Lela Nargi | Civil Eats

Venison Was An Important Protein Source for Food Banks. Now It May Be Too Dangerous to Eat.

Lela Nargi — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:00:23 +0000

Every autumn since he was 12, Paul Annear has been hunting for deer on his parents’ 120 hilly, wooded acres in southwestern Wisconsin’s Driftless Area. It’s a tradition passed down from grandfather to father to son and one that he talks about reverently. “The region is full of rock outcroppings and big ridges and low-lying valleys with creeks running through, and there’s herd wildlife pretty much everywhere you turn,” Annear says.

If he’s shooting straight, Annear harvests his two allotted bucks each season—one hunted with his firearm permit and one with his bow permit. He’ll bring home about 100 pounds of venison, which will feed his family of five throughout the spring, summer, and into the fall.

Many low-income rural residents also receive donated venison in food pantry boxes or served in meals at charitable feeding centers.

In the past few years, what was once a straightforward if labor-intensive process—field dressing, transporting, and processing the meat into various cuts before freezing—has become considerably more fraught. Throughout most of Wisconsin and in 29 other states, chronic wasting disease (CWD) is on the rise in deer-related species; trophy hunting, or captive hunt, facilities are at least partly to blame. Six of the last 11 bucks Annear harvested on his family’s property were infected with CWD, a percentage that tracks with countywide infection rates. Rather than being eaten, those deer are destroyed.

Although hunting isn’t Annear’s only way to access protein, he knows “some families where that’s their red meat for the most part,” he says. Many low-income rural residents also receive donated venison in food pantry boxes or served in meals at charitable feeding centers. With food insecurity back to pre-pandemic rates, and inflation driving up the cost of beef and veal by 14.3 percent, some anti-hunger advocates are wondering how CWD will impact people already struggling to put fresh food on their tables.

The Spread of CWD

CWD was identified in the U.S. in the late 1960s. It is highly infectious and fatal for deer, elk, moose, and reindeer. Like other prion diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s disease in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, AKA mad cow disease, it attacks the brain, killing nerve cells until tiny holes form in the tissue. There’s no way to prevent or cure it. Although it’s not known to spread to humans, epidemiologists fear it could make that interspecies jump; as a result, the Centers for Disease Control advises against eating CWD-infected venison. “It’s really depressing when you have a deer test positive, but I’m not willing to personally take the risk,” Annear says.

In its last stage, CWD causes animals to lose weight and stagger, making them vulnerable to car strikes and predators like coyotes and bobcats. For most of the disease’s incubation period, which can last up to 24 months, there’s no way to tell if an animal is infected. Diagnosis is only possible in dead animals—either roadkill or hunted deer brought to testing sites. A hunter must remove the head so the lymph nodes can be extracted.

“It’s a gruesome thing to do and a gruesome sight when you see it,” says Annear. “You tag the [head] with a registration number that’ll link back to your name, and within two weeks you typically get your results back.” That’s a challenge for hunters who must either refrigerate the deer carcass while they wait or break down and package the meat, only to throw it away if they receive a positive result.

In the weeks before showing CWD symptoms, wild deer are “shedding infective materials like urine, feces, blood, saliva, and semen into the environment. Deer are very social so that is one way the disease is spreading,” says Kip Adams. He’s chief conservation officer for the National Deer Association (NDA), an organization that works in part to preserve wild deer and their habitats. However, Adams says many wildlife managers believe that the greatest culprit in spreading the disease is captive hunt facilities.

These are tracts of fenced land where people come to trophy hunt. What are known as shooter bucks are reared, with considerable trauma, in breeding farms that proliferate mostly in Texas. They are then transported across the country to hunting facilities from which they frequently escape; between 2004 and 2007, 437 animals escaped from facilities in Wisconsin alone. Infected escapees—but also penned animals that wander up to the fencing—can and do transmit CWD to wild deer populations. As a result, it’s rapidly spreading through some regions and moving into others.

The North American Deer and Elk Farmers Association, the industry’s largest trade organization, did not respond to a request for comment from Civil Eats.

Some states, like Virginia, don’t allow captive hunt facilities; others have strict rules for how they’re run, still others are less stringent. In Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, captive hunt facilities are common, with more than 750 in Pennsylvania alone, according to the state’s agriculture department. The first case of CWD in Pennsylvania was found in a captive facility in 2012 and in the wild in 2013; last year it was found in 257 tested animals in a CWD hotspot near the Maryland border, representing a 2.3 percent infection rate.

The Humane Society of the United States has been a vociferous critic of captive hunt facilities. In an email, Director of Wildlife Protection Samantha Hagio called them “one of the worst forms of trophy hunting . . . for wealthy shooters who don’t want to get their boots scuffed by putting in the time, skill, and effort that fair chase hunting requires.” Apart from the toll on the overall cervid populations, CWD could significantly impact rural communities that rely on venison for subsistence, she notes, adding she’d like to see them abolished outright. NDA would like to see them better regulated; it has called on Pennsylvania’s agriculture department to turn management over to the state’s game commission, which it says is better able to enforce rules.

Processor Challenges

The Food Bank Council of Michigan partners with Michigan Sportsmen Against Hunger to distribute venison to its seven regional food banks. Kath Clark, director of the organization’s food programs, says there’s been a huge uptick in donations, thanks in part to conveniently located drop-off points that make it easy for hunters to pass along deer they can’t eat themselves. In 2020, the Council received 100,000 pounds of ground venison, up from less than 30,000 pounds in 2016—the equivalent of about 400,000 meals. “High-quality protein is at such a premium right now [that] it’s been hard to get in our food banks,” Clark says.

CWD in Virginia, which is infiltrating from neighboring West Virginia, is also adding “extra work for the processors, who’ve got to take the head off each animal that was donated to us, process it separately, box it separately.”

The hitch: Some area meat processors have stopped accepting venison because of the potential risk of cross-contamination from CWD to other meat they’re handling. “That really does put a dent in our hunters’ ability to process [deer] and starts limiting donations,” Clark says.

Gary Arrington, director of a Virginia-based venison donation program called Hunters for the Hungry, says he’s seen a downturn in donations recently, to about 5,000 deer per year. The deer are certainly out there—in fact, there are overpopulations in his and other states. But in addition to some hunters aging out of the activity, Arrington says that rising grocery prices means “more hunters are harvesting extra deer and keeping them for themselves or giving them to family and friends,” rather than donating them to the emergency food sector. That means processor fridges are already out of space when Arrington comes around with what donations he has been able to secure.

Further exacerbating his organization’s ability to donate venison is the tanking economy, which Arrington says has led to fewer cash donations to cover processing fees for donated deer. “Right now, many are saying, ‘We can’t [give] $50 or $100 to a charity; we’re having a hard time making ends meet,’” he says. “That hurts us on the other side of the coin.”

Meanwhile, in Richland Center, Wisconsin, at least one processor has stopped taking venison donations due to a wholly unrelated challenge: not enough staff, a COVID-era problem across the food service sector that is aggravating the donation situation. Nevertheless, Annear plans to spend some time this coming fall culling deer near Green Bay, where the population is exploding, and at least trying to donate most of his harvest. He says CWD hasn’t been detected yet in that part of the state, adding, “But I assume that’s only just a matter of time.”

The post Venison Was An Important Protein Source for Food Banks. Now It May Be Too Dangerous to Eat. appeared first on Civil Eats.

Can Produce Prescription Programs Turn the Tide on Diet-Related Disease?

Lela Nargi — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 08:00:04 +0000

Update: On June 1, 2022, USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) made nearly $40 million available to support the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) Produce Prescription Program as part of the USDA American Rescue Plan Act.

The 61-year-old African American woman arrived at the health clinic with high blood pressure, prediabetes, and worries about kidney failure—a concern for prediabetics with insulin resistance.

She told Dr. Steven Chen that she wanted to learn to take care of her body, lose weight, and eat right. He signed her up for a produce prescription that gave her free fresh, local fruits and vegetables, along with a suite of parallel interventions, like exercise. In just four months, says Chen, the woman was no longer prediabetic, and she saw a significant drop in her insulin levels, along with a huge improvement to her kidneys.

“We had a window to get her off that track and towards health,” he adds. The intervention “helped her build success and agency” that will potentially have long-lasting, positive effects on her life.

To those with limited resources, “healthy foods [are perceived] as luxury items. That has downstream implications for obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.”

It seems like a straightforward proposition that Americans should eat more fruits and vegetables. Millions of us experience diet-related diseases such as obesity (78 million), hypertension (67 million), and diabetes (29 million), and 85 percent of U.S. healthcare spending now goes to these types of “chronic, progressive, and preventable health conditions.” But making this connection is easier said than done, especially since limited access to produce is often tied to food insecurity, which means low-income folks take the hardest hit.

This in spite of many worthy interventions over the years: The National Farm to School Network helped to expand the amount of local produce making its way into the National School Lunch Program, which provides free or reduced-price meals to almost 30 million low-income students a day; Double Up Food Bucks gives extra benefits to purchase produce to some recipients of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps; and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) provides vouchers to low-income moms and young kids for healthy foods including produce.

Why aren’t these programs making enough health headway? To those with limited resources, “healthy foods [are perceived] as luxury items. That has downstream implications for obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases,” says Hilary Seligman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). And she, like many others, believe it’s time for the healthcare sector to step up.

One response to this call has been produce prescription programs (PPRs in USDA parlance). They’re part of a broader “food as health” effort—including medically tailored meals and free distribution of local produce—meant to address the double-whammy of poor health and food insecurity across the country. PPRs in particular “envision an ecosystem in which healthy food becomes a part of healthcare because it’s such an important part of your health,” Seligman says. And they’re being met with optimism “because [they] maintain a lot of the dignity of shopping for yourself and choosing your own foods.”

PPR Program Basics

In simplest terms, PPRs—which may alternatively be referred to as PPPs or Produce Rx, and which Civil Eats has reported on since they first began to emerge—allow clinicians to prescribe fresh produce to low-income patients with diet-related health risks or conditions.

A person with diabetes might walk into a community health center, meet with a doctor or nurse practitioner who ask a series of targeted questions, receive a prescription and a voucher for, say, $10 worth of produce for the week, and then redeem the voucher at a participating grocery store or farmers’ market. Some programs (like Chen’s) have additional components, such as exercise classes and training for medical staff. Ideally, a person’s health insurance provider pays for it all.

Since in 2019, USDA’s Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP), which received funding for five years through the last farm bill, has been providing competitive grants for PPRs.

The National Produce Prescription Collaborative estimates that there are 108 PPRs operating in 38 states, although Amy Yaroch, executive director of the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition in Omaha, believes these numbers are higher. The vast majority of PPRs are funded primarily with private dollars, and the approaches vary widely—some might provide only fruit and vegetables, while others allow for less-specific “healthier foods.”

