School Food | Civil Eats

The US Weakens a UN Declaration on Antibiotic Resistance

Lisa Held — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:01:29 +0000

Last May, the United Nations (U.N.) released the first draft of a global plan to tackle antibiotic resistance that aligned with a call from world leaders’ expert advisors to take “bold and specific action.” That included a commitment to reduce the use of antibiotics used in the food and agriculture system by 30 percent by 2030.

But when those leaders meet at the U.N. on Thursday to adopt the Political Declaration on Antimicrobial Resistance, that concrete goal and others will be missing from the latest draft.

After months of negotiations and edits to the proposal, these ambitious—and likely effective—commitments have been replaced with a toothless target: to “strive to meaningfully reduce” antibiotic use in agriculture. Now, experts and advocates are concerned that this new, vague provision, among other weakened commitments, will be included in the final declaration.

“I think it’s a serious mistake,” said Andre Delattre, the senior vice president and COO for programs at the Public Interest Network, which has advocated for reducing antibiotic use on farms as a matter of public interest for years. “We’ve known for a very long time that the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture is really problematic for public health. Saying we’re going to reduce without setting targets just shows we’re not as serious as we should be about the problem.”

The news comes at a pivotal moment. While the urgency of antibiotic resistance as a public health threat is well known, a new study released last week upped the ante. According to a systemic analysis of the problem, researchers predicted deaths directly caused by resistance will increase nearly 70 percent between 2022 and 2050, rising to around 2 million per year globally, with another 8 million deaths associated with the issue.

In the U.S., the largest volume of antibiotics are used in animal agriculture. Also, the preventive dosing of animals with medically important drugs—that is, drugs for treating humans—is still routine. This use of drugs can drive the development of resistant bacteria that then threaten human lives. Reducing or eliminating the use of medically important antibiotics in livestock would slow the development of resistant bacteria, experts say, safeguarding the efficacy of important drugs for longer.

U.S. officials were at least partially responsible for weakening the U.N. declaration’s commitments on animal agriculture. The advocacy organization U.S. Right to Know obtained a document showing that the U.S. was one of a few meat-producing countries that suggested deleting the 2030 goal. The organization also cites the fact that a Washington, D.C. trade group representing the animal drug industry objected to the goal. In response to questions about involvement in the U.N. declaration, a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spokesperson referred Civil Eats to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA officials did not respond by press time.

Steve Roach, the Safe & Healthy Food Program Director at Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), has been tracking U.S. policy on antibiotic use in agriculture for years. He said that on the international stage, he’s seen the U.S. “actively undermining” stronger policies time and time again.

“The U.S. always seems to be aiming for something weaker,” he said. For example, he said the U.S. worked to keep targets for the reduction of antibiotic use out of international food safety standards. The U.S. was also one of five countries—all top users of antibiotics in animal agriculture— that did not sign onto an earlier global agreement, called the Muscat Ministerial Manifesto on AMR, that did include targeted reductions.

And Roach said that this approach on the global stage mirrors how federal agencies continue to approach the issue at home. “We’ve been calling for targets for years, and FDA is always saying, ‘We don’t have enough data to determine how much use is inappropriate. So, therefore, we don’t support targets,’” he said.

The FDA does track the volume of medically important antibiotics sold for use in animals, but it is still not tracking exactly how those drugs are being used on farms. Instead, it has funded small pilot projects and is now in the process of working with the meat industry on a voluntary reporting system.

The agency outlined some of those efforts in a letter sent to Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) last week. The letter was in response to concerns Booker raised in July about updates he felt would weaken guidance the FDA creates for the industry on responsible antibiotic use. Booker’s team was far from satisfied with the agency’s response and said that after more than a decade of attention, they found it incredibly troubling that basic issues of data collection and setting concrete targets were still unresolved.

“It is estimated that by 2050, as many as 10 million people globally will die annually from antibiotic-resistant infections unless the United States joins with other countries to quickly take aggressive action to address this issue. That is why I am deeply concerned that the FDA has caved under pressure from special interests for decades and failed to take any meaningful steps to address this overuse in industrial livestock production,” Booker said in an email to Civil Eats. “Not only has the FDA been unwilling to use its legal authority to reduce the massive overuse of antibiotics on factory farms in the U.S., but the agency is now actively working to block international commitments to address antimicrobial resistance.”

In 2016, the agency banned the use of medically important drugs on farms solely for the purpose of making animals get bigger, faster. That change led to a big drop in overall drug use. But pork producers and cattle feedlots still routinely add antibiotics to feed and water, often for long stretches, and drug use in those sectors has been rising over the past two years.

At the end of August, the USDA reported its recent testing even found antibiotic residue in about 20 percent of beef samples labeled “raised without antibiotics.” And over the past year, companies that once committed to moving their supply chains away from routine antibiotic use have been backtracking.

Multiple experts expressed dismay over what they said now feels like continued steps away from stronger regulations that can adequately protect public health.

“The U.S. government will do whatever it can to fight the serious public health threat of antimicrobial resistance—as long as that action has no impact on anyone whatsoever, as long as nobody has to make any changes to what they’re doing,” Roach said. “It’s really disappointing, because the U.S. could be a leader on this issue, and it just consistently chooses not to.”

In the absence of government leadership, Delattre said, watchdog groups will have to work harder.

“The commitment as it’s drafted now says it’s supposed to aim for meaningful reductions by every member country. Those numeric targets represented an idea of meaningful reduction,” he said. “Whether they’re in there or not, they’re the sort of thing we need to aim for, and it’s what we’ll be holding the U.S. farm animal industry to going forward.”

Poultry Implosion. According to a lawsuit filed today, an ambitious plan to create a poultry company dedicated to slower-growing chickens involved rapid company growth that led to its downfall—and ultimately harmed farmers raising its birds. Although Cooks’ Venture set out to raise healthier birds under better farm conditions, it replicated the contract system used by bigger industry players like Tyson and Perdue, placing financial risk on the shoulders of producers.

In the legal complaint, farmers say the company’s leadership misled them by misrepresenting the financial health of the operation. As a result, many took on debt to house and care for the chickens in anticipation of a long-term payoff. When the company went out of business without notice, it left farmers in the lurch. The lawsuit also alleges the individuals in charge of the company conspired with the Arkansas Department of Agriculture to kill more than a million chickens after the company folded—so they wouldn’t have to process them or pay farmers for the flocks—and left farmers to clean up the mess.

The lawsuit will be one of the first brought under new rules finalized by the Biden administration intended to better enforce the Packers & Stockyards Act.

Food-and-Climate Funding. As companies, advocates, and investors gather in New York City for Climate Week, multiple organizations are calling attention to the flow of capital toward food and agriculture systems that accelerate climate change—and how to redirect those funds.

Given meat’s outsized climate impacts, the global meat industry is at the top of the list. A group of 105 food and environmental organizations sent a letter to the world’s biggest private banks demanding they halt new funding for industrial livestock production and require meat and dairy clients to report emissions reduction targets. Meanwhile, Tilt Collective, a new nonprofit promoting a rapid shift toward plant-based diets, released a report highlighting investment opportunities. According to its analysis, investments in transitioning to a plant-based food system could reduce energy emissions far more than investments in renewable energy or electric vehicles, while also delivering other benefits, like reduced water use and biodiversity loss.

Nonprofits that work directly with the biggest food and agriculture companies are also in on the action. The Environmental Defense Fund released a report for investors on how they can play a role in reducing methane from livestock, while Ceres updated its investor-focused reporting on the 50 biggest food companies’ greenhouse gas emissions reporting and reductions. Their data showed that only 11 of the 50 companies reduced their overall greenhouse gas emissions compared to their base years, while 12 increased emissions. Lack of progress on emissions reductions was largely linked to the food companies’ supply chains. So while many companies did cut emissions from their own operations by shifting to renewable energy, for example, they struggled to reduce those that happened in farm fields and feedlots, which typically represent about 90 percent of a food company’s overall emissions.

Fresh Cafeteria Fare. A lengthy progress report on California’s farm-to-school grant program—the largest in the nation—found the state’s efforts are paying off. More local food is getting into schools while supporting farmers. Between 2020 and 2022, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) distributed about $100 million to increase locally farmed food served in school cafeterias. The results of this program—which includes farm-fresh meals and nutrition education efforts—disproportionately benefitted students from lower-income families who were eligible for free or reduced-price meals. At the same time, the funding went primarily to small- and mid-size farms, more than half of which were owned by women; more than 40 percent were owned by producers of color.

Participating farms were also much more likely to be organic or transitioning to organic production compared to the state average. They were also likely to be implementing and/or expanding other environmentally friendly practices.

Still, despite California’s advantages over other states—namely a super-long growing season that overlaps with the school year and a plethora of farms selling fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy—the total money spent by school grantees on local food represented just 1 percent of total food budgets. And schools cited many challenges common across the farm-to-school landscape: price constraints, processing capacity, and staffing. “The challenges around changing a complex school food system are substantial,” said Dr. Gail Feenstra, one of the researchers involved in the report, in a press release. “Fortunately, the state’s strategic and innovative investments in the entire farm to school supply chain—meaning funding for school districts, farmers, and also their regional partners, combined with support from CDFA’s regional staff—are beginning to address those long-standing challenges.”

The post The US Weakens a UN Declaration on Antibiotic Resistance appeared first on Civil Eats.

Are These Corporations Pocketing Your Kid’s Lunch Money?

Katya Schwenk, The Lever — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 09:00:34 +0000

A version of this story was originally published by The Lever, an investigative newsroom.

Last fall, Emily Krieger, a mother in Bozeman, Montana, began to wonder about the unending fees she was paying to provide her two children lunch money at their local public school.

A cafeteria lunch at Emily Dickinson Elementary School, where Krieger’s children attend, costs $2.25, plus $1 for a carton of milk. Yet last year, the cost of loading money onto students’ meal accounts—which are managed by a website called MySchoolBucks—increased to $3.25 per transaction. The fee had grown larger than the cost of an entire meal.

“It caught my attention,” Krieger told The Lever. On the MySchoolBucks website, the $3.25 charge was called a “program fee.” But that money, Krieger learned, wasn’t going toward her children’s school.

“They designed a system to nickel and dime hundreds of thousands of people once every other week.”

Instead, the fees were going to one of the largest payment processing companies in the world—one that has been fighting a years-long legal battle to protect the millions it makes upcharging parents on lunch money. Now, that operation is facing new scrutiny from the courts and federal regulators.

At the same time, efforts are ramping up to provide universal free school lunches, which Minnesota adopted last year under the governorship of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

MySchoolBucks, a subsidiary of financial behemoth Global Payments, is the largest of three payment processors that dominate an increasingly lucrative K-12 payments market, mediating millions of dollars in payments from students and their parents for everything from school lunches to athletic events. As the company has increasingly cornered the market, it has drawn attention from consumer-rights lawyers and federal regulators—and is now at the center of a growing battle over school-lunch junk fees.

“They’re making billions off a very large service fee,” Krieger said—on the backs of her own family and families around the country, as students head back to school. “It’s like, yikes, is this the best or only option? Is this what most schools are using?”

The company and its competitors are raking in more than $100 million a year from fees on lunch money alone, according to a July report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal consumer watchdog. The fees are particularly burdensome on low-income families, who often can’t afford to load a large lump sum of money onto a student’s meal account and therefore pay more frequent flat transaction fees. Regulators found that vulnerable families may pay as much as $0.60 in fees for every $1 they spend on lunch.

“They designed a system to nickel and dime hundreds of thousands of people once every other week,” said Adam Rust, the director of financial services at the consumer advocacy group Consumer Federation of America, calling the fees “a hidden cost of just living.”

Yet while MySchoolBucks has signed more and more contracts each year, making it a central growth driver for Global Payments, challenges to its business practices are brewing. A consumer fraud lawsuit, which was brought in 2019 against the company, may soon be certified as a class-action suit, which could allow attorneys to pursue settlements on behalf of many more families, according to new court records reviewed by The Lever. The CFPB’s recent report on the market, which documented the companies’ disproportionate burden on poor families, could represent a prelude to further enforcement.

Any attempts at reform, however, will come up against a company with annual revenues of more than $9 billion, and which spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year lobbying lawmakers in Washington.

