, according to Feeding America.

At the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, capacity is so constrained that it must sometimes turn away donations of food, according to its capital campaign literature. Since 2005, the food bank has tripled the amount of food it distributes. River Bend Food Bank is in a similar situation. “We’re three times the size we were in 2014,” said Mike Miller, President and CEO, making the food bank’s planned expansion “more like a right-sizing.”

Within the context of dramatically increased demand, bigger food banks are a no-brainer. But it’s also worth noting that many food banks often talk about the need to address the root causes of poverty so they can put themselves out of business. It’s an end goal that seems further out of reach with every square foot of additional warehouse space.

Joshua Lohnes, Food Policy Research Director at the Center for Resilient Communities at West Virginia University, doesn’t see food banks going away, noting that West Virginia’s two food banks are the state’s largest food hubs. In fact, food banks are enjoying an expansion of their social power, along with their footprints, Lohnes said, as they attract more philanthropic dollars and good will from their communities. 

“My question to food banks is:  ‘How will they wield this social power?’” said Lohnes, who is also a member of the Global Solidarity Alliance. “Will they use their infrastructure to transform the food system based on the principles of food justice? Or will they use it to continue to reinforce the power of the agro-industrial food system? That’s a question we need to continue to pose in the midst of this expansion.”

In fact, some food bankers say, bigger food banking does not present a contradiction in a society that tolerates having large segments of the population remain unable to meet their basic needs even when they work. “It’s now to the point where it’s a conscious choice in the United States that we’re going to have people not able to meet their needs,” said Brian Greene, President and CEO of Houston Food Bank. “And as long as that’s going on, we do this.”

Waide of Atlanta Community Food Bank also sees the need for a “great, robust public policy solution.” Until that happens, the food bank can provide relief by helping to free up more of the family budget. “Families have more resources to address other challenges and invest in the future,” he said.

Some food banks are expanding, but in ways that are consistent with also transferring power to others. The Greater Chicago Food Depository, for example, has modified its planned expansion of about 60,000 square feet into a smaller, redesigned building that will no longer have meeting space for community groups. The food bank learned during the pandemic that community meetings need to happen out in the communities, said Kate Maehr, Executive Director and CEO, who was named Food Bank News’ Food Bank CEO of the Year in 2021. 

“We’re committed to convening, but that convening does not need to happen in our building,” she said.

Good Shepherd Food Bank is also applying lessons learned during the pandemic to its investment plans. “The pandemic really put a spotlight on our complete inadequacy of meeting the needs of communities of color in Maine,” said Kristen Miale, President. 

Those communities are not interested in participating in traditional food bank programs, she said. Rather, “we’re going to be investing a lot more in community organizing and supporting grassroots organizations that are really doing on-the-ground organizing.” 

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What, then, are we trying to do? Do we want to grow more local food to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change? To keep economic dollars in Hawaii? To make fresh food more affordable to struggling families? To address obesity and public health concerns? To make the state less reliant on imports?

The answers to these questions should be guiding our goals for farming in Hawaii.

There are a lot of different reasons that people want to see agriculture preserved and expanded in Hawaii. Some of it is lifestyle and landscape.

No one wants to see the entire central valley of Maui urbanized, said Noa Kekuewa Lincoln, a professor of Indigenous Crops and Cropping Systems at the University of Hawaii Manoa. There’s a cultural component, a climate resilience component and an economic resilience component, Lincoln said. Hawaii has frequent discussions about these issues, but the conversation always seems to focus on one problem at a time.

“We don’t have a plan that really considers all of these things, how they get there,” Lincoln said. “And how they can support each other. How multiple outcomes could be realized through the same action.”

Creating a state food charter

In the last decade, stakeholders in a growing number of states have been addressing some of these questions by developing a state food system plan, a document that lays out state goals and guides policy decisions.

There are currently 18 states with an active food system plan or charter, and many more working to develop one, according to a survey by the University of Michigan.

A food system plan or charter sets a vision for food in the state. That means not only agriculture and food production but farmers’ markets and food procurement and programs like Da Bux that help low-income families access food. That vision can then help guide public policy and investment toward achieving specific goals, Miles said.