Since in 2019, USDA’s Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP), which received funding for five years through the last farm bill, has been providing competitive grants for PPRs. This is where Yaroch and the Gretchen Swanson Center come in. Assisted by Seligman’s team at UCSF and other partners, the center will oversee GusNIP’s reporting and evaluation, and analyze the long-term impact of these prescription programs. So far, “self-reported health is trending in the right direction,” Yaroch says. But starting next year, when data from year two starts to roll in, “we’ll have more objective measures.”

There are several advantages to GusNIP’s model, says Yaroch. For starters, anyone who gets a grant must have much-needed partnerships built into their program: a supermarket that accepts produce vouchers; clinicians working in the public health sector to do assessments and write prescriptions; and a health insurance provider who pays for the care. GusNIP grantees are also encouraged to offer nutrition education to patients.

This latter intervention has received criticism in the past for being out of touch with, and unwanted by, recipients, as has what some food policy analysts say is an inequity in the way GusNIP dollars are parceled out. But, “it’s evolved to be very innovative,” says Yaroch, and to engage with community members about their needs.

PPRs in Practice

Chen is the chief medical officer at ALL IN Alameda County, a public health program that has covered a wide swath of the east side of the San Francisco Bay Area since 2014; ALL IN is now also a GusNIP grantee for its PPR initiative. It has honed its practices over the years to what Chen calls a “three-ingredient” approach.

First, prescriptions are written for 16 weekly bags of produce for low-income participants who have any one of a number of cardio-metabolic or behavioral conditions; the prescriptions are filled for free and delivered by a local regenerative farm, which has the added benefit of reducing transportation barriers. Second, through ALL IN’s “behavioral pharmacy,” patients take exercise and movement classes; learn healthful produce prep, stress reduction, and mindfulness practices; and visit with a medical advisor to refine their recommended activities. Finally, clinicians and clinic staff receive food-as-medicine training.

“Nutrition training should be part of your job the same way pharmaceuticals are part of your job.”

“We are trying to train folks who’ve been practicing medicine for 20 years,” Chen says. “Most of us clinicians, if we don’t get this training, we develop the habit of seeing the world as nails and we’re a hammer: ‘Just do what I say.’” Clinicians experience the behavioral pharmacy much as their patients do, with cooking demos and meditation, among other activities. “That usually then opens their mindset to say, ‘Oh, wow, that’d be amazing for my patients,’” Chen says. They also learn to screen for food insecurity.

Seligman believes this kind of clinician involvement is essential. “Nutrition training should be part of your job the same way pharmaceuticals are part of your job,” she says.

ALL IN received seed money from the Alameda Alliance for Health, one of a number of health insurance companies with a deep interest in learning how PPRs affect patient health. An important leap of faith came from California’s CalAIM—an initiative to transform its version of Medicaid—which allows state health plans to accept “non-traditional” interventions, including food-based options.

In North Carolina, Blue Cross/Blue Shield is running its own privately funded PPR program pilot called Eat Well. It provides $40 worth of produce vouchers per week, for a year, to 5,000 people with hypertension and incomes between 100 and 250 percent of the federal poverty level. The vouchers can be redeemed at Food Lion grocery stores, which are ubiquitous across the state.

“We are interested in looking at smaller populations with certain chronic conditions and different income eligibility to see what is that impact. How many people do we help? Were there any reductions in unnecessary ER [visits]?” says program lead Kaylah Epps. Insurers increasingly see funding preventative care via PPRs as cost effective, compared to pricey treatments, says Yaroch.

The Need for More Research

The difference in approaches among PPR programs, though, is a pain point for data collectors like Yaroch. Even within GusNIP-funded programs, there’s a lack of coordination, which makes outcomes hard to measure, she says. “Is the nutrition education component going to be a cooking class? Is it a weekly diabetes prevention program? What’s the amount of incentive needed? Is it $20 a week? $40 a week? What is the secret recipe?”

In an effort to get things standardized, the Gretchen Swanson Center created some shared metrics, hoping to make apples-to-apples comparisons among GusNIP-funded programs. Since GusNIP was made a permanent fixture of the Farm Bill in 2018, Yaroch is hoping that PPRs continue to be a mainstay of its grantmaking—and perhaps even get a monetary boost in the 2023 Farm Bill, after analyzed data (presumably) shows their benefit.

The center is awaiting a batch of data so it can start measuring the impacts of produce consumption on things like hemoglobin A1C, which indicates blood sugar levels, and body mass index, a measure of body fat. It’s hoping to eventually gain insights into metrics like “dosage”—how much produce is ideal for a patient to receive—and how many produce prescription refills are needed to make a difference in patients’ long-term health.

Meanwhile, Yaroch sees another big benefit to PPR programs: local economic impact. In its second year of operation, GusNIP’s PPR programs generated $1.1 million in sales for grocers, farmers’ markets, and other local outlets. “Everyone has a right to healthy food,” Yaroch says. “But who doesn’t like an incentive?”

The post Can Produce Prescription Programs Turn the Tide on Diet-Related Disease? appeared first on Civil Eats.

A New Approach to Keep Former Foster Youth from Facing Food Insecurity

Lela Nargi — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 08:00:02 +0000

At the age of 7, Santos Amigon entered the foster care system in his home state of California. After stays with foster families didn’t work out, he spent most of the years until he turned 18 in group homes with other foster kids. Now 25, Amigon has been couch surfing for years and says being able to afford food, and knowing how to prepare it, prove to be continuous challenges—just two of the ways the foster system failed to prepare him for an independent life.

“They go from telling you what to do and how to do it to saying, ‘Figure it out on your own, now,’” Amigon says. “I didn’t know how to [get] my driver’s license; I don’t know how to change a tire on a car; I don’t know how to grocery shop.”

Even though he’s managed to earn income from warehouse jobs and sign up for CalFresh— California’s version of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—this is insufficient to feed him for a full month. On occasion, he has ordered hot food at a grocery store counter and stuffed it into his backpack. “I don’t like to steal,” he says. “But I know what it’s like to be hungry.”

“They go from telling you what to do and how to do it to saying, ‘Figure it out on your own, now.’ I didn’t know how to [get] my driver’s license . . . I don’t know how to grocery shop.”

Amigon is not alone. According to nonprofit National Foster Youth Institute (NFYI), where he is now an intern, 33 percent of surveyed former foster youth in California said they experienced food insecurity when they left the system. A report from the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) estimates that this number is potentially much higher nationwide; it found that 30 percent of former foster youth receive SNAP and other food assistance, but that as many as 71 percent might actually need it, based on Medicaid-funded program enrollments that indicate broader financial insecurity.

Some 23,000 adolescents in the U.S. transition out of the foster system every year. Whether they’re 18 when that happens—or a few years older in states with extended programs—they receive little education in caring for themselves as “grown-ups.” What they need, says Jacqueline Burbank, NYFI’s director of communications, are “training wheels so that when [they] have a setback or fail, they’re not just hitting rock bottom.”

The question is: What would that sort of safety provision look like?

Origins of Foster Food Insecurity

The root cause of food insecurity is poverty. But poverty’s drivers and exacerbators can vary among populations; college students may find themselves food insecure after purchasing books and school supplies, while seniors can experience an income nosedive when they retire, leaving them short on grocery money.

Kids entering the foster system have likely started their lives in low-income Black, brown, or Indigenous households. Foster care doesn’t necessarily change their status; in fact, kids removed from their own family homes may be living with foster families (including so-called “kinship” caregivers like grandparents) whose incomes are below the federal poverty line and who are therefore vulnerable to food insecurity, too.

Additionally, foster kids may move more than once. “Their homes change, their caregivers change, the rules change, mealtimes change, meals change,” Burbank says. “Access to food might not be consistent.”

Because of all the challenges they face, youth who’ve spent time in foster care are more likely to experience homelessness, criminal justice involvement, low rates of timely high school and college graduation, and incomes below the poverty line. They are “disproportionately drawn from families living in poverty. And we typically stay in poverty,” says Burbank, who spent her childhood in kinship care. She considers herself fortunate that, upon aging out, she had access to CalFresh and a computer she could use to locate food pantries. And so the narrative comes full circle—from poverty, back to poverty and the ways in which it encourages and reinforces food insecurity.

The Elusive Home Base

There’s evidence to suggest that having a literal home base can mitigate against food insecurity. An adolescent who’s living in her car or sleeping on friends’ couches is in a poor position to shop for food or cook meals. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issues waivers so states can allow SNAP recipients to buy hot food rather than groceries, but they tend to be sought after disasters and other emergencies and are temporary.

College, for those who find their way there, can provide some stability. But Mauriell Amechi, a senior policy analyst at New America and social scientist who researches educational pathways among former foster youth, points out that 6 in 10 foster kids matriculate in community colleges, which don’t usually provide housing. Even when they do, “housing instability is a very complex issue for these students,” Amechi says. The homes of former foster parents are no longer available to them to return to during holiday breaks, and lacking family support, “they don’t have anywhere to go, so they end up sleeping in their cars.” This became an all-too-common scenario when the pandemic began and closed down campuses in March 2020.

For former foster youth to succeed, Amechi says, colleges must “take a critical approach to serving all the needs of students beyond just providing instruction. We have to make sure students don’t have to [choose between] going to class or working their job in order to put food on the table.” That starts with identifying students with foster care backgrounds on their campuses—potentially as easy as adding a question to a student survey—then reaching out to make sure they’re receiving all the financial supports they’re qualified for.

“We have to make sure students don’t have to [choose between] going to class or working their job in order to put food on the table.”

Federally funded, state-administered Chafee Education and Training Vouchers, for example, give former foster youth $5,000 a year for five years to spend on post-secondary education, up to the age of 26. States may offer education monies of their own. For example, California’s Educational Opportunity Program offers financial and other supports, such as advising and mentoring, to disadvantaged students including those who have spent time in the foster system.

Also important is figuring out how to provide housing for students over holidays and summers. Even community colleges, Amechi says, could reach out to housing and residential life departments at nearby four-year colleges and say, “We have 25 students that need housing over winter break. Is there any way we can work with your institution to provide that?”

Barriers to SNAP

Some experts say that reducing food insecurity among former foster youth requires a similar approach to reducing it among any other population: namely, increasing the amount of monthly SNAP benefits to actually reflect what groceries cost, so recipients like Amigon don’t have to resort to more desperate approaches to feeding themselves.

However, there are some extra barriers to SNAP access experienced by former foster youth. One of the most significant is the Time Limit for Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWDs). Under this restriction, a single, healthy person between the ages of 18 and 49 who is not working at least 80 hours a month can only receive three months’ worth of SNAP benefits within a three-year period.