“There is every incentive in the world for [Global Payments] to throw everything they’ve got at us, as long as they possibly can, until a court makes them pay back parents,” said Janet Varnell, one of the lead attorneys on the ongoing lawsuit against MySchoolBucks, and the president of Public Justice, a pro-worker and pro-consumer legal advocacy group.

“This is the first case of its kind,” she added. “No one has successfully sued a K-12 payment processor company for this type of fraud.”

Global Payments did not return requests for comment.

Fees ‘Way Above Industry Standards’

In 2010 and 2011, a company called Heartland Payment Systems went on a shopping spree, rapidly acquiring nascent school payments companies, including MySchoolBucks.com, a startup website that parents could use to pay for school lunches. At the time, Heartland was the fifth-largest payments processor in the country after just over a decade in business, thanks in part to an early injection of private equity cash. It saw promise in the new push for cashless school transactions, which were growing in popularity among parents.

In 2016, another deal further drove school lunches into the grip of corporate America. That December, Global Payments announced a $4.3 billion deal to acquire Heartland Payment Systems, with executives promising the sale would be “transformative” for the industry.

“The amount they are charging to parents for school lunch is several times more than whatever they’d be charged in virtually any other part of the market.”

Heartland’s “school solutions” are now a prized asset for Global Payments, helping drive “double-digit growth” in one of the company’s divisions, executives told investors on an earnings call last year.

The company is by far the biggest player in the market, which is largely controlled by three companies. The others are SchoolCafé, which is owned by Cybersoft Technologies, and LINQ Connect. Regulators estimate that MySchoolBucks has captured nearly 40 percent of the market, with SchoolCafé and LINQ holding 17 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

MySchoolBucks also charges the highest fees. The company’s average transaction fee is $2.55, according to federal regulators, the highest on the market. But in Bozeman and elsewhere, the company is increasingly raising fees to over $3. Families have no choice but to pay up.

While those fees may seem small at first glance, they add up: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s conservative estimate was that families pay $42 per school year on average. For families with more children, or who add money to their accounts more frequently, that total may be far higher. And it’s worth noting that a $3.25 transaction fee on a deposit of $20 or even $50 (16 and 6 percent of the total transaction) is far higher than, say, credit or debit card transaction fees, which are usually between 1 and 2 percent of a given purchase.

“[The fees] are way above industry standards,” said Varnell. “The amount they are charging to parents for school lunch is several times more than whatever they’d be charged in virtually any other part of the market.”

But lured by the promise of cashless convenience for families and back-end services for administrators, schools are increasingly signing up for MySchoolBucks. The company says that more than 30,000 schools and two million families now use its technology, and Global Payments executives told investors in August that the platform had secured a contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District, which meant that “we now have partnerships with the three largest school districts in the United States.”

Schools, however, may not always consider the fees that families are charged when negotiating these contracts. Indeed, the fact that the companies’ customers—school districts—are not factoring fees into their decision-making has arguably become a pillar of MySchoolBucks’ business model. Districts might choose MySchoolBucks for its point-of-sale technology for cafeterias and school stores, for instance, without considering that these programs then automatically integrate sky-high fees for families. Or districts might not realize they can push the company to lower the fees in contract negotiations.

This arrangement has created a captive market, critics charge—one consisting of parents and families who have no choice about what payment platform their schools use.

“This is an example of corporate monopoly power. They exert a certain price—really, any price that they want—and the parents are at the corporations’ mercy to pay that price,” said Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a pro-consumer advocacy group. “They have no choices.”

There’s Nothing Stopping Corporations From Raising Fees

This is what Varnell, the attorney, realized when years ago she was contacted by Max Story, an attorney and father in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, whose two children attended public schools in Duval County.

Story, himself a consumer-protection attorney, had begun wondering where the program fees that MySchoolBucks charged him each time he put money on either of his children’s meal accounts were going. In court documents, he testified that he was led to believe that this money was going to the Duval County schools. It wasn’t.

“I could immediately see that there was nothing stopping this private corporation from just raising the fees,” Varnell said.

In 2019, Story filed suit against MySchoolBucks, alleging that he was misled about the destination of the fees, which he claimed amounted to consumer fraud, and that the transactions violated credit card laws. At the center of the case is alleged deception by MySchoolBucks, which attorneys claim was trying to hide the fact that its fees were going straight to its own corporate coffers.

“Parents behave differently when they think that the money is going to their child’s school than when they think the largest payment processor in the world is stealing their money,” Varnell explained.

Global Payments has been fighting hard to keep it that way. As Varnell and Story got to work on the case, the company began to go to extreme lengths to stop them.

“I do think there’s been some indication in the discovery that Heartland internally knew there were some problems here.”

Shortly after the lawsuit was filed, with Story as a plaintiff, MySchoolBucks deposited $40,000 into Story’s bank account in an attempt to nullify his claim, as the company explained in court documents at the time. Story was undeterred. He refused the money and reversed the deposit, in order to keep the case in court.

MySchoolBucks then rolled out a new “terms of service” agreement to all users, requiring them to waive their rights to participate in a class-action lawsuit against the company in order to continue using the platform. To avoid signing it, Story went to “tremendous lengths,” he testified in court documents, to work out an alternative way to pay for his children’s school lunch.

That terms of service—which, five years later, parents are still required to sign to pay for their child’s lunches—explicitly mentions the Story v. Heartland Payment Systems case: “If you accept these terms of service… you will not [be] permitted to participate in the Story case as a class member,” it says.

“They are still, to this day, saying they can enforce that,” Varnell said of the terms of service.

That may soon change. At a hearing on July 17, the federal judge presiding over the proceedings told attorneys for both sides that he was leaning toward certifying the case as a class-action lawsuit—a major victory for the plaintiffs, who could then pursue claims in the case on behalf of MySchoolBucks users around the country.

“My inclination is to say yes to some class certification in this case,” said U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan, according to a transcript of the hearing, which The Lever obtained. Corrigan emphasized, though, that he had not yet ruled on the issue. “I do think there’s been some indication in the discovery that Heartland internally knew there were some problems here.”

Before moving forward, Corrigan sent both parties to settlement talks, which are expected to last the next several months. In the meantime, the lawsuit is not the only threat Global Payments is currently facing.

Cracking Down

The first sign that regulators were considering taking on the growing K-12 payments industry emerged last fall, when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a report on junk fees. In a brief section in that report, regulators noted that they had warned some unnamed K-12 payments companies of practices that “may not comply with consumer financial protection laws.”

Regulators followed this notice with another report in July—the first in-depth study of the companies that make money from school lunch fees. The report found that the fees were “burdensome” and they had a disproportionate impact on low-income families.

“Families may be paying fees for electronic payments without knowing that they are entitled to fee-free options.”

Zinner, the attorney with Americans for Financial Reform, said the report was a sign that regulators were working to hold the companies to account. “I think the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] has the right idea,” she said. “They’re doing everything that they can to make sure these payment processing companies are in full compliance with the law.”

School lunch programs—whether students are paying full price or qualify for free or reduced-price lunches—are not supposed to charge additional fees, beyond the cost of a meal. As regulators highlighted, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees school lunch programs, has long had this as a policy: Students “shall not be charged any additional fees” for lunch.

Whether the practices of MySchoolBucks and other K-12 payment companies are running afoul of this policy is a key focus of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report. As schools increasingly turn to digital payment options, parents might not realize they have any alternative ways to pay, even if they exist.

The fees have persisted even as schools in some states have started implementing free lunches for all, as in Minnesota, which recently launched a universal free breakfast and lunch program. But the new guarantee of free lunch has not driven MySchoolBucks out of the state. Some schools still use the platform to allow students to pay for milk or additional food at lunch—preserving the platform’s fees.

“Families may be paying fees for electronic payments without knowing that they are entitled to fee-free options,” regulators found, saying that it believed payment processors were violating consumer protection laws if they did not make it clear that fee-free alternatives were available to families.

In Bozeman, Krieger said that she was unaware of other ways to pay for school lunch at her children’s district: “[There wasn’t] one that was obvious to me,” she said.

A representative from the Bozeman School District wrote in an email to The Lever that “Parents can also send cash or check to the school for lunch deposits, and many take advantage of that option.”

The post Are These Corporations Pocketing Your Kid’s Lunch Money? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Hunger Doesn’t Take a Summer Break. Neither Do School Food Professionals.

Lisa Held — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 09:00:58 +0000

At the end of May, Samantha Figueroa sat at her desk counting the number of sites where Caroline County Public Schools would distribute free food to children this summer. Behind her, color-coded meal plans filled the wall.

“People think, ‘It’s almost summertime; you must get a vacation!’” said Figueroa, the food operations manager for the small district in eastern Maryland. “But I am running around like a maniac.”

That’s because while cafeteria workers serve meals in nine Caroline County schools during the school year, they would be operating 24 sites between June and August. In addition to serving meals at camps and other places children gather during the summer, at 17 of those, her team would be sending applesauce cups, baked ziti, and milk cartons out into communities in a whole new way. Other districts and nonprofits all over the country are doing the same thing this summer.

Vegetables like baby carrots have to be packaged into individual serving sizes before they’re added to meal bags. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

Driving it all is a policy change members of Congress, led by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and John Boozman (R-Arkansas), quietly tucked into a December 2022 spending bill. In addition to authorizing a program that would put extra funds into low-income parents’ pockets for summer groceries, the lawmakers changed a longstanding provision that required schools to serve summer meals communally, eliminating the requirement for rural areas.

While it may seem like a tiny detail, school food professionals and child hunger organizations have long argued that in the past, requiring children to show up and sit down to eat had prevented them from reaching many food-insecure households during the summer months. That was especially true in rural areas, where families are spread out and transportation options can be limited. In low-income districts like Caroline County—where all kids eat free during the school year—they argued, kids were likely going hungry as a result.

This summer, then, marks a turning point.

“It truly is a historic moment. We have the opportunity to do something that folks have been trying to do for a very long time,” said U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Xochitl Torres Small at No Kid Hungry’s Summer Nutrition Summit in January. “By giving kids the nutrition they need, we’re giving them a foundation of well-being that can—without exaggeration—change the trajectory of their lives.”

But while the policy tweak may be simple, the 400 professionals at the conference were there to talk about the hard part: logistics. It’s profoundly complicated to find hungry kids who are out of school, prepare, pack, and deliver meals to them—and to do it all while following U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rules that come with unwieldy paperwork. In short, they were laying the foundation for what Figueroa and countless other school food professionals are now working on every week this summer.

Packing Meals to Go

By early July, on a morning when hot air hung heavy over the crisp, browned grass outside Lockerman Middle School, Figueroa had worked through many of those details.

Inside the school, which had been transformed into the district’s summer meal command center, staff members worked in an assembly line packing plastic bags. They opened up boxes of breakfast burritos, Pop-Tarts, and personal pizzas. They reached for individually packed bags of fresh broccoli, cherry tomatoes, and loose oranges. There were chicken patty and potato wedge platters packaged to be easily microwaved, and plenty of milk. Cardboard boxes filled with roasted chickpea snacks, Craisins, and Blueberry Chex were stacked throughout the cafeteria.

A produce delivery arrives at Lockerman Middle School. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

It might have felt more chaotic if they hadn’t done this before, but they had. “We have PTSD from COVID,” Figueroa said, “but we learned the rhythm and the way to set this up and make it efficient.”

The USDA calls this kind of meal service—which doesn’t involve kids sitting down next to each other with trays—“non-congregate.” While hunger groups had been advocating for the approach for many years, the pandemic provided the test case for the power of the practice. With emergency waivers in hand, schools and nonprofits were freed up to feed students—now learning in their homes all over the place—however they could manage it.

Figueroa’s team sprang into action in 2020, with bus drivers delivering meals, Parks & Recreation employees donating vehicles, and volunteers from the community helping out. While it was born of necessity, it showed them the possibilities and where, exactly, the need was.

The team of women who unload boxes, prep meals, preserve vegetables, and package bags of meals to be distributed all summer long in Caroline County. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

“We were going into neighborhoods, apartment complexes, mobile-home sites,” she said. “Those are the places we went during COVID, where there was a need. Now, we know where those kids will be.”

At Feeding Southwest Virginia, a nonprofit that runs summer meal programs in multiple counties, Director of Children’s Programs Brandon Comer said she saw the scramble to get food to families during the pandemic as a sort of pilot program for non-congregate meal service. Plus, the challenges her team handled during that time made her feel like now they could do anything.