What Hawaii has had in the past is agricultural plans that single out food production from other parts of the food system.

“We could achieve doubling food production, but it’s not going to solve these other aspects of the food system that we need to simultaneously address,” Miles said.

These more comprehensive plans are in line with a broader trend at top-tier universities and think tanks to approach issues in a multidisciplinary way, Lincoln said.

Food system plans or charters can be based on a government-commissioned survey of state needs, but they often start as a grassroots effort that brings together an array of stakeholders to talk about big challenges and goals in a given area, said Lesli Hoey, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan.

One thing that the charter process accomplished in Michigan was to really mobilize people, Hoey said, and generate support for people and groups with fledgling ideas that might not have otherwise gotten off the ground or had a big impact.

That need for support is one of the reasons it’s critical to involve lawmakers and state agencies in the process.

Miles is helping to lead a grassroots effort in Hawaii to start the process of developing a participatory food system plan, through an initiative called Transforming Hawaii’s Food System Together. He has also been working to drum up support for creating a food system plan with state lawmakers and private groups.

Other nonprofits and coalitions like The Ag Hui are also trying to bring people together for more coordinated conversations about needs in the state, Lincoln said. But these efforts are trying to fill a void in state leadership that shouldn’t be there.

“We’re not seeing leadership from our leaders. And so others are stepping up, but they don’t have the keys to the power as it were, to instigate those changes,” Lincoln said.

A lack of coordination

Bringing together stakeholders to create a roadmap for Hawaii’s food system is just one way to address a serious lack of planning and coordination when it comes to the state’s struggling agricultural sector.

“What we should be doing is asking ourselves, how well is the state providing services to farmers?” said University of Hawaii economist Sumner La Croix. “Why is it that farmers are not making money in the state of Hawaii, as most of them are not? What can we do to reduce the regulatory burden on farmers to make it less costly to produce food here in the state?”

No one can tell farmers what to grow, said Nicholas Comerford, dean of the University of Hawaii’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. They will grow what they know how to grow, what their parents grew, and what they think will make money.

But Hawaii needs a different kind of agriculture, he said.

“It needs it because we’re so remote, right?” Comerford said. “We need a better perspective on what the state needs to grow. And we have to provide the farmer with [information about] where it can grow, and what the economics of growing it are.”

The agriculture department has a list of crops that are most sought after in the state and are most nutritious. University of Hawaii has a detailed map of what crops grow best in the state. If that data could be paired with economic projections for what crops will be most profitable, farmers could then make more sophisticated decisions about what to plant.

If the state had a better idea of what food it wanted to see grown to meet sustainability or food security goals, it could also use that information to create incentives for certain types of crops.

Another way to help would be to bolster planning and coordination at the university system, said Bruce Mathews, dean of the College of Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resource Management and a professor of soil science at University of Hawaii Hilo.

The university system has lost funding for a number of positions because agriculture hasn’t been prioritized in the state in recent decades, Mathews said. This means that there’s a lot of missed opportunities just within the university, Mathews said.

One idea would be to have a vice president for agriculture in the UH system who could coordinate all the agriculture departments and programs across the system in addressing big state challenges.

Some of that work used to be done by the now-defunct Governor’s Agricultural Coordinating Committee. The committee, which was eliminated more than two decades ago, was allotted a certain amount of state money each year to address priority problems, Mathews said. Then the committee would get faculty from across the UH system to meet with producers to identify challenges and submit proposals to address them.

“I mean, somehow you have to have all the ships in the Navy aligned to do what the Navy’s got to do,” Mathews said. “And right now, it’s just kind of a free for all.”

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We’re talking about a common and perilous financial reality that’s little discussed outside wonkish circles, known as the cliff effect—or, perhaps more familiar to some, the benefits cliff. The term describes a positive change in someone’s personal finances—a raise or rise in income, of as little as 25 cents an hour, in some cases—that then disqualifies them from continuing to receive public benefits, whether or not they’re financially stable enough to absorb the loss of those benefits. No one knows for certain how many of the 59 million Americans receiving public benefits in any given month are at risk; in Ohio, research has shown that 20 percent of businesses have encountered the benefits cliff as it relates to their workers. 