“This is a very harsh penalty for youth aging out of foster care,” write the authors of the CSSP report, noting that unemployment rates among this population run high; only three-fifths are employed by age 24, and their wages also tend to be much lower than others their age. Exacerbating the issue, the report notes, “Youth transitioning to adulthood can easily fall into a gap—supports . . . have traditionally ended at age 18, but many federal services and benefits for adults were designed for older individuals or parents.” The USDA granted ABAWD waivers to states during the pandemic; CSSP and other advocates would like to see former foster youth up to age 26 permanently exempted from ABAWD.

Offering youth who are about to age out mentorship that includes information on applying for SNAP and other benefits would also help them transition to independence. Amigon says he wishes he’d been connected with a professional with lived experience similar to his, “Somebody I can relate to who’s like, ‘Hey, I’ve been there, I know what it’s like, this is what worked for me, and this is what didn’t,’” he says. Burbank says adult foster youth who are aging out also need a caseworker to help ease them into independence.

Both Burbank and Amigon would like to see more attention given to setting up life skills programs that include teaching foster youth how to do things like feed themselves. “Someone should take you to the supermarket to show you how much food actually costs and not sugarcoat it. The reality is, it’s not always going to be three square meals a day,” says Amigon.

“We’re raising a generation that doesn’t know how to prepare meals because no one [in the system] teaches you how to cook.”

Erika Shira, a clinician in private practice who works with the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families and has also served as a foster parent, says this kind of skills-building doesn’t currently happen within the system at all “unless the foster parent is teaching it—and foster parents who kick kids out when they’re 18 are not the kind of people who are like, ‘I’m going to teach you to grocery shop.’”

Adds Burbank, “We’re raising a generation that doesn’t know how to prepare meals because no one [in the system] teaches you how to cook.”

Providing Support and Teaching Life Skills

“We’re taking their children from them because they’re poor, then placing them with other families, and giving those families financial assistance that still might not be enough to take care of these kids. It’s beyond ironic, and where does it end? Just give [parents] money.”

Shira likens the foster care system to “the proverbial town where people are jumping off a cliff, so they park an ambulance at the bottom of it.” Shira describes the U.S.’s approach to kids aging out of foster care as a “massive societal and policy flaw.” Much more beneficial, both Shira and Burbank argue, is for every state to offer extended care, which is currently available in only 26 states, plus Washington, D.C. Or, better still, starting way back at the beginning, would be to make much more concerted efforts to keep kids with their parents, or returning them as quickly as possible.

While reunification of parents and children is almost always the goal of foster care, certain unfortunate nuances exist. Burbank says the system offers training and support to parents struggling with mental health challenges and substance abuse. But some cases of “neglect,” such as lack of consistent meals or housing, “have to do with the family’s lack of resources to pay for those things,” she says. “We’re taking their children from them because they’re poor, then placing them with other families, and giving those families financial assistance that still might not be enough to take care of these kids. It’s beyond ironic, and where does it end? Just give [parents] money.”

The post A New Approach to Keep Former Foster Youth from Facing Food Insecurity appeared first on Civil Eats.

Can Farmers Help Each Other Navigate Mental Health Crises?

Lela Nargi — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 09:00:03 +0000

Chris Frakes spent childhood summers on her grandparents’ corn and soy farm in Iowa, and she vividly remembers the devastation of the 1980s farm crisis. In that one decade, some 300,000 farmers defaulted on their loans and many were forced to shutter their operations forever.

“I watched my uncle struggle as [he] nearly lost the family farm, then we had a couple of farmer suicides that really rocked the community,” says Frakes, who is now the project director of Farm Well Wisconsin, which offers behavioral and wellness services across the state. “So, farmer mental health has been this concern that I’ve had my whole adult life.”

“Seeking out mental health services, therapy, that’s certainly not within a lot of farmers’ up-bringing. Their mindset is independence and autonomy.”

The pandemic and all its challenges, along with mounting anxiety about the impacts of climate change, have triggered another series of crises, in and out of the agriculture community. As a result, demand for mental health services, especially for anxiety and depression, has seen a massive uptick. A poll conducted on behalf of the American Farm Bureau Federation found that 61 percent of farmers and farm workers said they experienced more stress and mental health challenges in 2021 than they did in 2020; new NIH research indicates that they may have an elevated risk of suicide to boot.

And yet, folks who work in ag are often loath to admit they need emotional support or more concerted behavioral care, let alone to ask for it. “Seeking out mental health services, therapy, that’s certainly not within a lot of farmers’ up-bringing,” says Lisa Misch, director of farmer outreach and technical assistance at Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI-USA). “Their mindset is independence and autonomy.”

Nevertheless, an increasing number of farm-related groups are actively working to reduce the stigma around mental health services and to increase farmer access to resources that will help them, before feelings of hopelessness become overwhelming.

Peer-to-Peer Support

While every workplace has its stressors, farming includes several uniquely disquieting aspects. “For farmers, there’s the element of livelihood, there’s the element of their housing, and then there’s the element of legacy,” says Misch. “Either multiple generations before them have been [on the land] or they’re trying to build something to leave to future generations. There’s a lot at stake, and a lot of pride in the work that can get mixed into not wanting to show they might not be succeeding.” The all-too-common response to this perception of personal failure is shame.

The Wisconsin Women in Conservation (WiWiC), a three-year collaborative project among several organizations, just this year decided that the time had come for them to act. In addition to the project’s efforts to boost the profile of Wisconsin’s 38,000-plus women producers, WiWiC has started offering courses in a behavioral health strategy that may well be uniquely suited to farmers: They’re training their members in peer-to-peer mental health support.

In five two-hour initiatives throughout the state over the course of two months, WiWiC will coach up to 30 women at a time to recognize signs of stress in farmers, teaching them how to actively listen for clues that an emotional crisis might be brewing. To do this, they’re using a program called Changing Our Mental and Emotional Trajectory (COMET), which was developed in 2014 at the High Plains Research Network, and which serves eastern Colorado’s rural and frontier communities. These regions, like Wisconsin’s, have a preponderance of people working in ag and a dearth of mental health care providers. “So, it’s up to community members to help fill some of those gaps,” says Chris Frakes, who took the COMET training in 2021 and whose organization has since trained about 150 farmers and rural community members; Farm Well Wisconsin is also facilitating WiWiC’s COMET workshops.

Wisconsin Women in Conservation practices a peer-to-peer, highly interactive model called a “Learning Circle.” Women are encouraged to share challenges and advice. (Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Farmers Union)

Through COMET, farmers and other locals—for instance, the owner of the hardware store and staff at the public school—learn to ask gentle but probing questions of their friends and neighbors during the normal course of conversation. They may tell a socially isolated farmer that they’ve missed her at the diner lately, then ask, “How are you, really?” says Maret Felzein, a member of HPRN’s Community Advisory Council who helped fine-tune the COMET curriculum. Questions culminate in asking the person who’s struggling if they’d be open to hearing a story about a similar challenge, or if they’d be willing to talk again. “It’s an invitation to engage,” Felzein says.

“Truth be told, even family and friends can be like, ‘Why are you working every weekend? Why can’t you leave the farm for vacation?’ You’re always in triage mode on a farm.”

Sara George, a WiWiC regional coordinator, says this kind of strategy lines up with the very particular needs of the farming community. “There are farmer helplines out there; there’s mental health support groups.” (Farm Aid, for example, maintains an online list of resources.) “But I think building up a network in a community is so much more relevant,” George says.

Part of this, she says, has to do with the fact that the person on the other end of a crisis hotline might not have a background in ag, or understand its pressures. “Truth be told, even family [members] and friends can be like, ‘Why are you working every weekend? Why can’t you leave the farm for vacation?’” George says. “[They don’t understand that] you’ve got irrigation pipes that are breaking, animals that are dying, and crops that have an infestation of bugs. You’re always in triage mode on a farm.”

Sara George at a WiWiC Field Day. (Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Farmers Union)

When it comes to support groups, Misch says competition between farmers can also be an inhibitor. “You don’t always want to tell another farmer, ‘We are facing issues,’ because that can lead to certain farmers knocking on the door asking to buy your land. There needs to be a level of confidentiality.” Isolation, and the can-do ethic that makes many farmers determined to suffer in silence, compounds the challenge of getting folks the help they need.

An Arsenal of Mental Health Tools

COMET is just one tool in the behavioral health arsenal for those with a stake in keeping the ag community emotionally sound. RAFI-USA favors a practical approach. “When we think about mental health outreach, we’re looking at it through the lens of farm stress,” says Misch. Through their Farm Advocacy program, which has been a cornerstone of the organization’s work since its founding in 1990, they guide farmers in navigating any number of business disasters: loan acceleration, pending bankruptcy, natural disasters, crop losses, and others.

The organization’s lead farmer advocate—himself a survivor of the 1980s farm crisis—lends an ear, then counsels a farmer on what options might be available. Says Misch, “If it’s a loan acceleration, maybe they could [reorganize their finances by filing a] Chapter 12 [bankruptcy], which would allow them to keep farming [on their land]. Sometimes the goal is to retain assets when they get out of farming, or it’s, ‘We’re keeping this land no matter what.’”

“All the work you do in agricultural safety and health is important. But if you don’t address farm stress, all your other work to prevent illness, injury, and fatality doesn’t mean anything.”

After meeting with the advocate, farmers often say, “They got the best night’s sleep they’ve had in a long time because they had a way forward,” Misch says. An additional benefit: A farmer who’s learned how to navigate a complex array of farm regulations is now able to pass that info on to other farmers, creating what Misch calls a multiplying effect.

The North Carolina Agromedicine Institute has been developing mental health services in the ag realm for about 10 years—including with migrant farmworkers, who experience another series of challenges when it comes to getting any sort of help, including language and financial barriers. The Institute’s focus on farm stress in particular all started, says director Robin Tutor Marcom, “with a farm woman who said to me, ‘All the work you do in agricultural safety and health is important. But if you don’t address farm stress, all your other work to prevent illness, injury, and fatality doesn’t mean anything.’”

The institute offers free substance abuse programming, as well as a limited number of free therapy sessions to those who need them. They’ve trained 140 cooperative extension agents in Mental Health First Aid. And they use another sort of peer-to-peer training, called Farmer-to-Farmer. When a farmer is referred to the institute they are screened for depression, stress, and anxiety. Then they’re matched with a peer, if that’s what’s in order.

“We try hard to match on their agricultural commodity, and whether they have children or not,” says Marcom. “Maybe they are a person of faith and want someone else who has that background.” A bit of physical distance is essential, so there’s no perceived competition; peers live several counties away, and conversations happen by phone or video call. And although both farm men and women take the peer training, “It’s our farm women who are taking ownership of the program,” Marcom says.