“It couldn’t get any worse than that. Literally, in 2021, USDA made a decision to approve some of the waivers, and we were already halfway through the summer, but we made it work,” Comer said. “COVID just about killed me, but we made sure we fed kids.”

At the peak of her pandemic service, she had 42 meal sites running. This summer, she has 67, 35 of which are adopting the non-congregate option. Many sites are in the arrowhead-shaped span of far southwest Virginia that juts between Kentucky and Tennessee, where rural poverty runs deep.

And now that the change has become law, the USDA issued more specific rules around it, one of which has had huge implications for Comer’s operations. In January, the agency tweaked how it defines “rural,” a change that more than doubled how many Virginia schools qualified this year—up to 120 from 50 last year.

“Some of the areas we were feeding congregate before, but now we can turn them into non-congregate, which enables us to get more kids fed because we’re not spending an hour and a half at a feeding site and then driving 45 minutes and spending an hour and a half at a feeding site and then having to come back,” she said. “We can do three, four, or five in a day now.”

In Craig County on the state’s western edge, for example, a librarian called to propose distributing meals last year, but the area did not meet the definition of rural. This year, it did. When Comer added the site to her routes, the library estimated they’d feed 150 kids. Once word got out, she began upping the number, which is now around 350 kids a week.

Meeting the Need

Back on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Figueroa didn’t have to worry about that change. “We’re 100 percent rural, so we’re going everywhere,” she said.

Samantha Figueroa checks her timeline of multiple meal delivery routes while boxes of incoming produce are stacked behind her. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

While her team fed plenty of kids last summer, the biggest difference this year is “it’s a lot more food,” said Liz Alley, a member of Figueroa’s team who runs the Lockerman operation. Alley pointed to print-outs she had taped to an easel, where below the different locations and routes planned for each day, she was tallying meal counts. By the end of the day, they’d send out 1,400 meals.

Mid-morning, van driver Meghan Hewitt pulled up with her helper, a high-school student fulfilling community service hours. As the two rearranged bins filled with bags of food so that cartons of milk jugs wouldn’t fall over in transit, a tractor trailer pulled in. “Produce is here!” one of the cafeteria employees yelled, as a delivery worker began moving pallets of grapes, apples, peaches, and honeydew melons from his truck into a stationary refrigerated truck used for storage.

Meghan Hewitt drives the van slowly through the neighborhood, tapping her horn to alert families of the arriving meals. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

In the meantime, Hewitt set out, and after a quick distribution at a small condo complex, she drove north.

The van, decorated with colorful images of fruits and vegetables, passed a warehouse where zucchini, squash, and green beans from local farms was stored. The Lockerman cafeteria team has recently blanched and vacuum-sealed the vegetables to be used for lunch service during the upcoming school year . It passed corn and soybean fields stretching out on either side of the highway.

Then, Hewitt arrived at the destination: a mobile home park that housed many of the immigrant families who harvest the fruits and vegetables grown in the county’s fields.

Left: A little boy holds up his fingers to indicate how many children are at home. Right: Kids follow their mother inside carrying a bag filled with free meals. (Photos credit: Colin Marshall)

As she pulled into the neighborhood, she began gently, repeatedly tapping the horn outside homes where she had identified—a few weeks earlier—that children were present. It was no ice cream truck, but mothers ushered their children out to greet her at the sound of the arrival.

Sweat dripped off her forehead as she carried bags of food and milk jugs to their doorsteps, tallying each on a clipboard with a smile. Families expressed their thanks and then hurried back inside trailers plagued by disrepair as the sun bore down, the strained hum of rusted, aging air conditioners filling the air.

Adding Sun Bucks to Summer Programs

Much further south, in Florida, Sky Beard directs her state’s No Kid Hungry campaign, which provides grants to schools and nonprofits running summer meal programs. She said that last year, even though most schools weren’t able to get the non-congregate programs off the ground in time, she had already heard how the rule change was helping expand efforts to curb child hunger.

“What we heard last year is that this meets the needs of their communities like nothing else,” she said. In her state, it’s even more critical, she said: Despite new survey data showing one in five kids in the state live in food-insecure households, Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration chose not to participate in Summer EBT, the other program that came out of Congress’ 2022 changes. DeSantis also rejected earlier, COVID-related summer food aid dollars for kids and is one of more than a dozen governors, all Republicans, who have rejected the latest federal funds.

Summer EBT, which the USDA has rebranded as “Sun Bucks,” is an extra benefit of $40 per month provided to families whose children qualify for free meals during the school year. In places where the two changes are being rolled out and adopted at the same time, advocates say the combination is a powerful one-two punch.

“With summer EBT in conjunction with our summer feeding programs, it’s an opportunity to make up for the loss of meals that a child will experience” when school is closed, said LaMonika Jones, who runs Maryland Hunger Solutions and D.C. Hunger Solutions, both initiatives of the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). “We know we had greater participation with non-congregate meals during the pandemic. So, this is an opportunity for us to extend that and for us to continue to make improvements to the summer feeding program.”

In Maryland, Jones has been helping rural districts implement non-congregate meal programs while also helping families access summer EBT benefits. In Washington, D.C., her focus has been on those latter benefits, since the region is entirely urban.

“I’ve been sharing with my staff for the last couple of months as an FYI: ‘Be on the lookout and listen up. Parents may be calling,’” she said. While many students will automatically be enrolled in Summer EBT through other nutrition-assistance programs, there are always cracks people fall through, and each state’s system for distributing the benefits is slightly different. Jones’ group communicates how the program works so that families know how and when to expect benefits—and what to do if things don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

For example, she said, a benefit card might be mailed in an unlabeled envelope, which gets accidentally thrown away. “That’s another question that I get,” she said. “‘I was waiting for a summer EBT benefit to arrive, but I never got it. What do I do?’”

Jones and her team keep information on hand to direct families to the right offices where they can get help and access resources they’re eligible for.

Challenges and Paperwork

That’s the thing about federal meal programs: While the work of feeding children is as elemental as survival, sustenance, and good health, the most challenging parts of the work often involve administrative headaches and paperwork.

Improved nutrition standards in school meals, for example, have successfully moved the needle on improving the health of low-income students. But for Figueroa’s team showing up to chop broccoli, those standards can make the job harder and often feel like red tape, because the rules are incredibly specific. And what each meal contains during the school year is different than what it must consist of in the summer.

“We’re receiving federal funds, and we want to do it right. We have to do it right. We get reviewed, we get audited, we get inspected all the time, but we also want to feed our kids,” Figueroa said. “Sometimes all of the politics and rules make it hard to just feed a kid a hamburger.”

One of her biggest challenges, which Brandon Comer in Virginia echoed, is monitoring all the different sites, especially as the non-congregate option takes off. The USDA requires that the districts and nonprofits running summer meal programs provide oversight of all the locations at which they distribute meals. Depending on how new the site is, it may mean a member of the management team will have to go to that site multiple times to evaluate its performance.

Another is staffing. “Ever since COVID, we have not been able to [fully] staff,” Comer said. Finding truck drivers is especially difficult, so the team ends up using smaller vehicles, which requires more trips and therefore more time. Still, she is making it work and expects her meal numbers to be 25 to 30 percent higher than they were last summer.

Meghan Hewitt marks each meal distributed on her spreadsheet so that meal totals can later be reported to USDA. (Photo credit: Colin Marshall)

While COVID taught her she could make anything work, both she and Figueroa said they’re hoping these recent policy shifts stick around so that they can ultimately build systems that last, rather than having to figure out new plans as June approaches. “I feel like every year is a trial run,” Figueroa said, “but I’m hoping this is the year where next year, I won’t have to write a million different menus because hopefully we’re in a final rule that we can stick with.”

Whatever happens, each week this summer until school starts, the staff at Lockerman will be unpacking boxes and packing bags of meals over and over, while Meghan Hewitt and others drive their vans around Caroline County, beeping to let families know they’ve arrived.

“It’s not always easy for them to get to us,” Figueroa said. “We’ve got to go to them.”

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New School Meal Standards Could Put More Local Food on Students’ Lunch Trays

Lisa Held — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 09:00:25 +0000

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) finalized long-anticipated changes to the nutrition standards that regulate school meals. Among the changes that attracted the most attention were the first-ever limits on added sugar and a scaled-down plan to reduce salt.

But another small tweak has big implications for the increasing number of schools working to get more fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats produced by nearby farmers onto students’ trays. Starting July 1, when districts put out a call for an unprocessed or minimally processed food—whether it’s tomatoes, taco meat, or tuna—they’ll be able to specify that they’d like it to be “locally grown, locally raised, or locally caught.”

“We’re . . . freeing up schools to continue to look for ways in which they can partner with producers and with local and regional food systems,” agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack said during a press conference last week, “so that we create additional market opportunities for farmers and ranchers in the area, but also create a better connection between those who produce the food and those who consume it.”

Two days later, Vilsack landed in Michigan, where his travel schedule attempted to trace that connection, with a first stop at a Detroit middle school followed by a visit to Williamston to talk about helping farmers access “new and better markets.”

Karen Spangler, the policy director for the National Farm to School Network, said the change has long been a priority for the group because it often hears how the shift will simplify the process for school nutrition directors while also making it possible for more farmers to get involved in the first place. In addition to funding institutes and expanding farm-to-school efforts to early childcare centers, she sees as one piece of the USDA’s current focus on “integrating farm-to-school and local purchasing to a degree that hasn’t been seen before,” she said.

From the start of the Biden administration, Vilsack announced a priority on nutrition security and building regional markets for farmers, and farm-to-school efforts happened to sit right at the nexus. Since the release of the latest Agricultural Census in February showed small- and mid-size farms continue to disappear as consolidation in agriculture accelerates, Vilsack has been beating the drum of saving smaller farms by supporting markets they can sell into even more intensely. In addition to the shift to local purchasing, the nutrition standards also strengthen the “Buy America” provision already in place for school meals.

But forging a stronger connection between fields and cafeterias goes back to 2010, when Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act championed by Michelle Obama. It was the first Child Nutrition Reauthorization to push nutrition to the forefront of school meal programs, and it included the first federal farm-to-school grants. Since then, the federal government has supported the efforts in additional ways, alongside numerous state incentives and grant programs as well as work done by nonprofit organizations. During the 2018–19 school year, about 77 percent of school food authorities (districts or individual schools) reported serving some local food, spending a total of $1.26 billion.

However, that number is still a small sliver of total school meal spending, and buying local can be more complicated for districts and schools than just making up a funding gap. In addition to delivery, packaging, and labor challenges, school food procurement involves a complicated bid process with many rules attached. That’s where this change comes in.

Spangler explained that right now, schools can list a “geographic preference” as one factor to be evaluated alongside others such as price, volume, and other criteria. For example, if a New York district wants to buy apples grown in-state today, they would have to evaluate bids from in-state orchards alongside bids from out-of-state distributors, many of which are likely to come in with a much lower price. “It discourages local producers from participating in the process because they can be drastically undercut,” Spangler said.

With this change, if the district is confident that plenty of in-state orchards have enough Macintosh and Granny Smiths to satisfy their students’ appetites, it could specify up-front that it only wants bids from in-state orchards.

Alongside the National Farm to School Network, groups including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, National Farmers Union, and FoodCorps have been pushing for the change for years. In its summary of the new standards, USDA officials said the agency received close to 400 comments on the proposed change.

“Commentors noted that expanding the geographic preference option to allow local as a specification will broaden opportunities for CNP [Child Nutrition Program] operators to purchase directly from local farmers, reinforce local food systems, and ease procurement challenges for operators interested in sourcing food from local producers,” they wrote.

Previously, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) attempted to go the Congressional route to make it happen, introducing the Kids Eat Local Act multiple times with bipartisan support. But the bill never went anywhere because the overall Child Nutrition Reauthorization process is now nine years overdue.

Pingree celebrated the USDA for moving forward with the change in the meantime, and she plans to continue to reintroduce the bill so that it will eventually be set in law and therefore be more likely to stick. “Our children deserve healthy, nutritious school meals that are made with locally-sourced ingredients—not highly processed foods,” she said in a press release applauding the agency.

At Morgan Hill Unified School District in California, Michael Jochner said he’s ready to make that happen. Jochner has been working to improve meal quality by forging relationships with organic farmers in his area and growing his own lettuces using hydroponic shipping container systems for several years.