Cliffs aren’t a new phenomenon; they’ve been an uncomfortable by-product of income-based public assistance programs for decades. They don’t just affect single parents; any working person who gets public assistance is vulnerable to the benefits cliff. But single-parent households receiving certain kinds of aid get whalloped the hardest, as a study from the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston shows. These households tend to have the highest resource need, mostly around paying for childcare, and the most to lose if those resources disappear. 

With so much recent focus on food and related insecurities during the pandemic, the benefits cliff has become of topic of interest to legislators seeking to better understand how to pull America’s working poor out of food- and needs insecurity more broadly, and place them on less tenuous financial ground. What will actually work and who else, beyond workers, needs to be a part of that equation? There are partial solutions already at play in various states. The trick is taking them national, and including employers in the conversation. To do that requires a much better understanding of how they work and who is actually vulnerable.

Introducing a roundtable in late October on the benefits cliff as part of his effort to develop a plan to end hunger in America, Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, along with Indiana Republican Jackie Walorski, suggested it would make sense for SNAP benefits, for example, to gradually decrease as someone began to earn more, thereby ensuring a family’s ability to access enough to eat. 

But “that’s not the way it works,” McGovern said. “Instead, when someone makes even one dollar over some arbitrary program limit, their food assistance completely vanishes. In some cases, it even costs people more to have full-time work because their income causes them to lose all the benefits they rely on to put food on the table.” 

For a family receiving multiple supports, even non-food related programs can help them afford groceries, since housing or childcare benefits free up cash. But the effect is so highly individualized—not only to a particular family but also varying by state, county, city, and with each benefits program factoring in its own limitations and income thresholds—that even experts working within the system “can’t fully see how benefits and income work together,” according to Leap Fund, a fin-tech nonprofit based in New York and focused on benefits cliffs. “From case workers to government agencies, to think tanks and policy makers, each expert has a deep, but siloed, view of the problem.” Said Karen Schoellkopf, Leap Fund’s CEO, who gave testimony at the roundtable. “We’re not even collecting all the data necessary to understand the problem.”

Here are the basics when it comes to benefits: In order to qualify for SNAP, you must be a U.S. citizen or lawfully present non-citizen with an income at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level. That level varies by how many people are living in your household; for 2022, in the 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C., it’s $28,550 for a family of three—although SNAP considers your gross monthly income, which is currently set at $2,379 for a family of three. Applicants must have less than $2,500 in assets in the bank and elsewhere and meet employment requirements that vary by state.

Laura Sylvester at the Food Bank of Massachusetts presents a common cliff scenario: “Let’s say that somebody is working as a daycare provider and earning Massachusetts’ minimum wage of $13.50 an hour. They get some SNAP benefits, and they are in Section 8 housing, which is a federal housing subsidy you often have to wait for for 20 or more years before you’re approved; the waiting list is so long because of the incredible lack of affordable housing. Say that daycare provider gets offered a promotion to become a supervisor and is given a $1.50-an-hour raise. That tiny little income bump puts them over the eligibility for SNAP so they’re going to lose all their [SNAP] benefits, and it maybe puts them over the edge for housing, which nobody wants to lose because what happens if you take the raise and get laid off three months later? You’re out of luck and back on the waitlist… [and you can be] so much worse off than before.” 

Schoellkopf said there’s also a second, much wider, category of people affected by the benefits cliff: those who “make financially conservative decisions out of fear of hitting the them: turning down raises, promotions, hours, leaving jobs, so as not to fall into financial catastrophe.”

Either situation can keep a person in poverty and make them more vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity over the long term. “Lower-income populations on SNAP tend to spend most of their income on housing, utilities—the basics—and their food budget tends to be much more dispensable,” said Amy Yaroch, executive director of the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition in Omaha, Nebraska. “When they lose government benefits due to an increase in wages, they have more limited access to healthful foods. They’re making sure their kids are fed, but it’s cheap calories, not nutritious foods” that kids require to learn and thrive.