Stephanie Schneider, a Conservation Coach at WiWiC, at her Together Farms with her white park cattle. (Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Farmers Union)

The program helps farm women feel like they’re lending critical support to their communities—and in time, and with additional training, it could lead to paid work. But this kind of “third shift” work also comes with a downside. “We’re already doing the childcare, cooking, shopping, cleaning, and working a fulltime job and adding [mental-health support] to it feels heavy,” says WiWiC’s George. The COMET training, however, will allow women who participate “to put a focus on how to recognize mental health flags and know what to do with them, so we don’t carry that and lose sleep at night.” They’ll learn to help with care, and a bit of “professional” detachment.

The Quest for Sustainable Funding

Although federal, state, and private money to fund farmer mental health has become more abundant lately, sustainability is very much on the minds of those who run these programs. FEMA COVID disaster money provided short-term funds for states to institute Crisis Counseling Assistance and Training, to help residents experiencing pandemic-induced stress and anxiety. Wisconsin received more than $4.5 million to run such a program, some of which was used to pay for crisis counselors for farmers, through June 2021.

The Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN), which is overseen by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, provides competitive grants for distribution through four regional agricultural hubs for the purpose of connecting members of the ag community to programs that offer behavioral health counseling. It awarded $25 million in grants to 50 projects in 2021, up from $19 million in 2019; COMET training has been funded in some places in this way. There has also been grant money from the Department of Health & Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

“We need funds . . . to get more farmers services upfront [so they don’t get to a point of crisis to begin with]. At some point, there has to be some attempt to address [the roots of] farm stress itself.”

But funding otherwise comes from the states and from private coffers. Marcom’s institute, for example, has received master settlement money from the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission and the Corn Growers Association of North Carolina, in addition to FRSAN, to fund behavioral health programs. The need to seek out new funding periodically leaves the future of COMET and other farmer mental health programs uncertain.

Perhaps even more important to address, though, are the core causes of anxiety and depression. “We need funds . . . to get more farmers services upfront,” so they don’t get to a point of crisis to begin with, says Misch. “At some point, there has to be some attempt to address [the roots of] farm stress itself.” Real estate bubbles that cause insecure land tenure, the unpredictable commodity markets, climate extremes, poor access to health care, rural isolation, and exposure to pesticides could all play a role. USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture and Research Education office (SARE) is funding a RAFI-USA pilot project on farmer financial strain, which is an important step in that direction. But for the time being, a more detailed roadmap—let alone the funding to build it up—has yet to manifest.

Mental Health Resources

If you or someone you know needs immediate mental health support, there are a number of national hotlines available:

• Farm Aid Hotline: 800-FARM-AID (327-6243) – Monday-Friday 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. ET
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-TALK (8255) – 24/7/365
• 211, a comprehensive hotline that connects callers with local resources
• 911 in an emergency

Farm Aid has an extensive list of resources on its Farmer Resource Network website, and the Rural Health Information Hub also maintains a detailed page dedicated to farmer mental health and suicide prevention.

The post Can Farmers Help Each Other Navigate Mental Health Crises? appeared first on Civil Eats.

An Inside Look at Union Organizing in the Fast Food Industry

Lela Nargi — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 09:00:05 +0000

August 10, 2022 update: New York City said that it had reached a settlement potentially worth more than $20 million with Chipotle over violations of worker protection laws, the largest settlement of its kind in the city’s history.

July 22, 2022 update: This week, Chipotle permanently closed a store in Maine that had tried to form a union, raising alarms among union organizers working in other Chipotle stores.

On a cool, sunny morning in early October, a small group of Chipotle workers gathered in the deeply shadowed entrance to the Queens Center Mall in New York City. They sipped takeout coffee and nervously discussed the day’s strategy with an organizer from 32BJ Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a labor union representing 175,000 service employees that has been attempting to organize fast-food workers for the last few years.

Their plan was simple: They’d start their protest here around 10 a.m. and, hopefully, more of their colleagues would be on the way after they finished classes or took care of other non-work-related duties. The group planned to protest the wages they lost for the nine days of work they missed in early September when Hurricane Ida flooded the basement level food court where Chipotle shares space with Chick-fil-A, Panda Express, McDonald’s, and other exemplars of 21st-century mall cuisine.

Chipotle “waited a whole week to tell us” the store would remain closed, says Caren Guzman, a veteran crew member and recent community college graduate. “Then they said they wouldn’t pay us [for the days unworked].” The company did not respond to requests for comment on this story, but Guzman says the closure cost her $600 in lost wages—more than half her portion of rent on an apartment that she shares with her mother. The store’s 20 other crew members, most of whom earn New York City’s $15 hourly minimum wage, were similarly strapped.

Wage theft, unsafe work environments, last-minute shift changes, and firings for no clear reason are just some of the unethical, if not illegal, indignities fast-food workers say they endure in the U.S. The situation has only gotten worse since the COVID epidemic began, and that fact has lead to mass walkouts across the country as well as widespread labor shortages in the foodservice industry.

There’s no “shortage of people who can do the jobs, it’s that the jobs are terrible,” said Suzanne Adely, co-director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. Fast-food workers were being exposed to COVID; “They also realized that they’re not just being left unprotected—that their health didn’t matter to their employers—but that they were getting shit wages for their work.”

The fact that protests are occurring even in New York City—which has enacted hard-won, union-boosted worker protection legislation including Just Cause and Fair Workweek laws—and even at a chain like Chipotle, which promises to serve customers “food with integrity,” underscores the uphill work of union organizers. The strike at the Queens store was just one in a string of actions in the past two years in response to transgressions at New York area Chipotles—and it was part of a larger, longer, more concerted effort from union organizers to force fast-food chains to do better by their workers. This transient and vulnerable labor pool has historically proved tricky to organize; unions such as 32BJ hope they can convince them that better wages and less stressed lives are on the horizon, if only they make their voices heard.

The Roots of Fast-Food Organizing

Attempts to organize fast-food workers date back to the early ‘80s and a little-known union contract that was won by workers at an eatery in Detroit’s Greyhound bus station, says Alex Han, a longtime labor organizer who’s now a Bargaining for the Common Good fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

There have certainly been other efforts since. 32BJ has been active in this arena for the past nine years and is part of a larger national push to organize the sector. To date, however, a union contract recently established at the small West Coast chain Burgerville is a rarity. Current bids owe a lot to a broader, non-union “Fight for $15” campaign that launched in Chicago in 2012 among restaurant and retail workers, Han says. With that campaign following an enormous teachers strike, movement engendered movement as one set of workers inspired others. Solidarity was also forged as lines blurred between various types of low-wage service employment.

“People go from a job at McDonald’s to a job at H&M to driving for Uber,” says Han. This sort of transience highlights one reason that organizing fast-food workers is so tricky. Conventional wisdom holds that these jobs are transitional, not career-centric, for teens and other young people destined for more “professional” futures. But that’s a reality, if not a mindset, that Han says shifted after the 2008 financial crisis; fast food workers now may be supporting families, working multiple jobs to make ends meet, and/or taking college classes that require flexible schedules.

Additionally, Han says, “Whenever you have a workforce that is disproportionately female, people of color, immigrants, young people, you’re always going to have a bigger challenge organizing them.” These workers can be hamstrung by fear, a lack of legal knowledge, and disbelief in their power to change their situation, causing many to remain silent about their plight.

Union organizers use a variety of methods to show employees the benefits of coming together to demand better working conditions, with an eye toward helping them take ownership of the process. They might make contact by “salting”: when a trained organizer gets a job at a fast-food restaurant and begins “mapping the workplace” identifying leaders who employees gravitate toward and listen to, according to Luis Feliz Leon, a staff writer and organizer at Labor Notes.

“The organizer who is salting then builds a committee of worker leaders on the basis of having mapped the workplace to identify how workers organize themselves into social networks or workplace structures,” says Feliz Leon.

Tactics can be more basic, such as giving an organizer’s contact information to employees after closing time and letting them know that “we exist and we’re here for you,” says one Chipotle employee at the Queens Center Mall who requested anonymity. The worker said they began chatting with a 32BJ organizer two years ago.

When a store’s conditions escalate from merely lousy—no air conditioning in summer or heat in winter, no pandemic hazard pay, or a failure to pay legally mandated premiums of $75 for shift schedules changed within 24 hours—to dangerous or fiscally ruinous, now-trusted organizers are on call to offer advice on potential actions and explain basic worker rights.

“Not many people know what their rights are at work, in part because you have webs of state and federal and local law. . . . But also, every right is only as valid as the strength we have to enforce it. There’s no regulatory body to enforce all the laws we already have on the books,” Han says.

32BJ sees Chipotle as a prime target for organizing because its stores are company-owned—as opposed to franchises like McDonald’s—which makes it directly responsible for the working conditions of its approximately 97,000 employees, says Manny Pastreich, 32BJ’s secretary and treasurer. Chipotle has also allegedly broken New York’s worker protection laws: A 32BJ and National Consumers League report found evidence of sexual harassment, Fair Workweek violations, and retaliation against workers taking paid sick leave.

In 2020, 32BJ helped employees at a Manhattan Chipotle protest being made to work while sick during the pandemic. A few months later, workers at another Manhattan store went on strike because of a rat infestation that led to several crew members being bitten. Another very recent strike protested drastically reduced work hours and understaffing. “Nobody wants to strike,” says Pastreich. “Our goal is to figure out how to make change collectively, where people can continue to do their jobs, provide the service they’re being paid to do, and support their families.”

In September, workers at the Queens Center Mall say they received a blanket refusal from Chipotle to compensate them for wages lost due to the flood. Emboldened by reports of the union’s help with the rat situation, they sent a text to a 32BJ organizer who’d already made contact. “I [asked] him: What would he say about the situation we had?” says Guzman. “From there, he gave us a call and told us how it is unfair, and Chipotle shouldn’t be doing that to us. They should be paying us.”

The organizer “took command” and asked for the phone numbers of trusted crew members, says the anonymous employee. “He had us talking and sharing stories, and that empowered us even more. Then he said, ‘Why don’t we have a protest?’”

A Protest and Its Aftermath

By 10 a.m., as planned, nine Chipotle crew members were assembled and had already scored a minor victory: Two workers sent to cover for the striking employees had been convinced to turn around and go home. On the downside, four workers had committed to this morning’s shift, presumably afraid of retaliation. About a dozen organizers from 32BJ began to arrive, wearing purple-colored union garb. Two began handing out fliers to pedestrians explaining the reason for the strike. One brought a megaphone to his face to lead call-and-response chants.

“He was a big morale booster because everyone was scared that day. We had no idea what was going to happen,” says the anonymous crew member. Everyone picked up homemade signs and began circling in front of the mall’s doors.

Part of the point of this kind of protest is to set the workers up to take a leadership role the next time, Han says. “It’s essentially an opportunity to train and educate people on the building blocks” of a strike, he says. “Part of it is people understanding and taking on any role they need to take on—for people to collectively make a plan about how to move through physically and message-wise. A union is a group of workers asserting power; that doesn’t happen in an ad hoc, improvised way.”