“As a district going out to bid across all food items for next school year, we’re very excited to have the flexibility to use ‘local’ as a bid specification,” he told Civil Eats. “We feel this will allow us to prioritize our local farmers, ranchers, and fisherman, and in turn help the local economy.”

Pesticide Ban Moves Forward. California legislators advanced a state bill proposed to ban the herbicide paraquat, sending it to another committee for consideration. Paraquat has been linked to Parkinson’s disease and is banned in dozens of other countries due to its health risks, including the United Kingdom, throughout the European Union, and in China. Over the past few months, the Environmental Working Group has been supporting the campaign to ban paraquat in California, releasing reports that show it is sprayed disproportionately in counties home to low-income communities of color and that the top users in the state include the Wonderful Company, which sprays it to produce pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds. The legislation comes at a time when the pesticide industry is fighting on several fronts to prevent states from passing laws that regulate farm chemicals.

Confronting Poultry Problems. As avian influenza continues to spread in dairy cattle herds in nine states, the USDA announced it will now require mandatory reporting of infections in cattle and testing before moving cattle to other states. Some states, meanwhile, had already closed their borders to incoming cattle. And on Thursday, Colombia became the first country to restrict beef imports from the U.S. based on the situation. While beef cattle have not tested positive for the virus to date, retired dairy cows are generally processed into beef at the end of their lives.

Prior to the crossover into cattle, the virus had been circulating in poultry since early 2022 and is still is, primarily affecting egg-laying hens and turkeys. One dairy worker, whose only symptoms were conjunctivitis, remains the only reported infection in humans, and while particles of the virus have been found in milk, officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) say the milk is still safe to drink, since pasteurization kills the virus.

Meanwhile, the FDA also finalized a food safety rule that will allow the agency to enforce limits on Salmonella in some chicken products for the first time. The rule only applies to “frozen, breaded, and stuffed” chicken products, but in those products, if salmonella is found to exceed the limit, the products will be considered adulterated and will not be able to be sold. It’s a major change for the agency and is one piece of a larger plan to reduce illnesses from the common bacteria.

Farmworker Rights. On Friday, the Department of Labor finalized new regulations intended to increase protections for workers employed on farms through the H-2A guestworker program. Under the new rules, workers have more tools to advocate for their rights and obtain legal assistance, foreign recruiters are required to provide new documentation to increase transparency, and new procedures are in place to kick out farms that break the rules.

“With these new rules, the power of the federal government has sided with farm workers—both those who are born here and those from other countries—who for too long have been exploited, silenced, displaced, or harmed by the H-2A program,” United Farm Workers (UFW) President Teresa Romero said in a press release.

The news came days after the UFW Foundation released a new documentary video series showcasing the impacts of climate change on farmworkers. As the effects of climate change worsen, workers in the field increasingly face and lack adequate protection from hazards including dangerous heat, flooding, and wildfire smoke.

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How Do School Meals in the US Stack Up Against Other Countries?

Katie Rodriguez — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 08:00:35 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

The pandemic revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s school meal programs. In some cases, this unique time led to opportunities for local farmers to provide food directly to school districts. It also ushered in a wave of emergency allotments, which offset family food costs and significantly decreased food insecurity. However, when those funds came to an end, it exposed how many families struggled as the costs of groceries ballooned and universal free meals disappeared in most states.

“We’ve made them seem like charity handout programs, but they’re multi-sectoral, complex programs that actually contribute significantly to economic development, short and long term.”

In 2021, the Global Child Nutrition Foundation (GCNF), a nonprofit that provides global monitoring and advocacy to support the development of school feeding programs, ran a survey to capture the state of school meal programs across 139 countries—representing 81 percent of the world’s population.

This is the second GCNF global survey (the first was in 2019) and it collected data for the school year that began in 2020, highlighting 183 programs with large-scale meal programs. The goal is to track the programs’ progress and standardize their evaluation of coverage, beneficiaries, funding, links to local agriculture, and more.

Arlene Mitchell, GCNF’s executive director, believes school meal programs are misunderstood. “We’ve made them seem like charity handout programs, but they’re multi-sectoral, complex programs that actually contribute significantly to economic development, short and long term,” she said.

We spoke with Mitchell about what the survey revealed, how the United States’ program stacks up to other school meal programs around the world, and how it can improve.

What does a good school meal program look like?

There are a number of factors that we consider. One is, are they covering the need? [And then] how comprehensive it is—is it more than just feeding kids? [Does] it include some nutrition education, some knowledge of where food comes from? In some cases, it includes things like children helping to prepare or serve the food. They’re actually engaged in the program more meaningfully.

A third factor that we look for is a set of things that can contribute to sustainability, or to keep the program going. Are they engaging meaningfully with local farmers so that there is some economic opportunity locally alongside the program? Do they have a healthy relationship with the private sector in their country? Is it creating jobs? Is it in the national budget in a way that means that it can be sustained?

You look at countries at all levels of income and development. Which of the low-income countries stood out to you? Which ones did an exceptional job working with the resources that they have?

There are some pretty stunning examples of low-income countries actually trying harder, proportionately, than some rich countries to address hunger and nutrition in their school-aged kids. For years, one that has been astounding to me is Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world. Something like 89 percent of the budget for school meals is coming from the government, a very high percentage for a low-income country. And they’re covering almost 100 percent of their [elementary] school students, which is just extraordinary.

After the Millennium Development project in the early 2000s took off, several African countries pledged to implement new programs. Ghana has a very impressive program. Kenya has a pretty impressive program. Nigeria is new to the scene; their program now is very impressive and expanding quickly.

“There’s a lot to be proud of in the program. But one of the biggest issues is that the country has lost its excitement about it.”

Let’s jump to the U.S. What are some of the strengths of the programs here?

I think the pillars of the National School Lunch Program are admirable. They link to agriculture, they link education, they link to nutrition. If you neglect any one of those three, the program is not going to be as strong. That starting point is excellent. It’s reaching the kids who really need it. The fact that it is supported relatively sustainably by the national government is hugely important. If this was turned over to 50 states to run independently on their own, it would be a mess, because you would have 50 different standards, 50 different budgets.

And yet states have the flexibility to improve or change or tweak their program. They don’t have total flexibility if they want government funding, but they do have some flexibility. So it allows for local government input and local community input, but there are some national standards and guidelines and criteria, which I think is important for a country as large and diverse as the United States.

Where does the U.S. stand up against other more well-resourced countries?

There’s a lot to be proud of in the program. But one of the biggest issues is that the country has lost its excitement about it. It’s not getting a huge amount of public support or interest. That’s not true in some of the other relatively wealthy countries. For example, Japan has an excellent school meal program. Finland is probably the best in the world. France and Italy have decent programs.

I had an Italian friend who used to bring me menus from the school meal program, and it reads like a fancy restaurant menu. And not only is it really cool food, but they also give parents advice on how to complement what they have at school with what they’re going to have for dinner. Those programs are getting much more public attention and support. I think parents and others are much more engaged, much more involved than in much of the U.S.

The U.S. program has succeeded in feeding kids relatively nutritious food for decades, which is pretty darn important, but I do think it could be improved.

“Probably the biggest issue in the US is the [larger] food environment. We are dealing with advertisements and marketing and fast food and what’s cheap and available in your neighborhood.”

How can it be improved?

In the U.S., time is money. And one thing that really upsets me about the school meal programs is that they’ve gotten squeezed in time. The more time you have at lunchtime, the more likely you are to eat a full menu, including fruits and vegetables. There also needs to be time to socialize over meals; it’s hugely important.

Countries that are doing a really spectacular job [have students] actually spend time at the lunch table and they learn things like table manners, nutrition, and how to serve and receive food politely. There’s just no time for in the American school lunch program. By the time you get your meal, you’ve got five, 10 minutes maximum to actually eat it.

Keeping it national is another thing. This movement for universally free school meals is really important. But if it becomes a state-by-state thing with no comparable rules and procedures across 50 states, it could get pretty rocky.

We need to simplify the school meal rules so that your average parent can understand it, your average school lunch [worker] can understand it, and the community can figure it out and support it. I think we can do a better job of integrating a food and nutrition education into our curriculum. School lunch is a separate thing in the U.S. It’s not, “Here’s where your food comes from and here’s how it’s grown.” There are gardens in a lot of schools, but not everywhere. And it isn’t just integrated into [most students’] everyday thinking and activities.

Probably the biggest issue in the U.S. is the [larger] food environment. We are dealing with advertisements and marketing and fast food and what’s cheap and available in your neighborhood. That is surrounding every nutritional problem in the U.S., including school kids having choices, particularly adolescents. We’re not effectively addressing that and it’s causing huge, expensive problems of health and financial issues in the U.S. which largely link back to what food kids are eating.

They do a whole child’s approach in Finland. So it’s everything outdoors, indoors, exercise, sports, lunchroom, manners. The kids are involved in planning and implementing the school meal program. They have meals together. There’s respect for their different cultures and food needs and desires. They have the children and parents involved in deciding what vending machines can provide. They have them involved and testing and approving menus. It’s an integrated approach with nutrition, education, and knowledge about where their food comes from built right into it. It’s really a fabulous program and it has been going for over 100 years.

In looking at the results from these global surveys, what limitations might there be? What gaps in information did you notice?

The biggest gap we had was probably how many jobs were created by the program. There were very few countries who thought of that aspect as a job-creation mechanism for youth and for women. We have very spotty data on that.

What was the biggest standout from the last survey?

I think the number of emergencies suffered is just astounding. The pandemic was on top of those emergencies. So it’s earthquakes, floods, civil unrest, drought—anything that affects your program. Climate change is clearly there. And again, it’s usually those who need food the most who are having the biggest struggle.

“You can train thousands of teachers, but kids won’t learn if they’re hungry or malnourished.”

In both the 2021 and 2019 surveys, we put in a question about whether they had issues with waste, fraud, or abuse—corruption kinds of questions. And everybody said, “Nobody is going to answer that honestly.” But in fact, we got quite a few pretty decent answers about corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse.

We also asked a question about what good came out of the COVID pandemic. We got some fabulous answers, mostly about improved hygiene conditions at the schools. But that was another one that I thought no one would have anything good to say about it.

We have a whole new section on climate questions this time around, because it’s clearly impacting us much more than the world was tuned to.

Is there anything else that you want to make sure our readers understand?

Without the combination of good nutrition and good education, good investment in agriculture and nutrition . . . our future is stuck. You can spend all kinds of money on a school building and kids will never come if they’re hungry. You can train thousands of teachers, but kids won’t learn if they’re hungry or malnourished. School meals are a multi-sectoral investment, and it’s the three pillars of development: education, health and nutrition, and agriculture. And that means you’re investing in the pillars of development for the short term for the kids who are eating. And you’re creating a future that is healthier and more successful and productive.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Without Federal School-Meal Support, Lunch Shaming May Be Back on the Menu

Lynn Fantom — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:00:06 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

Before the pandemic, Elizabeth Santamour dreaded seeing a certain stack of envelopes once a month in her mailbox. A third-grade teacher in Scurlock, North Carolina, she was tasked with handing out past-due cafeteria bills to her students.

“The kids knew what they were taking home to their parents and the reaction they were going to get. They knew,” Santamour said. “I had kids who left them in their book bags for days. When I handed them to some kids, they’d get upset. Others would refuse breakfast or lunch because of the expense they knew they were accruing.”

Prior to the pandemic, some schools that were determined to manage school meal debt had resorted to tactics that embarrassed kids, such as stamping their hands to remind parents of unpaid bills and substituting cold cheese sandwiches for hot meals.

Students and teachers nationwide had a two-year break from this pressure when federal pandemic waivers allowed free meals for all. That was followed by a transition year of higher per-meal reimbursements funded by the Keep Kids Fed Act. But those expired in July. Now the burden of school meal debt begins again, at a time when experts are declaring a kids’ mental health crisis as a broad array of stressors, from gun violence to climate disasters, roil their world.

The Education Data Initiative pegs the annual national public school meal debt at $262 million. What’s more, after free school meals for all ended, 67 percent of schools surveyed by the School Nutrition Association (SNA) reported an increase in stigma for low-income students who often depend on those meals as a key source of nutrition.

“Schools, families, and states really did not want to go back to having the complicated school nutrition operations where some kids have access to free meals and other kids do not, and they have to struggle with unpaid debt,” said Crystal FitzSimons, the director of school and out-of-school time programs at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC).