Single-parent households aren’t the only ones who are vulnerable. Two-parent households can also experience the cliff effect, as can individuals. A single man working a consistent but seasonal job for most of the year, for instance, may lose his SNAP benefits if he’s not able to find a second job to help him meet his 20-hour-a-week requirement for benefits, according to Michael Wilson, director of Maryland Hunger Solutions—although Sylvester says the main cliff impact in this scenario tends to be around housing. Even efforts to raise the minimum wage in certain states have pushed some workers over the cliff. According to a 2017 article in New Mexico in Depth, as the city of Las Cruces prepared for a minimum-wage hike from $7.50 to $9.20, and then again to $10.10, there were very real concerns about how many people might hit the cliff effect, or fail to qualify for benefits entirely—even if the raise wasn’t enough to cover their food needs. Still, said Schoellkopf, “We should absolutely raise the minimum wage. This is not either/or; policy needs to evolve to meet the moment and the needs of people.”

Thorny though it is to find comprehensive solutions to the cliff effect, certain mitigating and hopefully sustainable possibilities are beginning to emerge. On the federal level, the HOPE Act includes two pilot programs aimed at helping eligible individuals learn to budget, build savings, and improve their financial security over the long term. The act would also improve technology to the point where multiple benefits could be applied for at the same time—a measure that might allow applicants and anyone assisting them to see where potential cliffs lie. As it was originally proposed in 2016, the HOPE framework also required use of a calculator system to help families understand the financial impacts of one program on another. According to Schoellkopf, “That is incredibly powerful, since not knowing is what’s creating a lot of problems to begin with. That can be part of the data collection that helps us better understand how to tweak policies.” 

Another policy effort, the ASSET Act, would eliminate asset tests or resource limits on a cash-assistance program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), as well as on SNAP. That’s important because currently, said Sylvester, if you have a house, a savings account, a car worth more than $5,000, you’re ineligible for most benefits. “If you lose your job but still have your car, you’d have to [also] lose your house to qualify,” she said. “So you have to be dead broke” to get these benefits. 

A number of individual states have enacted some initiatives to confront the financial conditions that make people vulnerable to benefits cliffs. Massachusetts has upped a family’s SNAP eligibility from 130 to 200 percent of the FPL, which allows for assistance even at a higher income level. Oregon doubled the income threshold for families receiving TANF and enacted a three-month phase-out of the benefit, gradually ratcheting it down to 75 percent, then to 50 percent, before getting rid of it altogether as income rises—the sort of gradual phase-out Yaroch believes allows people to “accumulate savings before removing benefits.” Colorado has a subsidized childcare system that allows families to pay on a sliding scale that’s proportional to any income increases they receive. 

Sylvester and partners of the food bank have been pushing for Massachusetts state legislation related to the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). This would ensure that families facing a benefits cliff would have some or all of that gap in resources filled by extra EITC monies—either as a lump-sum refund at tax time, or a monthly or quarterly payment “so people can budget,” Sylvester said. If passed, Massachusetts would be the first state to use the EITC in this way, “and we’re excited because it’s actually a simplified fix as opposed to tweaking each benefit separately and trying to get them to work together, and it’s almost like guaranteed basic income because it’s giving people money so they can start to move forward in their career path.” 

Wilson calls the benefits cliff a “Human-made solution that is human-solvable. We need to feed kids in school without worrying whether Johnny’s mom makes $25,000 a year or $23,000 year.” He sees universal school meals, which Maryland is currently considering, as an important partial fix to the benefits cliff, although federal legislation, rather than piecemeal state efforts, would have the most heft. And he points out that increasing the maximum monthly SNAP pay-outs is good for the broader economy as well as for people with limited resources, giving them more to spend in grocery stores, bodegas, and at farmers’ markets. 

There is bipartisan support for eliminating benefits cliffs from our array of assistance programs, though not to the same end and the reasons differ. Yaroch says Republicans see these cliffs as disincentivizing work, while Democrats see them as barriers to advancement. Ultimately, though, “We’re so gung-ho in the U.S. about people pulling themselves up by bootstraps,” said Sylvester. “But people don’t realize the system is stacked against them.”

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