By the time of a strike, organizers have also “inoculated” employees by counseling them on how management is likely to respond and trying to blunt the impact to give them the confidence to move forward with their protest. “At the end of the day, people have to take risks and they’re really, really meaningful,” Han says. “Even getting your hours cut is a really scary situation.”

The advantage of being under the wing of a “big union bureaucracy” like 32BJ is that it has legal resources and the political clout to pull in elected officials and regulatory bodies. “I remember one of the first fast-food worker strikes at a Wendy’s in Brooklyn [in 2012] and getting texted photos of [then-NYC councilmember] Jumaane Williams sitting in until there was a resolution,” Han says. “Being part of a big organization can bring that to bear.”

“There’s a fight in the restaurant community to increase wages, and that’s really, really important,” says Adely of the Food Chain Workers Alliance. “But added to that is the fact that—no matter if you’re working in a restaurant, or in meat processing, or fast food—nothing can take the place of having an organized workforce, so people can have a say in how things are done on a day to day basis in your workplace, and being able to collectively bargain with your employer.”

The Chipotle crew at the Queens Center Mall wound up striking all day. After that, they say the corporate response was swift. Each crew member was spoken to individually, but no offer of wage compensation was forthcoming. The store’s much-respected general manager was allegedly blamed by the company for the strike by not adequately explaining store policy to his workers; crew members feared he’d be fired because of their actions.

“That tactic of ‘Don’t do this again or the baby dies,’ is a really smart way to handle it if you’re an employer,” says Han.

Nevertheless, crew members haven’t given up hope of a bigger, better resolution. “I don’t know everyone else’s goals or agenda but my hope and dream is to have a union for fast-food workers,” said the anonymous crew member—a dream likely shared by Starbucks workers striking this fall in Buffalo and McDonald’s workers in 10 cities, who went on strike October 26—not to mention organizers at 32BJ. “I’ve seen all the ugliness, and if things don’t challenge it, it keeps going. I would like for little voices to be able to speak up and defend themselves instead of being rolled over. With a union that’s possible.”

The post An Inside Look at Union Organizing in the Fast Food Industry appeared first on Civil Eats.

Hunger Continues to Plague Americans. Here’s Why—and What to Do About It.

Lela Nargi — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 09:00:40 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only monthly newsletter. Become a member today to receive this month’s issue.

Growing up in North Philadelphia’s Hunting Park neighborhood, Barbie Izquierdo knew that the way she and her family lived wasn’t “normal.” Her Cuban-born father served time in prison for the first 10 years of her life, and her mother suffered from mental health issues that precluded her from working. Izquierdo and her older brother survived on social security income, food stamps—now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—and the generosity of their neighbors, who were also struggling but would pitch in with a can of beans or a cup of rice when the larder was bare.

Despite all this, Izquierdo says, “It wasn’t until I became a parent that I really understood what it feels like to be food insecure. What it does to you mentally I still have not recovered from.”

As a single mom, Izquierdo contended with a cold apartment, a son who was going blind, and “plenty of days when I couldn’t afford to feed myself.” She’d feed her son and daughter, who are now both teenagers, then “‘read eat:’ go into another room and read [takeout] menus, and ask, ‘What would I want to eat today?’ I was feeding my brain when I couldn’t put food into my stomach.”

“I cannot eliminate the fear that all this can be taken away at any moment. Food insecurity is psychological warfare.”

Landing a full-time job was no salvation; with an hourly wage that put her $2 over the income limit for benefits—“Just enough to feel like you’re still poor but . . . not homeless”—she hit what’s called the benefits cliff and was cut off from SNAP, her childcare subsidy, cash assistance, and her kids’ free and reduced-price school lunches.

Izquierdo is now much better situated as a community empowerment manager for the advocacy organization Hunger Free America, and has recently left the sirens and gunshots of her old neighborhood for a home with a grassy yard in Florida. But she still lives with the after-effects of longstanding trauma. “I cannot eliminate the fear that all this can be taken away at any moment,” Izquierdo says. “Food insecurity is psychological warfare.”

That same fear pervaded the days of almost 35.2 million (or 10.9 percent) of U.S. residents in 2019, before COVID hit. Although the USDA found that food insecurity rose in communities of color, and in Black communities in particular, it remained steady overall. As a result, it’s clear to researchers that when federal, state, and municipal governments, along with private-sector groups, put their minds to it, they can make a dent in our country’s current and abiding needs crisis.

We have long reported on food security and wanted to dig in at this moment to better understand what works to lower food insecurity rates and why—and how we can keep it going in the long term.

Federal Assistance Programs: One Important Solution

Food insecurity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a much larger knot of challenges that includes nutrition insecurity, or the lack of adequate healthy food and the resultant tilt toward diet-related diseases, and poor learning outcomes for kids; lack of self-sufficiency; and structural racism, which ensures that certain communities consistently have lower access to healthy food. The umbrella over it all is poverty, which sets all these other pieces in motion.

“The pandemic underscored a lot of things we already knew from the research, including the reminder that food insecurity should not be viewed in isolation,” says Joseph Llobrera, director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Nevertheless, the poverty umbrella is so wide that its components often still have to be contended with piecemeal. Let’s start with SNAP, which is widely considered by many researchers to be “one of the most effective food security programs in the country,” according to Meg Breuning, associate professor in Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions. As food insecurity numbers fluctuated in 2020, the USDA increased the maximum benefit—determined by what’s called the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP)—by 15 percent; this was the first time the effective value of SNAP had changed since the 1960s.

As a result, says Lauren Bauer, an economics fellow at the Brookings Institute, food insecurity dipped. When that maximum benefit increase expired in September, another increase, of 21 percent, was authorized in October for 2022. “The evidence we’ve gained over the past two business cycles on the consequences of raising that maximum benefit is that spending well-targeted money on a basic necessity makes sense,” Bauer says. “SNAP solves the problem it was authorized to solve.” Similarly, the USDA increased food assistance for people enrolled in the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR), a program that has lately increased the amount of fresh foods it provides to participants.

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is also “highly effective in improving . . . health outcomes, not just for kids, but for mothers and parents as well,” says Llobrera. Additionally, Breuning points out that increasing the program’s fruit and vegetable allotment in October of 2021 should have been “effective” in increasing healthy food access for low-resource families. However, WIC enrollments declined during the pandemic, for reasons researchers have yet to suss out.

Cash and Cash-like Resources: Another Solution

Another win for reduced rates of food insecurity: Pandemic EBT (P-EBT) cards, which were provided to families whose children normally receive free or reduced-price school lunches that disappeared when schools shuttered. The cards, says Bauer, were rolled out in a “pretty random way across states over time, which allowed us to identify what happened when families got that grocery money. We found in the initial rollout in the summer of 2020, when things were pretty bad, that there was about a 30 percent reduction in food insecurity among children,” which lifted between 2.7 and 3.9 million kids out of hunger. She says a second study showed a comparable effect when another round of P-EBT was rolled out in 2021.

Stimulus checks also helped to drop the food insecurity numbers, as did a Child Tax Credit increase of up to $3,600 per child under the age of 6 for 2021. “When Congress finally signed off on the relief package in December 2020, we saw a downward shift in the number of folks reporting they couldn’t get enough to eat,” says Llobrera. Nevertheless, he says he’s waiting for economists and other researchers to begin to “tease apart to what extent ups or downs in the experience of food insecurity were attributable to the increase in SNAP benefits versus economic impact payments. There’s a lot of noise that’s going to require more data and time to disentangle.”

Still, Bauer says, we know that “every time a new wave of cash or cash-like resources went out to families, food insecurity went a little bit down, which says that [the approach] is a way to solve this problem.” This is one reason she and others are pleased to see the P-EBT program expanded into a Summer EBT program that Build Back Better would fund through 2024. This way, when school is out for two or three months, families will continue to have adequate resources to feed their children at home, rather than having to resort to summer feeding programs at libraries and community centers, which tend to be under-utilized.

“Every time a new wave of cash or cash-like resources went out to families, food insecurity went a little bit down, which says that [the approach] is a way to solve this problem.”

One major obstacle—for SNAP, P-EBT, and other national benefits programs—is that “they only work for those who are enrolled,” Bauer says. And the barriers to enrollment can be high. For college students, the “complex, stressful application procedures” as well as a pre-pandemic mandate that students work 20-plus hours a week have both acted as barriers to their enrolling in SNAP, according to the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute. Congress lifted some restrictions in December 2020 and, as a result, increased eligibility for 3 million students. “If we could maintain flexibility and growth of these programs and the supports we now have in place, that would be ideal,” says Breuning.

Now that children are back in school, Breuning says that the National School Lunch and Breakfast programs are important ways to increase food and nutrition security for children and to alleviate some economic stressors from families. In 2021, Maine and California were the first states in the U.S. to adopt universally free school meals for all students regardless of household income, and more states could follow their lead soon. With school food considered a reliable way to get children nutritious meals on an almost-daily basis, there’s a push to pass a similar federal law making free school meals available to every child in the U.S. “With certain states, unless it comes from the federal government, it’s not going to happen,” says Breuning.

Emergency Feeding Networks: A Piece of the Puzzle

Vince Hall, chief government relations officer for the national food bank network Feeding America, says the expanded charitable response during the pandemic was an important factor in mitigating food insecurity rates—and the need for charitable intervention is not likely to disappear anytime soon. What will help in the future, he believes, is a $1 billion investment from the USDA in the charitable food system, some of which will assist food banks in purchasing food—including fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers, and still-edible foods that might otherwise be sent to landfills—as well as building up necessary infrastructure like refrigerated vehicles and cold storage units for distribution sites in order to keep the food fresh.

In fact, Hall says rescuing food waste is already improving healthy food access in California, where Senate Bill 1383, meant to reduce methane emanating from landfills, is sending more produce to food banks. He calls this development “encouraging.” He also says that food banks and pantries have a greater role to play in addressing other aspects of poverty, such as access to decent jobs. “There’s workforce development happening at food banks and some of our nonprofit partners operate programs at food banks such as culinary arts training programs, which have very high rates of job placement,” he says. “No one is just hungry.”

Breuning agrees. “Generational poverty remains a persistent problem and until we are able to address things like access to a living wage and access to education, we’re going to be fighting an uphill battle,” she says. And she’s frustrated by the fact that interrelated agencies that provide various assistance to low-resource folks, like the USDA, Medicare and Medicaid, and the National School Lunch Program, aren’t better coordinated. “I worked in anti-hunger before I was an academic and 20 years ago people were talking about a single application” for benefits programs, she says. “And here we are 20 years later and it’s not even on the table.”