And in a small handful of states, they haven’t gone back: Lawmakers in California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Vermont have made universally free school meals permanent. But in the rest of the country, the return to paid school meals has also brought back a host of complications.

Prior to the pandemic, some schools had resorted to tactics that embarrassed kids, such as stamping their hands to remind parents of unpaid bills and substituting cold cheese sandwiches for hot meals. Sometimes meals were thrown out in front of the children. And while experts say that fewer districts have resumed these practices—often dubbed “lunch shaming”—they haven’t gone away entirely either.

A Vicious Cycle of Debt and Stigma

In general, schools have financed breakfast and lunch programs primarily through per-meal reimbursements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). To receive those reimbursements, which vary based on family income, schools must provide meals that meet certain nutritional standards.

Children in households with incomes at or up to 130 percent of the federal poverty level can receive free meals; those whose households have incomes between 130 and 185 percent are charged 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch.

“We certainly hear from school districts with large immigrant communities that there are lots of families who are uncomfortable filling out that application, but definitely need assistance.”

School meal programs are expected to be self-sustaining, according to the SNA. Districts attempt to cover expenses with the federal reimbursements, as well as cafeteria sales from both full- and reduced-price meals. But that’s been increasingly difficult as food and labor costs have risen. Plus, “many of the families who are eligible for reduced-price meals still struggle with that copay,” noted Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the SNA.

And there’s another rub. Families must apply for federally subsidized meals if they are not automatically eligible through programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “These applications for free meal service have always been a barrier for eligible families,” Pratt-Heavner added. For example, income information and the last four digits of a social security number are required. People who don’t have a social security number must check a box declaring that fact.

“We certainly hear from school districts with large immigrant communities that there are lots of families who are uncomfortable filling out that application, but definitely need assistance,” said Pratt-Heavner. And schools need the reimbursements to help cover the cost of the meals.

Illustration by Nhatt Nichols. Click to enlarge.

The application process can be a barrier for families in several ways. Juliana Cohen, an associate professor in the department of nutrition and public health at Merrimack College and an adjunct associate professor in the department of nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said that completing the form is effectively saying, “I can’t afford to feed my child.”

“Oftentimes these forms are on a brightly colored piece of paper. They say ‘Free School Lunch Form.’ And a parent has to give it to their child to bring back to the school to hand to their teacher. So, many parents are actually reluctant to even fill out the form. Additionally, there can be stigma for the child if they feel like they’re different.”

Since the pandemic reprieve from the application system, another challenge is that many families are now confused about what’s required. If they don’t apply, debt builds.

Laura Milliken, executive director of New Hampshire Hunger Solutions, believes that confusion is one of the drivers of the fast-growing meal debt among schools in her state. “As a result, we are hearing from schools that many of them have amassed quite high school meal debt from kids who eat and then families don’t pay.”

A Flurry of State Legislative Activity and Public Sentiment

There was a wave of media coverage related to lunch shaming prior to the pandemic. And it appears to have had an impact.

“People have a very visceral reaction to those stories, they get a lot of traction, and kids often have phones in school,” which allowed them to document and share the stories themselves, said FitzSimons. After the spate of publicity, experts say the overt actions diminished.

At least 20 states also have taken action against lunch shaming with specific legislation, according to FRAC. North Dakota is among the most recent, with a law signed in April that prohibits public identification or stigmatization of students whose parents have outstanding meal debt.

But some anti-shaming bills have failed. In January, for example, a New Hampshire state representative introduced such a bill, and it was killed the following month. Another effort by legislators there—a bill to raise the income threshold for reduced price lunches from 185 percent to 300 percent of the federal poverty level—made it as far as a Senate committee, which recommended delaying a decision until next year.

And despite the gulf between states with universally free school meals and those without, it’s clear that the pandemic put a spotlight on the importance of the role of schools in feeding the nation’s children.

“There have been a lot of changes in recent years, including the recognition of the value of school meals to students’ health and academic achievement. In most schools across the country, kids, even if they don’t have money in their accounts, are getting some kind of meal,” said Pratt-Heavner of the SNA. She added that she has seen a dramatic increase in unpaid meal debt, which is an indication that kids are being fed even if they don’t have money.

“We shouldn’t encourage philanthropic solutions to policy problems. We need to address the systemic issues that make this generosity necessary.”

There have also been a number of community-wide efforts to assist families that can’t pay for their school meals. In fact, over half of school districts have received charitable donations to help pay off meal debt.

People in Michigan and Virginia have started nonprofits focused solely on relieving school meal debt. Sometimes a local foundation, small business, or church provides the funds and makes headlines. Individuals have stepped in as well.

In August, a 14-year-old in Missouri raised $400 to give to his former elementary school because he remembered not having enough money for lunch when he was there. In May, the New Hampshire family of a retired cafeteria worker who had died of cancer sold her car for $3,000 and used the money to help pay off the school’s meal debt. And at the end of last year, a former North Carolina school superintendent donated $20,000 to help pay debts owed by low-income students.

That school superintendent realized something many others probably don’t. If debt remains, it must be paid out of the school district’s general fund. “This can be the difference between being able to hire another teacher, aides, and the like for the classroom. And so, this has a profound impact on education,” said Harvard’s Cohen.

But Morgan Wittman Gramann, executive director for the North Carolina Alliance for Health, says private donations are a “temporary fix” to a recurring problem. “We shouldn’t encourage philanthropic solutions to policy problems. We need to address the systemic issues that make this generosity necessary.”

‘Vague’ and Variable School District Policies

In conversations with food service directors and parents, advocates say they’re continuing to hear about lunch shaming. “It’s still occurring, but there’s just a lot of variation,” said Cohen, who has multiple grants to examine school-based policies and is also director of the Nourish Lab.

In an effort to measure the scope of the problem, a researcher at the University of North Carolina conducted an analysis of school district meal charge policies in the state. The policies posted online by districts were “vague” and “vary in their willingness to allow meal charges, punishments, and implementation,” according to the report. Forty percent of school districts had a policy to serve those students “an alternative meal,” typically without meat to reduce the cost.

“We’ve heard stories of some school districts that have created robocalls that call the parent every single night until the debt is paid off.”

A local news station reported that when an alternative meal is served in North Carolina’s Guilford County schools, for example, the district’s executive director of school nutrition said that it “looks similar to the daily reimbursable meal to avoid identifying that student.” But the question remains: How does that alternative meal make the child feel?

Some schools in the state have also singled out students who have a balance at the end of the year. In May, a middle school in Granville County, North Carolina, surprised parents with an email warning that students with unpaid meal bills would be excluded from certain end-of-the-year school events. “It’s just an effort to try to encourage our families to help us take care of these bills so that our local taxpayers don’t have to rely on clearing this up,” the county’s associate superintendent told a local ABC affiliate.

Another tactic: robocalls. “We’ve heard stories of some school districts that have created robocalls that call the parent every single night until the debt is paid off,” said Cohen.

In some places—including Douglas County, Colorado, and Knox County, Tennessee—debt collectors are even called in.

All of this is in stark contrast to the best practices FRAC has developed on how schools should engage with households about school meal debt. The group encourages contact to be made by “trusted school officials” and warns against “harsh tactics,” such as charging households added fees and withholding school records. According to FRAC, 20 states still have no legislation addressing issues such as unpaid school meal fees and outreach programs.

Mental Health Impact

Experts agree that one of the most important reasons to provide free school meals is to reduce overall food insecurity in households, both for school children and their families. When school meals are free, resources can be shifted to meals at home.

School meals are about more than nutrition. Food insecurity affects mental health—in fact, it can cause psychological distress. A 2019 study conducted by University of California researchers explored the awareness levels and feelings of 60 San Francisco Bay Area children (aged 7 to 14 years) whose parent had reported household food insecurity during the previous year. It yielded “eye-opening and impactful” results, said Cindy Leung, the lead author.

First of all, the children knew what was going on. “They know that their parents are struggling to put food on the table. . . . They notice when their parents are eating toast or cereal and they have eggs for breakfast. They know when their SNAP or WIC benefits are coming in and that’s when they can ask for something they want at the grocery store. They know if they get free or reduced lunch,” Leung said.

Second, they experienced psychological impacts beyond stress and anxiety. Kids felt anger and frustration at not being able to have the foods they wanted, concern about their parents, loneliness because they couldn’t talk to their friends about these problems, and embarrassment about how empty their refrigerators were.

“What we’re moving into now is wanting to call this a form of toxic stress,” said Leung. That’s a label that has been given to serious adverse events, like suffering from abuse, witnessing domestic violence, or experiencing a death of a family member.

The pandemic, however, shined a light on the policy levers that can improve food security. “We saw the swiftness and efficiency with which we were able to provide food and economic support to families. It has shown that we can prevent food insecurity in children,” said Leung, who is now an assistant professor of public health nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

What Free Meals for All Feels Like

In addition to the eight states that have made universally free school meals permanent, a few states have temporary policies in place. For the 2023–2024 school year, for example, no public-school student in Nevada will have to pay for meals. And in at least 20 other states, legislators are working to pass bills to institute free school meals, according to FRAC.

“There was also a huge increase in the number of schools providing free meals to all students through the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP),” FRAC’s FitzSimons added. After experiencing the benefits of universally free school meals during the pandemic, close to 7,000 more schools adopted CEP for 2022–2023, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year.

“Not only are we providing all children nutrients, but universal free school meals reduce the stigma of who’s accessing school meals.”

CEP allows a school or district to provide free meals if 40 percent or more of children are in a program such as SNAP or a category that includes homeless, migrant, and foster care children. With CEP, family members are not subjected to the stigma of filling out applications.

Massachusetts is the most recent state to adopt universally free school meals. When Governor Maura Healey signed permanent funding for the program in August, she called it “an investment in childhood nutrition that’s also removing a source of stress from our schools and our homes.”

During the 2022–2023 school year, Massachusetts had authorized a one-year temporary extension of free school meals. Nourish Lab, directed by Cohen, surveyed parents about what would occur if the policy ended. In a surprising insight, roughly two-thirds of households near eligibility for free or reduced-price meals and one-third of middle-class households said that they may not have enough food in their homes if school meals were not free.

Cohen said this reflects federal eligibility criteria that does not take into account the “incredibly high cost of living” in many places and the fact that many so-called middle-class families are also struggling.

The Nourish Lab study also found that 42 percent of families with children eligible for free or reduced-priced meals reported their child would be less likely to eat a school meal next year if it was not free for all children.

That’s because if school meals aren’t free for all, kids associate them with subsidized food for low-income families. But when the stigma is removed, kids are no longer embarrassed to eat them, and overall meal participation increases. That dynamic has played out in case studies around the world and is now being experienced by American kids in a growing number of states.

“There is so much movement in this area,” Leung added. “Not only are we providing all children nutrients, but universal free school meals reduce the stigma of who’s accessing school meals. There’s no more lunch shaming with the cheese sandwiches. So, how can we leverage this momentum?”

The post Without Federal School-Meal Support, Lunch Shaming May Be Back on the Menu appeared first on Civil Eats.

California Leads the Way in Low-Carbon School Meals

Naoki Nitta — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 08:00:57 +0000

In 2021, Josh Goddard came across some sobering news. That year’s United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report showed that globally, meat and dairy production is responsible for fueling nearly a third of human-caused methane gas emissions.

The IPCC assessment “was pretty unforgiving,” says the director of nutrition services for Southern California’s Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD), in making “strong connections between our food systems and climate change.” Methane is a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas that scientists say has driven roughly 30 percent of Earth’s warming since pre-industrial times.

“Kids and lentils aren’t good bedfellows.” But creativity and the right investments “can make something like lentil piccadillo rather special.”

The news was “an impetus for action” for Goddard, who runs one of the state’s largest school meal programs serving upwards of 10 million lunches, breakfasts, snacks, and suppers annually with more than 80 percent of students eligible for free and reduced-priced meals.

With blessing from administrators and the community, Santa Ana schools started offering an entirely plant-based lunch menu once a week. Milk is still available daily per U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) requirement. The revised offerings, which include creative dishes such as tempeh tacos and buffalo cauliflower wraps, have helped reduce SAUSD’s climate impact, Goddard says. His EPA-guided calculations estimate a district-wide reduction in emissions by about 1,300 tons a year.