Llobrera comes back to the interconnectedness of the challenges in confronting food insecurity. SNAP is important, he says, because it helps to relieve the pressures around health, jobs, and housing. “This frees up resources for a family or an individual to be able to adhere to their required medication,” he says. “Research shows that adults receiving SNAP miss fewer days at work because they’re not as sick because they are getting their nutritional needs met, they’re making fewer calls to the doctor, and they’re less stressed.”

Even so, he says, “We can pump in as much SNAP food assistance as possible but if people are having trouble affording housing, that can only take you so far. Solutions to food insecurity [include] affordable housing and the stable availability of jobs that pay enough so that people aren’t pinched on a number of different human needs. The solution is going to have to be comprehensive and broad.”

“I’m still surviving on P-EBT benefits, and the Child Tax Credit has been helping me stay afloat. I don’t know what life will be like without that extra little bit of help.”

One key aspect of that broad solution involves the fight for a living wage. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for over a decade, and while state and local efforts to increase hourly pay for food workers and farmworkers, as well as universal guaranteed income programs provide some progress, federal legislation to increase the minimum wage have stalled in Congress.

Will there be enough political will to address these overlapping concerns in the Build Back Better plan? The researchers are watching, but not holding their breath. “The last administration made it hard to be hopeful,” says Breuning.

Meanwhile, with pandemic supports beginning to wind down, Barbie Izquierdo continues to find herself stretched financially thin. “I’m still surviving on P-EBT benefits, and the Child Tax Credit has been helping me stay afloat. I don’t know what life will be like without that extra little bit of help,” she says.

The post Hunger Continues to Plague Americans. Here’s Why—and What to Do About It. appeared first on Civil Eats.

Farm to School Programs Are Finally Making Inroads on Capitol Hill

Lela Nargi — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 08:00:32 +0000

The farm to school movement (F2S) came about in the 1990s amid rising concerns about the amount of processed food turning up in school meals. In many people’s minds, it is indelibly linked to Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Project, which started alongside farm to school in 1995, to give kids a chance to grow their own vegetables in a school garden, sample similar produce in the cafeteria, and develop a liking for the carrots, tomatoes, and green beans they might not have access to at home. Since its early years, F2S has expanded into a more ambitious effort to increase local food purchasing at schools and childcare centers to not only improve childhood nutrition, but create stable markets for local farmers as well.

Since 2011, researchers at the National Farm to School Network (NFSN) and the Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) have issued a report after every other legislative session on the policy efforts—which range widely, depending on the state, locality, or school district—related to getting food directly from farms to schools, tapping into data dating back to 2002. In July, the group released the latest update to their comprehensive State Farm to School Policy Handbook.

The handbook shows that in the years since the first F2S policies began bubbling into existence, school districts and states have figured out myriad ways to start or expand fresh, local food programs using creative funding and legislative strategies to stretch well beyond the Edible Schoolyard models. By tracking every bill that has been introduced in each state, and whether it’s passed or failed, and why, the handbook is designed to help educators and others determine the tactics that might work best in their own regions.

The handbook also makes clear that F2S practitioners have begun connecting the dots on the interrelated benefits of local procurement, the need for which COVID only highlighted this past year-and-a-half, including improved racial equity in childhood nutrition, shorter and more stable supply chains, more stable economic growth for farmers, and more resilient families and communities.

A Growing Movement

Though the F2S movement has been around for several decades, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 created the Farm to School Grant Program, which provides $5 million in annual federal funding to state, local, and regional organizations to build or expand F2S programming.

The Act helped significantly raise the number of farm-to-school initiatives across the country—by 430 percent between 2006 and 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), with a 58 percent increase in participating schools between 2015 and 2019, and an 81 percent increase in the number of students participating.

“Farm to school has grown and grown, and it’s become a big presence on Capitol Hill,” says Lihlani Nelson, associate director of CAFS, who worked on the policy handbook.

In fact, the initiative stands to benefit directly from five bills included in the upcoming Childhood Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR), under which Congress updates federal child-focused nutrition laws: 1. The Farm to School Act of 2021, which would triple F2S funding; 2. the Kids Eat Local Act, which would make it easier for school meal programs to source locally; 3. the Local School Foods Expansion Act, which would allow schools in 14 states more flexibility in buying fresh local food; 4. the Food and Nutrition Education in Schools Act, which would create more F2S school educator positions; and 5. the School Food Modernization Act, which would fund cafeteria kitchen upgrades.

This proliferation of federal bills aimed at building on successful state-level F2S efforts shows not only the current relevance and popularity of F2S across the U.S., but also the ways in which it’s begun to be understood as a movement shaped by a number of interrelated needs.

“It’s not just about getting fresh food into local schools,” says Nelson. “There also needs to be a buildup of support for farmers, so they can plan and have bigger markets, and for infrastructure that can process local food,” for example.

As The Hill reported in 2019, 88 percent of school districts need at least one new piece of kitchen equipment; some “must feed hundreds, sometimes thousands of kids each day with nothing more than a freezer and a microwave.”

Poor kitchen infrastructure is an enduring challenge for schools, says Jenileigh Harris, program associate at NFSN, who also worked on the handbook. “Even if there are farmers near you”—and for some schools, there aren’t, which is a whole other challenge—“if there’s no way to process a meal, it doesn’t matter.”

The new handbook shows that F2S has also increased its reach into daycare and preschool facilities, and it has become part of a national discussion about ways to broaden the procurement of local foods more generally to the advantage of families, seniors, and people served by institutions like hospitals.

“Once states start to think about local procurement beyond farm to school, it becomes a broader conversation, about [who else] can be part of the program,” says Harris. “New Mexico and New York have done a lot of great work around a farm-to-institution mindset, pulling in anchor institutions with huge purchasing power that make this an economically viable option for farmers.” At the same time, asks Nelson, “What about farm-to-college and farm-to-prison? How can we expand what’s been successful with farm to school to other institutions?”

A Focus on Equity

Those invested in F2S have started to focus more vociferously on equity, and researchers of this year’s handbook went looking for evidence of an equity focus in state bills. They found that 19 of 91 bills introduced in 2019–2020 identified economic, health, or racial equity as a motivating factor. Notably, some California bills (which failed to pass) would have encouraged schools to purchase from socially disadvantaged farmers.

The researchers also identified a need to learn from the years-long efforts of self-governed Indigenous communities, which have been interpreting farm to school in their own unique ways (a notable example is Alaska’s Fish to School program).

There has also been increased momentum in the F2S community around universal school meal (USM) policies. California and Maine both passed state-level universal meal laws last month, but the Universal School Meals Program Act is also up for consideration under the CNR; if passed into federal law, it would ensure that every child in U.S. public schools has access to free breakfasts, lunches, and snacks.

“That’s one of the biggest pieces for any reader [of the handbook] to come away with—that bills supporting USM are becoming increasingly important when it comes to equity,” says Nelson. “It reduces the paperwork burden on the administrative side and gives the opportunity for more local procurement that might not have been as easy before.”

Alongside USM, she has seen growing focus on “supporting workers all along the supply chain, protecting the environment, and consecrating animal welfare”—an interconnectedness that Indigenous communities in their own procurement strategies have long accepted as a given.

The Work That Remains

Despite much growth and progress over the years, the researchers say there’s still work to be done to support both students and local farms. Harris says there is a lack of studies that draw a robust connection between F2S and health, learning, and social-emotional outcomes—all important benchmarks as kids head back to school after having their educations radically disrupted over the last year and a half.

“We do see some [state-level] bills that mention those sorts of [assessment-based] motivations for farm to school, but to be able to say explicitly that it reduces rates of diabetes or other outcomes would probably help some bills get more traction,” Harris says.

The piecemeal F2S efforts within some states—a bill here or there to support a pilot program, or a proclamation of interest in local procurement—might not lead to much growth, and sustained funding is often hard to nail down.

“Annual appropriations come year to year, then sometimes disappear,” says Nelson. COVID only exacerbated this problem, as budget shortfalls led to the curtailing of F2S programs in some places. But Harris says this lack of consistency is another case for federal legislation. Harris calls permanent F2S funding “the gold standard.”

Nevertheless, while COVID engendered “a lot of losses and struggles to make ends meet with school budgets,” says Harris, “there were a lot of innovations, too, and brute force in trying to make sure kids and families were fed.” Whole communities stepped up to the challenge, she adds, mobilizing YMCAs, churches, and anyone else they could find “to figure out, ‘What infrastructure and resources do we have on the ground?’”

It’s this sort of deep, impactful, and flexible thinking that may ultimately help F2S and all its interrelated threads find greater success—hopefully in time for the next handbook.

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A Farmer-Owned Local Food App Stands Out from the Venture Capital-Backed Crowd

Lela Nargi — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 08:00:21 +0000

At the start of the pandemic, Elizabeth Riffle built out a website for her West Virginia bison farm. Her aim, in part, was to boost revenue by allowing local customers to pre-order their brisket and strip loin for pickup at her farm and the Morgantown farmers’ market. Soon enough, though, things took a turn for the “quite messy,” Riffle says. In order to track inventory and manage sales, she had to create a separate virtual farm store to link from her website. Then, she started using a third platform to keep on top of customer communication. “And don’t even get me started on [our] beast of an accounting system—that is a nightmare,” Riffle says.

Like almost any farmer, Riffle is plagued by habitual time constraints, making this kind of laborious investment in online sales a time-suck that might hardly seem worth the effort. There is a critical caveat, however: Online purchasing is on the rise in the U.S., fueled by the pandemic as well as a proliferation of online shopping options.

In 2020, online food and beverage sales alone accounted for $106 billion, a jump of 125 percent over 2019, according to the Food Industry Association and NielsenIQ. In parallel to that growth, the pandemic’s negative effects on national and international supply chains engendered a heightened understanding among shoppers about the importance of maintaining local food systems. As a result, some Americans are now more willing to click-and-buy produce and other foods from local farms.

All of this has led various farmers and farmer organizations to wonder: Is the time finally ripe for digital sales to help regional producers aiming to feed their communities stay afloat?

Lindsey Lusher Shute has been pondering this question for years. Back in 2015, when she was the executive director of the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), she’d surveyed members about what sorts of business services the organization could offer to help them make more money.

“Innovative, forward-thinking tech rose to the top of the list as the thing that could give a more modern customer experience, and they needed support on marketing and outreach to bring in more customers,” Lusher Shute remembers. At the same time, a half-dozen tech companies had entered the fray, including Farmigo, Good Eggs, Full Circle, Barn2Door, and Plough, to name just a few.

As an aggregator, Farmigo, for example, made it easier for farms to sell online but it took 20 percent of farm profits—less than the cut from selling wholesale but far more than the 95 to 100 percent farmers earn from selling direct to consumers through farmers’ markets or community-sponsored agriculture (CSA) boxes. Farmigo found the food delivery business a tough nut to crack: It stopped deliveries five years ago after failing to break even.

The challenge with these sorts of online hubs is they siphon off customers from viable local farm businesses while making them believe they’re support their local growers directly, Lusher Shute says. As a result, many farmers reliant on CSAs and similar models say they have seen a marked decline in customers. The shift has also come at a time when young farmers and other smaller-scale producers who sell their food locally have been hit hard by a number of other challenges, including soaring farmland prices, and the costs and challenges associated with climate-fueled weather extremes such as freezes, flooding, and drought.

As Lusher Shute sees it, Farmigo provides a good example of the negative effects of “tech companies coming in and disrupting industries and livelihoods, thinking about how they can increase their own margins but not about the human impacts of doing so.”

In 2019, a grant allowed the Farm Generations cooperative—which aimed to help increase equity and profitability among its member-owners—to build its own online platform. The coop has since spun off from NYFC (along with Lusher Shute), but its new platform, GrownBy, launched in March 2020, allows farmers anywhere in the country to sell their own products and CSA shares online without a venture-backed tech startup as the middleman. The platform is starting with local pickup, but home delivery and shipping options are currently in the works. GrownBy charges a 2 percent service fee and a similar fee for credit card sales; after a farm makes its first sale through the platform, it can buy a share in the co-op and a stake in its future success—another path, hopefully, to financial sustainability.

The group convened 18 farms to beta-test GrownBy last spring; among the improvements testers suggested was creating a smartphone app, which Lusher Shute says makes for “a better user experience for customers—and research shows that when customers are buying on an app they buy more.” The team also improved searchability and made sure that both the app and website alike could support any kind of farm sales, from a traditional pre-determined CSA box, a customizable box, or even just a pre-order of bread and grapes.

The whole point, according to Mike Parker, a GrownBy co-op member, grass-fed beef farmer, and co-developer of the GrownBy site, is to “build tech that works for farmers, and to allow customer discoverability of local farms. This is something other apps are not purporting to do.” He points out that as a mechanism of a farmer-owned cooperative that’s whole mission is to support farmers, GrownBy does not have to quickly build profitability in order to pay back VC funders looking to capitalize on their investments.

As of press time, GrownBy 1.0 had 50 farms selling their products and distributing from 155 sites; another 130-plus farms have signed on and are presumably getting ready to list their own products. One participating farm is seven-year-old Rise & Root in Chester, New York. One of the co-owners of the cooperatively run farm, Jane Hayes-Hodge, had already been using an online ordering system for its spring plant sale and was thinking about using it to facilitate orders for restaurants and farmers markets customers, when COVID-19 hit and accelerated the need.

“Suddenly we were in a situation where restaurant clients weren’t buying from us but there was a huge demand from the local community, with people afraid of losing their food sources,” she says.

Hayes-Hodge says the GrownBy app enables her to sell pre-orders at all three of her markets and, with very little promotion in a very short time, has increased her weekly sales by hundreds of dollars. She says it effectively offsets weekly ebbs and flows with “some basic sales before we arrive at the market; we can harvest lettuce, tomatoes, basil, knowing that someone has already purchased them. We can also sell some stuff that we might not otherwise bring to the market because there’s not enough of it. It helps ease a little of the stress.”

GrownBy is not the only platform attempting to better serve farmers, rather than tech companies, first and foremost. Both meat-centric GrazeCart and Harvie, which concentrates on produce and flowers, also do a good job, according to Parker, of providing fresh local food to retail customers without fleecing producers.

In a similar vein, the Minnesota Farmers Union (MFU) recently launched the Minnesota Foodshed to provide what Claudine Arndt, an MFU program manager, calls an online matchmaking service between farmers too busy to seek out relationships with chefs, for example, and chefs wanting to work with nearby farmers “but don’t know where to start,” she says. Chefs and farmers can browse each others’ profiles, advertise a need for strawberries or an overabundance of juneberries, and eventually, will be able to search an in-development resources section for tips on how to work well together.

Andy Fisher, executive director of nonprofit Ecological Farming Association, believes these kinds of solutions comprise a “niche” strategy suited to young, technologically proficient farmers, and are not necessarily the best method for creating the kind of communal experience that in-person farmers’ market shopping provides. And yet, he says, “they also present great opportunities for farmers to expand their audience beyond the folks who already go the extra mile to find local food—they’re a natural progression of democratizing food access,” he says. That could include figuring out how to make GrownBy or a similar platform work for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) clients who—as of this moment—lack the ability to use their benefits for online purchases except through Amazon and Walmart.

In fact, GrownBy’s Parker says equity for underserved consumers is top of mind for food-justice-minded Farm Generations members. And fresh local food, he says, “is a big deal. It’s a huge part of the grocery market that’s currently kept out of e-commerce sales.”

Seeking to alter that, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees SNAP, recently announced $4 million in grant money to build an online pilot platform that allows clients to use their benefits to pre-order at local farmers markets. Farm Generations will be applying, Parker says, but no matter who the money is awarded to, “We’ll be keeping an eye on that, because we definitely want to integrate that into GrownBy.”

This article was updated to correct Farm Generations’ relationship to NYFC.

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A NYC Reentry Program Offers Formerly Incarcerated People Healing, Dignity Through Meals

Lela Nargi — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 08:00:12 +0000

When Stanley Richards was released from a New York State prison in 1991, the only way he knew how to feed himself was with the fried Jack Mack he’d eaten during his four-and-a-half years behind bars for a robbery conviction. This classic cell-cooked dish, named for the cheap canned jack mackerel that inmates receive in care packages from home or purchase in the commissary, had been far preferable to both the food and the vibe in the prison’s mess hall.

Notoriously devoid of fresh vegetables and frills, institutional prison food—which in New York State is mass produced outside the small city of Rome for less than $3 per inmate per day—is heaped onto a “hard tray, and you might not be able to finish it because they only give you three to five minutes to eat, then the guards knock on the table and you gotta empty your tray,” Richards said.

Thirty years later, Richards is executive vice president of the Fortune Society, a nonprofit that since 1967 has offered reentry support to about 9,000 men and women a year in three locations in Queens and Manhattan, as well as on-site at jails. The organization offers formerly incarcerated people help finding housing, counseling, employment training, and other wraparound services.

As he works to expand his own cooking repertoire, Richards has become ever more aware of the value of “using food to build community.” At Fortune, he said, “we have an opportunity to provide nourishing and healthy food. But when we break bread together, we can also laugh, socialize, bond, communicate, and heal.”

Expanding the Menu

When Richards first started working as a counselor at Fortune two months into his parole, its residential facility in upper Manhattan, called the Castle, hadn’t yet opened. That happened more than a decade later in 2002, and its kitchen began churning out hot meals soon after. From there, inspired by “Black families on Sundays that gather around,” he said, Fortune began to steadily develop a well-rounded food and nutrition program that sought to address the power and relevance of a good meal for people who’d been involved in the justice system.

The Castle. (Photo credit: John Dalton)

Even today, ample fixings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are always on offer in the kitchen at the Castle, which provides emergency and transitional housing for 60 men and women for an average of 12 to 13 months, until they’re ready to move into their own apartments or in with their families. The PB&J is a way to address not only hunger, but also hoarding tendencies and other food anxieties that formerly incarcerated folks often experience. “You don’t go to prison for 20 or 30 years and come out fresh, squeaky-clean healthy in all ways,” said Jaime McBeth, who joined Fortune in 2014 and now serves as director of food and nutrition—an unusual position within reentry programs. “There’s a lot of trauma involved.”

By then, the organization’s Queens location had already been serving tuna sandwiches and hot dogs for lunch to day clients accessing training, services, and counseling. But when Fortune surveyed its clients, it learned that many of them lived in areas with poor access to healthy food and might not otherwise eat on a given day. “We said, we have to do something if this is their only meal,” Richards said. “We have to make sure it’s hot and nutritious.”

When McBeth was hired, she started devising new menus for the Queens location and the Castle; she coordinated with a distributor that worked with local farms to bring in fresh, high-quality produce and proteins. And yet the cost per meal at the Castle is comparable to mass-produced prison meals. On a recent weekday, for instance, some of the Castle staff were oohing and aahing over the glistening, bright orange fillets of steelhead trout McBeth had recently procured.

McBeth hired two chefs, one for each Fortune kitchen, and started a nutrition-counseling program. To deal with potential pushback against less familiar meals, she also expanded attendance of weekly cooking demos—by a third chef—from 20 to 200 to familiarize Fortune clients with new-to-them healthy dishes. “You don’t have stuff like salads and garlic spinach in prison, and with the demos they can go from ‘I don’t want to try that’ to ‘I want more,’” Richards said.

The Value of a Hot, Nutritious Meal

“I am a dietician, and that means I want to make sure that our food is well-balanced and nutritious—that’s our foundation,” McBeth said. “From there, we want to make sure [clients] eat it, that it tastes good, and that we don’t go too far in terms of it being unfamiliar.” In coordination with Nicole Gurley, the Castle’s chef of four years, she devises menus for every day’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner that riff on what she calls “traditional” foods: burgers and yucca fries and arroz con pollo.

“We’ve got a few Caribbean people in the building, so we’ll do Rasta pasta [with Jamaican jerk spices] and basic Southern African American foods like greens and yams and chicken,” McBeth said. All of this is meant to override memories of “very starchy meals that fill you up.” To figure out what may or may not be popular, she checks the trash to see what got tossed.

Chef Nikki (pictured at top), as Gurley is known around Fortune, normally has two jobs—one at the Castle and one as chef de partie at the Rainbow Room, Rockefeller Center’s landmark restaurant, which has been shut down this year due to the pandemic; she’s been working full-time at the Castle since June 2020. Gurley also has first-hand experience with feeling undernourished by food, which made her especially eager to serve this group in a way that “gives you a little dignity with the meal,” she said.

Gurley grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where, she says, “everyone around me was on drugs.” She dropped out of school in the eighth grade, ran the streets, then spent a year in a youth house. Even after she began apprenticing at a kosher butcher—before working her way up in fast casual then small mom-and-pop restaurant kitchens—she she still found herself hungry at times. “I could eat at work but then on a day off I’m broke because the rent is so high. Then you go to soup kitchens and it be like a soup broth with a few pieces in it, or Dunkin’ Donuts” but it’s stale, she said. “Just because you find yourself in a tough situation, that doesn’t mean you have to have crap for food.”

She and McBeth usually sit down to plot out meals a week or even a month in advance, which allows them to plan around including local, seasonal ingredients. Her recent dinners have included oven-fried chicken and black-eyed peas, and steak in mushroom-shallot gravy with garlic peas and sweet potato fingerlings. They’re designed to be balanced, but they always reflect the fact that many Castle residents are older, with bad teeth, and potentially obsessive about their health.