Santa Ana’s efforts, however, are not unique. Across the nation, students returning to school have found expanded plant-based options in their cafeteria offerings. But in California, an array of recent progressive school food initiatives has helped raise the bar on making lunch menus not just more climate-friendly, but healthier and more inclusive, by appealing to a greater range of dietary preferences and restrictions—as well as palettes.

“Kids and lentils aren’t good bedfellows,” says Goddard. With tight budgets and complex USDA reimbursement requirements, appeasing the palettes of 39,000 students can be a challenge. But along with creativity, ingenuity, and state support, investments in kitchen facilities, equipment, and staff training, he says, “can make something like lentil piccadillo rather special.”

Plant-Powered Progress

As school districts across the country move to a plant-forward menu approach, many have widened their offerings far beyond cheese pizzas and nut butter sandwiches. In 2022, the New York School System introduced “Plant-Powered Fridays,” serving up hot, vegan meals such as zesty chickpea stew and a bean and plantain bowl to its 1.1 million students. Lee County schools in Florida—the 32nd largest school district in the country—have been dishing up bean burger gyros and breaded tofu nuggets weekly since 2015.

At public schools in Minneapolis, “we make [plant-based dishes] a choice, every single day,” says Bertrand Weber, director of the district’s culinary and wellness services. While selections often include dairy products, they steer clear of meat analogs such as imitation chicken tenders and “bleeding vegan burgers,” he says.

Instead, offerings focus on fiber-rich, whole and minimally-processed ingredients including legumes and pulses, pea protein crumble, and soy products such as tofu and tempeh—foods that are better aligned with the nutritional guidelines of leading public health organizations.

“We want to normalize plant-based food and not stigmatize it.”

Plant-based foods are not the most popular items on the menu, Weber concedes. He estimates the “take rate” is about 10 percent—though he has seen steady growth in demand since implementing the change two years ago. In nearby Richfield, the district reports that on some days, nearly half of its students reach for the vegan choice. “Our approach is, here are the [daily] options that you have,” he says, “and one of those is always non-meat.”

Such broader selections caters to the shifting trend among Gen Z towards plant-based diets—which, despite an increase in overall U.S. meat consumption, has jumped sevenfold since 2017.

“Everybody seems to have a different reason for eating plant-based foods,” says Kayla Beyer, founder of Deeply Rooted Farms. The plant-based protein manufacturer supplies a pea crumble to schools across the country that replaces ground beef “one for one,” without changing recipes.

The product checks many boxes including environmental, health, and animal welfare concerns, says Beyer, while helping schools respond to dietary, religious, and cultural restrictions. Unlike imitation meat burgers decried by environmental advocates for their heavy carbon footprint, the shelf-stable crumble requires minimal processing and ships dry, thereby lightening transport costs and freeing up refrigerator space. The low-allergen ingredient is also certified kosher and halal, “so it has broad appeal” in an understated way, she adds. “We want to normalize plant-based food and not stigmatize it.”

Revamping the Menu

Back in California, a new report from Friends of the Earth (FOE) finds that in the state’s 25 largest school districts, lunches are increasingly leaning towards inclusivity. The study, which reviewed changes in menus from the past four years, found that more than two-thirds now serve non-meat, non-dairy entrees at least once a week—a 50 percent spike since 2019. Additionally, more than half of middle and high schools offer a plant-based option every day.

“We were astonished to see the progress, despite 2020 being such a tough year for school nutrition services,” says Nora Stewart, FOE’s California climate friendly school food manager, who led the study, noting the unprecedented challenges in staffing and supply chains during the height of the pandemic.

Stewart points to a confluence of major state initiatives that helped propel the effort, starting with the Universal Free Meals Program. Along with nine other states, California has extended federal pandemic-era benefits to offer free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of income status.

Along with ensuring equitable meal access, the state has also made significant investments in school food policy reform aimed at improving the quality and sustainability of cafeteria menus. California’s $60 million Farm to School Incubator Grant Program, a first in the country, supports districts in sourcing organic and locally grown foods.

Additionally, the Kitchen Infrastructure and Training (KIT) fund allocates $600 million to upgrade school cooking facilities and train staff to expand on-site meal preparation. And a one-time $100 million fund helps districts implement these and other nutrition- and climate impact-minded measures.

The state support is invaluable to menu transition, Stewart says. While beans and legumes are cheap, procuring and transforming plant-based ingredients into appealing meals—ones that can compete with popular options—can be a challenge, she adds. And the USDA Foods program, which provides schools with subsidized meat, dairy, and other select commodities, covers a limited range of plant-based proteins such as beans and nut butters, “so the [state] funding helps to really offset some of those costs.”

Moises Plascencia, farm to school program coordinator in Santa Ana, says that the new programs help elevate plant-forward menus to a whole new level. The support for local sourcing allows procurement from farms within a 70-mile radius, giving the district access to a greater choice of fresh produce.

With a near-90 percent Latino population, ingredients such as tomatillos, Mexican squash, and herbs resonate with students, he notes, and lets kitchen staff “provide culturally relevant foods.” And that ups the appeal of any school lunch, he adds, “because then, you’re providing folks with things they want.”

“We’re increasingly drawing the connection between food as a driver of climate change … even just a small shift [towards a plant-based diet] could have a profound impact.”

Nevertheless, the tight $5 per-meal federal reimbursement rate often hamstrings budgets. “Nutrition service directors are hugely incentivized to use their pot of money on the USDA foods program,” says FOE’s Stewart, which ultimately skews the menu towards a heavy reliance on federally subsidized animal products.

Further south in Temecula Valley, limited budgets aren’t the only deterrent to embracing a full plant-based menu, says Amanda Shears, Temecula Valley Unified School District’s (TVUSD) assistant nutrition services director, in an email. Overall demand in the 27,000-student district—where nearly a quarter qualify for free and reduced lunches—is “minimal,” she adds, so “my goal is to design menus for everyone . . . using the resources and funds available.”

All district schools offer daily vegetarian options, but most contain cheese and dairy, says Ava Cuevas, a junior at TVUSD’s Chaparral High School. And the two vegan options—the bean burger and salad bar—are served in limited quantities, so they’re “sold out in minutes,” she adds.

As an animal welfare activist, Cuevas sees plant-based diets addressing a range of concerns, including climate impact and access to healthy food. She has also experienced food insecurity in the past, so the value of school lunches is not lost on her, she says. “Knowing that I can’t rely on [it] is definitely a distraction.” She’s stepping up her advocacy this fall—though until things change, she adds, “it’s [going to be] a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

Meanwhile, Shears maintains that “making more plant-based meals available is important to me,” noting that the district is trying to ramp up scratch cooking and local sourcing of fruit and greens. Yet her department faces pressing priorities: Since the pandemic, school kitchens have been “severely understaffed,” she says, and equipment and facilities need an upgrade to better accommodate onsite food storage and preparation. The state funds, she adds, will be definitely helpful in the endeavor.

Statewide, the FOE report found that beef, cheese, and poultry together accounted for more than two-thirds of school purchases through the USDA program. Plant-based protein, on the other hand, made up just 2.5 percent of the pie, despite representing 8 percent of menu offerings. The USDA is currently considering a proposal for expanding credit options to include whole nuts, seeds, and legumes, according to an agency spokesperson contacted by Civil Eats.

Not surprisingly, cheeseburgers and ground beef entrees are among the most popular lunch selections in California schools. Yet, because of cattle’s large methane footprint, those choices result in 22 times more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than tofu noodle bowls or a plant-based wrap, Stewart notes, and account for nearly half the climate footprint of all protein served at lunch.

And while pizza and other cheese-heavy dishes have only a quarter of the impact, the relative inefficiency of cheese production—it takes almost 10 pounds of milk to make a pound of cheese—still equate to sizable emissions, along with high water and land use requirements.

“We’re increasingly drawing the connection between food as a driver of climate change,” Stewart adds. With an enrollment of nearly 6 million students in California public schools, “even just a small shift [towards a plant-based diet] could have a profound impact” in reversing the course.

Yet revamping menus to steer schools in a plant-forward direction—and for that matter, a more nutrition-minded one—requires equipping them with adequate resources, says Brandy Dreibelbis, executive director of culinary at the Chef Ann Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes whole ingredient, scratch cooking and better nutrition in schools.

Investing in kitchen facilities and culinary training for staff is key to tailoring healthier meals, Dreibelbis says, and transitioning lunches away from processed heat-and-serve foods. “Cooking from scratch gives [schools] much more flexibility in their menus,” particularly whole ingredient, plant-forward ones. And other upgrades such as larger refrigerators can boost the procurement of fresh, locally grown ingredients, helping to truncate the supply chain and create more transparent connections to the food source.

As part of a national organization, Dreibelbis has seen progress in all 50 states, but California is way ahead of the game, she says, especially with the recent flood of initiatives. “There’s so much more momentum and progress [in the state] around school food in general.”

And ultimately, schools have an influential role in shaping the eating habits of their students—and steering the course of consumption towards more climate-conscious choices.

“It’s a big opportunity to make sweeping changes to our food system right now,” says SAUSD’s Goddard. “If the federal government [runs] one of the largest feeding operations on the planet, why shouldn’t that be a venue for change?”

The post California Leads the Way in Low-Carbon School Meals appeared first on Civil Eats.

Photo Essay: How DC Central Kitchen Tackles Hunger, From Food Trucks to Training Programs

Jake Price — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 08:00:45 +0000

In late July, as the temperature and humidity rose to dangerous levels, and wildfire smoke lingered in the atmosphere, I got off the M6 Metrobus outside the Atlantic Gardens in Washington, D.C.’s Highlands neighborhood. There, a food truck was offering summer meals to students who might not otherwise have enough to eat.

The truck, emblazoned with photos of fresh fruits and vegetables, is a project of DC Central Kitchen (DCCK), the longstanding anti-hunger and job-training nonprofit. DCCK operates two mobile meal trucks, an outgrowth of the organization’s Healthy School Foods program, which began in 2010 and has evolved over time: Today, DCCK is the food service provider for 19 D.C.-area schools.

Children at these schools rely on those meals during the academic year, since they may be their only nutritious meal in a day. But when schools close for summer vacation, they lose that meal option, and their families may struggle to shoulder the added costs of feeding kids at home all summer.

“We really strongly believe that a hungry child is not learning,” explained Sami Reilly, director of contract meals and nutrition at DCCK. But once the school year ends, she adds, the students don’t just go away. “We were like, ‘We were just feeding 5,000 meals a day and now we just go to zero?’”

In response, DCCK began a summer feeding program to support students when they’re out of school. The first step was to ask the community what they needed. Among the first things they realized was just how immense the need was—especially when school is not in session: DCCK currently cooks 10,000 meals a day in the summer and is planning to expand to 25,000 in the near future.

Preparing the meals is just one aspect of the challenge—they must also make sure D.C. residents can access the meals. DCCK has eliminated the need for families to register for the meals, which does away with the potential stigma associated with receiving food assistance.

“To know that they have access to food, regardless of age or any other factors and that they don’t need to be enrolled to get access shows that it’s all-inclusive,” Reilly said.

For families that receive free school meals during the year, the added expense of providing meals and snacks during the summer can be overwhelming.

Ja’Sent Brown, the chief impact officer at DCCK and a mother herself, said that when you factor in inflation, “the cost [becomes] astronomical.”

People of all ages line up to get a fresh meal from DC Central Kitchen’s mobile meal truck. (Photo credit: Jake Price)

Although recent inflation has come close to leveling off—federal data points to a 0.4 percent increase in fresh fruit prices, and 1.1 percent increase in fresh vegetable prices in 2023—last year’s inflation, and retailers’ response to that inflation, is still impacting the price of food on grocery store shelves.

Feeding children in the summer months isn’t new, but the way DCCK engages with children and communities and how it designs its outreach is new and unique. The group has developed a broad and comprehensive set of programs to feed and build communities, while providing training and workforce experience to improve their clients’ economic independence.

In addition to the school meals program and the summer food trucks, DCCK hosts regular community outreach events and recently expanded its headquarters to serve more schools and train more chefs.

A Long Bus Ride Through Food Apartheid

On my way to meet the DCCK food truck, I took a city bus through the neighborhoods it serves in an effort to understand firsthand the challenges that Brown described. As I traveled down Wheeler Avenue, the landscape of one of D.C.’s most challenging food apartheid neighborhoods was revealed. Along the roughly 2-mile route, the bus didn’t pass a single supermarket. Instead, it made its way past a number of convenience and liquor stores offering mainly ultra-processed foods.

Pictured above is Wheeler Market, one of the few places that sell food on the city bus route I took through D.C. Unlike other similar stores in the community, Wheeler Market is a part of DCCK’s Healthy Corners program, which provides fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables to local stores that have historically lacked these foods.

Left: a Google map of supermarkets in the larger Washington, D.C., area. Right: A detail of the area East of the Anacostia, where very few grocery options exist to serve residents.

“Along a single avenue in D.C.’s wealthiest corridor, you have seven full-service grocery stores and another under construction. East of the Anacostia River, you have half that number of stores responsible for serving more than 160,000 residents,” explained Alexander Justice Moore, chief development officer for DC Central Kitchen. “This persistent disparity in access to healthy food, and the underlying factors that perpetuate it, have produced a 20-year difference in life expectancy based on which D.C. neighborhood you call home.”

In this view from the bus, the Chesapeake Big Market is the closest market to the Atlantic Garden Apartments.

“The way they structure a lot of major cities, including here in D.C., is about creating these food apartheid areas,” Brown said. “We [need to] stop saying food desert because deserts are natural. It is not natural to not have access to fresh fruits and vegetables in your own community.”

In this short interview, Ja’Sent Brown talks about building community food security, the challenges that people D.C. face with food accessibility, and how food insecurity can feed into the criminal justice system.
(Audio by Jake Price)
http://civileats.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/DCCK-JaSent-Brown-interview.mp3

Chesapeake Market is just a two-minute walk from Atlantic Gardens, but it has little to offer in terms of healthy food. The nearest supermarkets are a Giant, 2.2 miles away, and a Safeway with a wider selection but 3.8 miles away. Using public transit to reach the Safeway requires an 80-minute round trip, involving two transfers each way, on buses that arrive about every 30 minutes on weekdays.

Distance and time, which are difficult enough for working parents, are not the only obstacles. Recent increases in summer temperatures and the increase in frequency of heat waves due to climate change have also made shopping in the summer months a challenge.

An elderly man waiting on a stoop to catch the bus told me that he was raised on a farm in Virginia. “It was always hot and humid down there, but the city, with all of its concrete, has become so much worse,” he said. “The heat here in recent years isn’t like anything I’ve experienced before.”

It was 10:15 a.m. when we spoke, and the temperature was already 80 degrees, with 74 percent humidity. The mercury gradually rose throughout the day. By evening, as most parents were getting off work, it had reached 88 degrees, and it felt like 97.

Building Communities, and Economies, While Fighting Food Insecurity

Earlier this year, DCCK partnered with the Washington Nationals baseball team and the Washington Wizards basketball team to bring attention to the summer meals program. During the Wizards’ fan appreciation night, Bradley Beal, one of the team’s star players, donated $96,000 to support the program, ensuring that DCCK could continue providing nutritious meals to thousands of children throughout the summer.

Meals are distributed at Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy. Endorsement from a team the kids love makes them more likely to trust the food that is being given out.

(Photo credit: Jake Price)

As we reported last year, DCCK has opened up a new headquarters called The Michael R. Klein Center for Jobs and Justice. The expanded facility can greatly expand the number of schools they are serving by adding 12 more. The new 36,000-square-foot facility will allow them to triple their capacity, offering crucial healthy food and serving as a hub for job training, community engagement, and a social enterprise café providing on-the-job training and living wage jobs for graduates.

Left: the new DCCK headquarters. (Photo credit: Jake Price) Right: an archival photo showing the previous headquarters, which shared a building with a shelter for unhoused people. (Photo courtesy of DC Central Kitchen)

The folks at DCCK like to say that the new Klein Center has only one door: Construction workers, U.S. presidents, and students all pass through the same entrance.

(Photo credit: Jake Price)

At its core, DCCK believes that robust dialogue with the students about their preferences is as important as the ingredients themselves—and this philosophy has resonated with other organizations throughout the United States. Justice Moore said that DC Central Kitchen’s model has inspired culinary job training programs and community kitchens across the country, including FoodLink’s culinary program (New York), Second Helping (Indiana), North Texas Food Bank’s culinary program (Texas), Kitchens for Good (California), and Plus Kitchen of Purpose (Virginia).

The organization conducts student focus groups where they gather feedback about what kids want to eat most, rather than a conventional top-down approach with menus dictated solely by nutritional guidelines. When students tire of the menu options, they get the chance to propose new options—and they’re even invited into the kitchen to help cook the recipes themselves.

Involving students “builds buy-in, increases participation, and makes sure the kids are actually getting the food into their bellies,” Reilly said. As a result, they tend to be more likely to embrace new culinary experiences.

When students go home, DCCK staff say they take this curiosity and desire for better meals with them. Because the meal ideas come from within the community, DCCK’s experience suggests that the whole household is more open to trying them.

And to facilitate access to fresh ingredients that would take hours to retrieve from the far-distant Safeway, DCCK’s Healthy Corners program brings the ingredients families need for the recipes they make at school to corner stores in the neighborhood, like the Wheeler Market my bus route passed.

Through Healthy Corners, DCCK sells fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables to store owners at wholesale prices, and in smaller quantities than a conventional distributor, which allows retailers to sell them at a discount.

But even all these efforts aren’t always enough to lure people out of their homes in the dog days of summer. Sometimes delivering meals to locations where children live and play can be key to ensuring families have enough to eat.

“Neighborhood-level disparities already made it tough for many of D.C.’s kids and seniors to get the healthy food they needed, even before this summer’s extreme heat and dangerous air quality issues compounded existing challenges,” Justice Moore said. “These barriers made our efforts to bring healthy meals to accessible locations—including right to people’s front doors—even more crucial.”

(Photo credit: Jake Price)

The post Photo Essay: How DC Central Kitchen Tackles Hunger, From Food Trucks to Training Programs appeared first on Civil Eats.

For Many Kids, a Boost to Summer School Meals Is a ‘Game Changer’

Anne Marshall-Chalmers — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 08:00:34 +0000

In the northeast corner of Indiana, soybean and corn fields stretch across the landscape, separating the schools of the East Noble School Corporation by as much as 20 miles. Last summer, when interim food service director Roger Urick geared up to offer summer meals to the district’s 3,400 students, pandemic-era waivers allowing him to offer to-go meals to families had expired, forcing him to go back to the old model.

Instead of being able to offer take-away meals at several locations in the area, Urick was required to serve meals at two designated locations where kids had to come in and eat their meals on site. (In the school nutrition world, this is known as a “congregate” setting.)

Participation dropped to half of what it had been the two summers prior. “We found it was difficult for parents and kids to come to our two buildings and eat on site,” says Urick.

Before the pandemic, an estimated 6 out of 7 kids who qualified for free or reduced lunch could not access food in the summer largely due to the mandate that it be eaten on site, a problem that’s particularly acute in rural regions.

“We have known for a very long time that structural, fundamental changes were needed in the summer meals program because of barriers like transportation to meal sites,” says Carolyn Vega, associate director of policy at Share Our Strength, the nonprofit whose No Kid Hungry campaign focuses on access to summer meals. “School buses aren’t running over the summer. A lot of summer meals would be (served) outside, but there can be extreme heat or rain.”

Early in the pandemic, though, congregate anything was forbidden and restrictions around summer feeding were stripped away. Families were allowed to pick up several days’ worth of meals in the summer or even have them delivered. As a result, the number of summer meals served nationwide in July 2020 was nearly triple the number served in July 2019, according to No Kid Hungry.

In December 2022, as part of the end-of-year $1.7 trillion budget bill, Congress approved $29 billion in meal programs for low-income kids, and permanently loosened the rules around congregate feeding during the summer—a win for child nutrition advocates. But it came with a cost, as Democrats agreed to end pandemic-era SNAP “emergency allotments” a few months early. (The end to those allotments has left millions of Americans with slashed benefits.)

“We would have liked to see those allotments continue,” says Clarissa Hayes, the deputy director of school and out-of-school time programs for the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). “We never like to see one program cut to prop up another program.”

The boost in school meal funding will pay for two major changes. Starting this summer, families in rural areas will once again be allowed to pick up meals or have them delivered, if districts and community groups are available to do so. This “non-congregate” option is expected to benefit up to 8 million children living in rural areas, according to a USDA spokesperson. And come next summer, families of children who qualify for free and reduced meals at school will receive a $40 monthly grocery stipend when school is out, creating permanent summer assistance.

These two changes will “work together to end summer hunger and fill that gap that many families face,” says Hayes.

Long Overdue Option

The history of summer food service dates to the late 1960s, when the federal government provided grants to states to offer meals over break. Decades later, summer feeding programs have greatly expanded and are entrenched in many low-income and rural communities.

School districts participate in the Seamless Summer Option (SSO), which provides reimbursement for all meals delivered to kids under the age of 18. All children eat free in communities where at least 50 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), meanwhile, offers reimbursement to summer enrichment programs (such as camps and religious organizations) that offer meals in low-income areas.

Over the last few months, after the USDA greenlit “non-congregate” meal services in rural areas, most states opted to participate, and school districts, along with community groups that provide summer meals, have been busy submitting plans to whichever state agency oversees SFSP or SSO.

Vega, at Share Our Strength, says offering more flexible feeding options in rural areas is long overdue. “There aren’t a lot of community locations that [rural] kids can regularly and easily get to during the summer, much less twice a day for breakfast and lunch,” she says. “This is the level of service our rural communities have needed all along.”

In Indiana’s Noble County, where about half of the student population is eligible for free and reduced lunch, Urick says he’s “excited” to once again offer a service that should help ensure that more kids get access to meals after last year’s low participation rates.

This summer, families are able to pick up meals at seven different sites in the area, including a public library and two public housing apartment complexes. When Urick announced the change to the community, he says he was “overwhelmed” by grateful emails and calls. Though many school kitchens face staffing shortages, Urick has had no problem finding workers eager to earn some summer money preparing and delivering meals. But not all rural districts are that fortunate.

Becky Woodman, cafeteria operations manager at the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School District in Northern California, says she’s not participating in a grab-and-go or delivery option for summer feeding largely due to staffing. “We’re just not in a position to do that,” she says. “All of our cafeteria staff are 10-month employees.”

During the height of the pandemic, Woodman says, meal delivery to families was a huge challenge. The furthest delivery site was an 80-minute drive down a one-lane road. During the school year, she was able to lean on bus drivers and other district employees to help. “It took a lot of people working really hard and being creative and making things work,” she recalls. Over the summers of 2020 and 2021, though, that meal delivery service paused.

This summer, she has hired two people to serve breakfast, lunch, snacks, and supper at an elementary school located on the Hoopa Valley Reservation, where the majority of the district’s roughly 1,000 students live. The meals are included in a month-long summer school that typically only attracts about 70 students. She expects “100 percent” of those students will take advantage of the meals. And in a district in which nearly 68 percent of kids qualify for free and reduced lunch, she says many in the community will likely turn to nonprofits and other outreach programs during the summer for help with groceries and meals.

‘A Game Changer’

About a year ago, the Healthy Meals, Healthy Kids Act aimed to improve funding and support for school nutrition and reauthorize federal child nutrition programs (which advocates say is long overdue). It only made it out of the House Committee on Education and Labor. But in December, chairman Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, a Democrat from Virginia, touted one element that made it into the end-of-year spending bill—a permanent Summer EBT program. “I am grateful we will be able to make some progress toward our ultimate goal of eliminating child hunger,” Scott wrote in a statement released at the time.

Summer EBT isn’t a totally new concept. A Pandemic EBT program provided grocery benefits to families when kids missed school meals due to COVID-19 or over the summer months. Children who qualify for free or reduced-price meals were eligible for Pandemic EBT. This is the last summer that program will run, and with the end in sight, Democrats and hunger advocates pushed for a permanent Summer EBT program.

The permanent program, which will begin next summer, drastically reduces benefits. Currently, a family receives up to $450 per child for the summer. Starting next year, the benefit drops to $120 per child, or about $40 per month. Still, Hayes at FRAC says it could make a significant difference for many families. She points to a USDA report assessing a number of states that have piloted a Summer EBT program and found that both a $60 monthly stipend and a $30 monthly stipend successfully reduced food insecurity, though individuals who received $60 per month were able to access healthier food options. “So, we do know that ($40) amount can benefit families,” she says.