“It surprised me coming here how these guys really, really care about their nutrition,” Gurley said. “They don’t want things with salt in it. They want vegetables. ‘How come we not getting a salad today?’ [they ask]. You’d think they’d just happy to get a meal, but no, they want real food just like anybody. Eating junk all day—that doesn’t make you feel good.”

Some people switch to kosher or halal diets to access special meals when they go to prison, as a way to maintain some semblance of control over their lives, and many retain those habits once they’re out. “In an institution, they tell you when it’s lights out and lights on, when to get out of your cell, when to stand for count, when you can go eat, when you can go to recreation,” Richards said. “The only thing you can control is yourself.”

One fan of Gurley’s cooking is Raymond Cruz, who was released from Rikers Island 10 months ago and has been living at the Castle ever since; he also works around the kitchen, scrubbing pots, sweeping, and helping pack up meals to deliver to rooms now that COVID has shut down communal dining. At Rikers, “you cook your own crackhead soup”—another prison staple that relies on live-wiring a cup of water to cook noodles—“because the food there is terrible,” Cruz said. “Everything is cold, and maybe you get a slice of lettuce and no fresh fruit.” At the Castle, though, “everything Chef Nikki cooks is good. It’s fresh, and I can laugh with [everyone here] and they treat you like real family. In jail you can’t do that. Being here gives you a lot of hope.”

Raymond Cruz in the Castle kitchen. (Photo credit: Lela Nargi)

Communal meals have been “sorely missed,” Richards said. Sit-down holiday meals, where staff at the Castle serve residents and their families, as well as an annual food-centric block party that’s held to help estranged families start to build back relationships, were all canceled this year. Weekly community meetings at the Castle have switched to Zoom, and Queens’ day clients receive to-go bags that include lunch and some food staples to tide them over for a few days.

“But it doesn’t replace the warmth that sitting down and having a conversation and community can bring,” Richards said. “There’s no replacing that.”

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Hungry Seniors Need More Than Just Access to Food

Lela Nargi — Mon, 12 Apr 2021 08:00:01 +0000

A 60-something woman with $140 in monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits doesn’t want to buy “junk” food but struggles to afford the produce she needs as a diabetic. A food-insecure woman in her 80s, impoverished since her husband’s death, is too ashamed to ask her children for financial assistance and contemplates suicide. And a functionally illiterate man with annual income of less than $12,000 relies on family members to fill out benefits paperwork—and hunts game to supplement his $16 monthly SNAP benefits.

This is just a tiny sampling of the challenges faced by the 25 million seniors in the U.S. who struggle to make ends meet. They were collected for a 2020 report conducted by Social Policy Research Associates and Mathematica on behalf of the U.S. Department Agriculture’s (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) to better understand how to improve access to SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps, among this extremely vulnerable population.

Not all seniors living below the poverty level officially qualify as “food insecure.” But many older Americans struggle to procure affordable, nutritious, and ample enough food. And those challenges are often invisible in a society that has outmoded ideas of grandparents surrounded by supportive family members or happily ensconced in assisted living facilities, all needs attended to.

Annelies Goger, an economic geographer now at the Brookings Institute who worked on the 2020 report while employed by Social Policy Research Associates, said that misconceptions about seniors persist “because Medicare and Social Security are seen as a pretty big safety net to protect older Americans against economic instability.” But for those without a cushion, she added, “it’s striking how insecure they are and how inadequate” the supplemental programs are that are meant to fill the gaps.

In 2018, 4.7 million men and women over the age of 60 received SNAP benefits, a number experts estimate represents only about one-third of eligible seniors. And some, like the game hunter mentioned above, receive benefits far below their need, an outcome that Eve Anthony, CEO of the Athens Community Council on Aging in Georgia, calls “incredibly insulting to seniors.”

The pandemic has dramatically increased demand for food assistance for seniors and other marginalized groups, even beyond SNAP. For example, Meals on Wheels, which normally provides food for 2.4 million in-need seniors, reports that 79 percent of its regional programs saw demand for meals increase—by 900 percent, in some cases. Requests for assistance in Anthony’s county in Georgia, which has a 26 percent poverty rate among its population of 126,000, almost doubled among seniors, from 215 to 385—although “I know there are more,” she said.

Identifying vulnerability among seniors, let alone figuring out ways to effectively and consistently feed them, remains elusive. For starters, “being able to tease out food insecurity among older adults, for whom there is not a lot of heterogeneity, is tied to measurements that were not developed for these,” but rather for younger populations, like college students, said Cindy Leung, assistant professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “It shows there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”

Still, a growing body of research by Leung and others seeks to home in on the challenges to better understand possible solutions.

A Complex Web of Challenges

Older adults experience an array of challenges in getting food assistance. Many lack access to transportation and the internet, live in food deserts, face housing instability, have difficulty speaking or reading English, and experience general confusion over whether or not they qualify for SNAP. (SNAP representatives did not respond to requests from Civil Eats for comment about barriers to applying for the program.)

They also have their own unique problems, explained Uche Akobundu, senior director of nutrition strategy and impact for Meals on Wheels America. “Seniors’ access to food is really a multidimensional challenge beyond financial constraints,” she said. “If they’re physically impaired, that makes it a challenge to acquire, prepare, and consume food. They have to be transported to the store, which is more difficult as you get older, and have complex health challenges and limited mobility and functionality. Can we reach, grab, or navigate around the grocery store? Can we move around our home? Are we dining alone, or compelled to feed the cat or [a grandchild] more than ourselves?”

Leung of the University of Michigan published a study in January that found food insecurity among older adults rose from 5.5 percent to 12.4 percent over a 10-year period—with a corresponding decrease in diet quality. To Akobundu’s already extensive list of challenges Leung adds the complexity of trying to find critically important nutritious ingredients on a limited budget.

“For older adults having to manage chronic conditions, it’s more challenging if you’re food insecure to access special foods that are consistent with what your doctor recommends,” she said. “Your caloric needs are also less than for a younger adult population, so that means you have to be mindful of fitting a high-quality diet into fewer calories.”

Her paper makes multiple links between diet quality, food insecurity, age-related physical and mental limitations, chronic disease, and poorer health. As Harvard Medical School assistant professor Seth Berkowitz put it in testimony to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging in July 2017, “[H]ealth conditions are often caused or exacerbated by an inadequate diet . . . [and] while there is no evidence that food insecurity causes breast cancer, adequate nutrition is vital when undergoing cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy.”

All of this is exacerbated by secondary factors elucidated by the USDA report: some seniors’ permanent inability to work, their age-related cognitive decline, and major health crises that can sap their savings—especially if they are between 60 and 65 and lost health care benefits but don’t yet quality for Medicare.

Depression, especially after the loss of a spouse, is also common, and this has only worsened during the pandemic as access to social and religious groups eroded. Pre-pandemic, Meals on Wheels programs often supplied lunches to congregate sites where seniors could socialize over a plate of chicken and dumplings. Dining with company is a recognized contributor to mental well-being in older adults, but the organization had to switch to delivery models that kept seniors solitary in order to keep them safe.

“[While] all the seniors are grateful,” Akobundu said, “a [solitary] frozen meal is a different dining experience than a [shared] hot meal, and some don’t even have equipment to reheat it.”

Goger called senior depression and its attendant isolation concerning, both pre-pandemic and now. “When you’re depressed, you have less energy to cook or problem solve, which affects basic functions that put you at greater risk of malnutrition,” she said.

Also concerning is the stigma that keeps many seniors from asking for help. Some become newly poor once they’re on fixed incomes or run out of money after caring for a spouse with a chronic illness, Leung said. They may be unaccustomed to feeling “needy.”

Many seniors are also confused about how to file for SNAP, especially online. “The people most likely to receive SNAP are those that have family members that helped them. Few are getting through without any assistance at all, based on our data,” Goger said. And there is confusion over what groups of programs seniors are eligible for “across utility assistance, food assistance, housing assistance, because things like Medicaid affect your eligibility for other programs,” she noted. Low-income seniors may be eligible for both Medicare (intended for people over 65) and Medicaid (intended for people with very low incomes). “It’s hard for a Ph.D to figure out, let alone someone whose ability to navigate the system is extremely reduced.”

Add rurality to any one of these equations and the challenges compound.

Possible Solutions

The pandemic “has shaken loose additional people who had a network of supports that they don’t have now, and we don’t expect a rapid falloff” of need after COVID, Akobundu said. “There’s no returning to the old ‘normal.’”

This does not mean there’s no hope for figuring out how to meet the complicated and increasingly urgent food needs of seniors, now and into the future. For starters, some states, including California, were able to keep restaurants afloat by temporarily paying them to make meals for seniors. (That program is authorized to run through April 7.) Cities have a role to play too. In Athens, Anthony tapped a local caterer for food preparation help. And New York City mobilized a Food Czar to coordinate multiple senior-serving agencies, including those focused on providing calorically, nutritionally, and culturally relevant meals.

Akobundu said the pandemic had an optimistic, unifying effect. “[It] gave us a shared sense of vulnerability that we all felt equally that made it easier to communicate need to our funders and donors and stakeholders.”

The FNS study identified clear solutions to eliminate barriers to SNAP enrollment among seniors; whether or not FNS will permanently implement them is another matter. One is a trial program called Combined Application Projects, which make it easier for seniors to apply for Social Security and SNAP at the same time, a standard policy across all states. Another, recommended by seniors themselves, is to increase outreach at senior centers, food pantries, public housing complexes, and through door-to-door visits. Anthony said she’ll be using this latter strategy herself moving forward by partnering with hyperlocal grassroots organizations that can identify seniors in need, sign them up for Meals on Wheels, and make food deliveries to them.

For her part, Goger would like to see more attention paid to building up infrastructure around feeding seniors. “More could be done to coordinate fresh produce for food pantries, and to make sure it’s publicized that seniors can go to X place to get it,” she said. When someone is discharged from the hospital, “there could be a healthy frozen meal program paid for with Medicare funds as preventive care, that would include options for special diabetic or low-sodium diets.”

Leung, too, sees clinical response as an important component of addressing senior need; her study recommends screening for food insecurity in clinical settings such as hospitals and doctors’ offices, where referrals to congregate meal programs and SNAP enrollment assistance could also be offered.

“Doctors play such an important role in older adults’ ability to manage their health. They’re a trusted source of information, and we’re definitely shifting toward doctors writing prescriptions for fruits and vegetables and making connections to special services,” Leung said. “There are [also] barriers to affording healthy food; if you’re diagnosed with diabetes you have to pay for a glucometer and testing strips. Doctors need to know that patients are not choosing to eat poorly or disregard medical advice.”

A slew of new research should also help in assessing the groups at highest risk, drivers of food insecurity, and programs most likely to increase their access to healthy meals.

“Factors that promote resilience deserve more research,” Leung said. “And we need to understand how seniors are managing food insecurity. Otherwise, they’re just relying on piecemeal programs to scrape by day to day.”

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