Share Our Strength’s Vega says that it’s unfortunate that SNAP’s emergency allotments ended early as part of the spending bill’s negotiations. But, she adds, the two changes slated for summer meals moving forward will be “a game changer” for low-income children.

The post For Many Kids, a Boost to Summer School Meals Is a ‘Game Changer’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

What Cuts to the Food Safety Net Mean for People’s Lives

Christina Cooke — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 08:01:23 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

See the related feature article about the large-scale impacts of benefits cuts.

This spring, the pandemic-era increases to benefits offered through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) ended in most states, substantially reducing the monthly dollar amounts many food-insecure households receive to buy food. Together with inflated food costs, the end of the emergency allotments—and revised work requirements for SNAP—has meant that many people across the U.S. are struggling to put food on the table.

To shed light on the problem we spoke with four people—two food-assistance recipients, a farmworker, and a school food professional—about their day-to-day realities and what the dismantling of the food safety net means for them.

Kyler Daniels, SNAP Recipient

By CHRISTINA COOKE

Kyler Daniels lives in North Carolina with her boyfriend and 4-year-old toddler, where she works for Down East Partnership for Children while completing her Master’s degree in social work. She has been receiving SNAP benefits since 2019.

When you were getting SNAP originally, what difference did that make for you and your family?

It was security for us. We started off getting about $212 or $215 each month. Then three or four months later, we started getting the maximum amount for our household because of COVID. Then we were earning about $600 total. We didn’t have to worry about meals. We didn’t have to worry about supplementing.

We could get our daughter the snacks she wanted—the fruit cups, yogurt, and applesauce. We could engage her in the shopping experience without having to worry about how much things were going to cost.

You said in April, you received $31 in SNAP benefits, and in May, you did not receive any benefits at all. What types of shopping decisions are you having to make given this decrease in support now?

Now, I go into the grocery store and try to crunch numbers. You don’t want to get up [to the register] and overspend and then have to go back and decide what to do.

At the beginning of the month, we look at what we have. . . [and] decide right then how much we’re going to take off for food after we pay the bills that need to get paid. If there is a bill we don’t have enough money for, we decide which one we will we get less penalties from—which one will work with us, which one will extend the deadline.

When I know we need it, I will [pick up shifts driving] for DoorDash. But then I’m tired all the time—when do we get to sleep?

I imagine access to healthier food is harder right now.

Yeah, definitely. Inflation has really hiked up the prices on things. Trying to get lettuce for a salad, or organic foods is higher. So, we don’t do that as often.

How does your daughter complicate the decisions that you’re making around food?

We wouldn’t eat at times to make sure that she had food—or we’d just eat noodles, something quick that we can make at the house—to make sure she can eat what she wants. She’s a picky eater. I don’t want to force her to eat something that she doesn’t like and then see her be hungry.

Are there challenges to navigating the benefit system? Did you run into any stumbling blocks?

I have never been 100 percent sure about why I received the benefits that I did. The application is not user-friendly. I am college-educated, getting a master’s degree, and there are things on there I don’t understand. For the average American, trying to get those benefits—and already being stressed out about needing them, with the negative stigma that goes along with it—is frustrating enough.

Can you describe the emotional toll on you?

Emotionally, there will be times where I would feel like a failure because we’re very low [on money], and it’s not the end of the month [so I’m not] about to get paid. It’s like, what do we do now? We’re constantly encouraging each other and ourselves to keep going. Nobody should have to deal with that on a daily basis. I feel like a bad parent for not being able to provide whatever my daughter needs, whatever she wants, especially when it comes to something as basic as food.

What would you like to see in this upcoming farm bill for SNAP and other programs that help people in need?

I would like it to be easier for people to apply [for SNAP]. If we had the revenue to give people the extra benefit during the pandemic, what is the difference now, especially if you are charging so much more for food?

There’s more that goes into needing food than what we make—I don’t think that [income] should be the first thing you look at. I moved in with my sister, so I don’t have a mortgage or a lease right now, but I’m still paying [for housing]. It’s hard to [reflect that expense] on the SNAP application.

So what do you wish that people—and lawmakers—who are in favor of cutting SNAP and other benefits programs understood about the people who use those programs?

We want the same things that they have. And not every person who needs assistance looks the same and has the same circumstances. It’s not black and white; there are areas of gray.

Adela Martinez, Farmworker

By JULIA KNOERR

Adela Martinez is a seasonal farmworker living in Immokalee, Florida—the nation’s “tomato capital.” The following responses have been translated from Spanish, and touch on many of the same themes as a longer feature on community responses to food insecurity in Immokalee that ran on Civil Eats.

Where do you and members of your community access food? How do challenges in access shape daily life?

Here in Immokalee, the [farms] primarily grow a lot of vegetables: tomatoes, chiles, cucumbers, and fruits in some areas as well. The growers bring them to a market area, and I buy food there when I don’t go to Walmart or Sam’s [Club]. Although I could buy food somewhere nearby, I [often] go further. I usually look for the place with the most affordable prices.

There are places that give out food, like vegetables, noodles, and rice. I look for food in the most affordable places because I don’t have a steady job. I’ve used coupons; I’ve used everything that I have at home so that I don’t waste anything. It’s also difficult for people who live far away from the places that donate food. Although they might want to go, sometimes they can’t drive, it’s very hot outside, or they have small children.

How has your access to food changed since the pandemic, and did changes in SNAP allowances impact you?

It’s a truly great help. There was an increase twice, and I didn’t want to spend it just anywhere. I had to look at what I bought and get what was affordable. In the small stores here, I have noticed that a single banana can cost you $1, but in Walmart, you can get lots of bananas for $1.50. [SNAP assistance] is very helpful for me. Now they don’t give as much, but it’s something.

I always try to economize what I can in every way. During the pandemic, things weren’t like they are now. Sometimes [the assistance] was enough for me to buy everything for two weeks—meat and lots of fruits and vegetables. But now, it’s not. I go to Walmart to buy what I need, and I sometimes spend $250 or $300. Sometimes I get extra things, but with this [reduction] and the lack of work here now, you don’t have the luxury of buying what you want. You think about everything: your rent, phones, and many things. Now I don’t buy anything like $250 or $300 worth of food. What they give me now [in assistance] for a month lasts me one week.

What are some potential solutions to improving food access in Immokalee?

The Cultivate Abundance community garden is a blessing for me. When I wasn’t working, we would go there to help, and they would give us herbs and other things. For me, that’s a lot, because in reality, if you go to the store, you spend $5 or $6 on herbs—for cilantro, for a cabbage. If [they were] able to do [the gardening] on a larger scale, it would be a great help for many people. The store owners take advantage of people who don’t have a car to get to more affordable stores. If there was a place that could help harvest more vegetables and fruits, that would be [helpful].

This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Tricia Kastelitz, School Food Professional

By ANNA GUTH

Tricia Kastelitz is the coordinator of nutrition and student wellness education at Suffolk City Public School District in Virginia. She is one of many in roles like hers who have had to find creative ways to feed families during difficult times.

How does food insecurity shape day-to-day life for members of your school community?

I wish more people could understand that food insecurity is a fluid situation, and it can go up and down during the month. It is also a spectrum. Sometimes, when we think about food insecurity, we only think about the students who don’t have any food at home. But there are also a lot of people in that gray range who eat every day, but maybe they can’t afford [to buy] healthy foods. Or, the kids are eating every day, but their parents are skipping meals. Or, they eat every day, but a lot of their food is coming from a food pantry or some other social service. I think it’s important to remember that those children, and families, are also food insecure.

After the federal universal meals offered during the pandemic ended, how did access to food in your district change?

We are a CEP [Community Eligibility Provision] district, which means that all our students are still eating free breakfast and lunch because of the amount of students who are “directly certified.” We actually opted into the CEP program in the middle of the pandemic, so our students and our families never really felt a difference between the universal feeding and free CEP meals we offer now. But I think making permanent universal free meals is definitely a concern on the horizon. We are a borderline district: Forty [percent] is the number to qualify for CEP. Last year, we were under 40.

As the menu planner, can you describe the challenges of shifting from remote meal deliveries back to in-person meals?

During COVID, we had to shift to mostly pre-packaged foods, mostly for safety reasons. The downside was that we became more reliant on those types of foods. Trying to make that transition back has been very challenging. Our biggest challenge right now is labor, and we are always looking to hire more people so we can begin to provide more home-cooked meals. We were really fortunate that our district chose to pay all of our [cafeteria] staff completely during the pandemic, but a lot of our older staff just decided not to come back, either because of health concerns or they had gotten used to being home.

How have recent cuts to the food safety net, following the end of the COVID public health emergency, affected your community?

The reduction in SNAP benefits often leads our families to make up that money elsewhere and to really try to find more resources. We have some close community partners—food banks and other feeding sites. I know they have [seen more demand] in the past few months. Recently, we’ve also had an uptick in people trying to go back and look at their P-EBT [Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer] benefits, [which are still available to families eligible for free or reduced-price school meals this summer]. And that makes me think that people are seeking more resources for food.

What is one thing that our readers could do to better support people in your position?

The more partners who get involved in school nutrition, and the more people who have a finger in the pot, so to speak, the better for everyone. If you feel called to help with school meals, call up your school nutrition department and see what they need. Asking the people you’re trying to help what they need is so, so important—especially in the food web, which is so different depending on where you are.

Jayson Call, Puerto Rico PAN recipient

By LINDSAY TALLEY

For all the shortcomings of SNAP, the situation in Puerto Rico poses even more challenges. The U.S. territory currently uses the Programa de Asistencia Nutricional (PAN), but many Puerto Ricans are hoping Congress will help the territory transition to SNAP instead. Jayson Call, a current PAN beneficiary, explains how this program falls short and why he thinks it’s important to improve food assistance for the people of Puerto Rico.

How did you first learn about PAN? Were you on the program growing up, or did you begin to access the benefits as an adult?

My family did use it for a little while when I was a child, before they were able to establish themselves economically and leave the program. But I went on PAN as an adult because I have a child with type 1 diabetes. I had to stop working to help him.

The application system is very complicated, and every time I submitted, they denied it. But then I found out that I could submit my son’s medical expenses and my [medical expenses], and with that they qualified me.

My son’s expenses are about $4,000 a month in medication. It’s not easy. If I go to work, I can’t make enough money to maintain the cost of living and my children’s medication. It was a tough process to apply because not even the employees who work there advise you correctly [to figure out how to present your finances to qualify for food assistance]. They said, [because I made $1 too much] I didn’t qualify. For a dollar! And if you don’t have someone to help you, you don’t know how to qualify for the program. I was looking for alternatives for months until someone told me [about] the medical expense [deduction].

How does food insecurity shape your day-to-day life, and the lives of other members of your community?

We have seen how inflation has [raised prices]. There are times when you say, “How is it possible that with $100 or $200 10 years ago, I could fill my cart?” Today with the $400 that [PAN] gives me, it doesn’t come close. And now there is a third-quality product [food that is lower quality than what is sold in the mainland U.S.] that you have to buy in order to eat the same thing you ate before. Many people, a lot of senior citizens, have even less and have to choose between buying food, personal toiletries, or medications.

What is one thing that could make a substantial difference in the lives of food-insecure Puerto Ricans?

The creation of community kitchens is really needed. A fund for the people to convert abandoned schools into community kitchens. Because, remember, communities know what is needed and how to solve things here.

Another thing that could be beneficial is more food banks. Right now there is just a single [food bank in Puerto Rico,] in Carolina, and it really can’t keep up. We need one in Ponce, one in Ceiba. It’s not like in the United States, where many of the churches have food banks.

How have recent events, from the hurricane to the earthquakes to the pandemic, affected access to food?

The PAN benefit card [system] depends on electricity. If there is no electricity, you cannot buy anything. And that affected us a lot when Hurricane María hit. If the electricity was out, the system was completely down. Useless. Also, if for any reason the port of Puerto Rico is affected, there is no [way to get food onto the island, which imports about 85 percent of what it consumes].

What can our readers do to better support and help people in your position?

Any organizations or individuals that are able to send funds to Puerto Rico could partner with local organizations and individuals in order to recuperate some of the abandoned schools (of which there are many) and turn them into community kitchens.

These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The post What Cuts to the Food Safety Net Mean for People’s Lives appeared first on Civil Eats.