For Whitney Jackson and her four children, not knowing if her family will receive federal food assistance next month means trying “to make the most of a smaller meal so we can save the food stamps.”
Jackson, a single mother from Columbia working as a certified medical assistant, said she has $44 of her family’s October benefits left.
“I’m trying to stretch it until the end of the month,” she said, “but is $44 going to make it until November, when we don’t know what’s going to happen?”
As Congress remains deadlocked on a plan to fund the federal government, and families who rely on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program wait, food pantries across Missouri are confronting how to make up for the potential loss of a key pillar of food security in their communities.
“We rely on families getting food stamps,” said Andrew Diemer, executive director of the St. Augustine Wellston Center in St. Louis County. “We’re just there to make a couple of the hard questions go away…. When families might not even have the money to buy food for the rest of the month, I don’t know. If this continues, fundamentally the role of our food pantry has changed.”
The Missouri Department of Social Services, which disburses SNAP benefits in the state, announced Oct. 20 it won’t be able to pay benefits until further notice, after USDA informed states that funding would run out.
Approximately 650,000 Missourians receive SNAP benefits.
Four days later, the USDA said it couldn’t legally shift contingency funds to sustain SNAP, despite an earlier USDA shutdown plan indicating that was the department’s intention. USDA last month transferred $300 million into its Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, from an account funded partly by tariff revenue to keep that program running.
Food pantry directors said they are already seeing heightened demand, from families of furloughed or laid off federal workers, SNAP users trying to stock up in case their benefits pause and those struggling to cope with rising food prices.
Suzanne Wilber, executive director of Good Samaritan of the Ozarks in Pulaski County, said the group gave out 125 bags of food during its monthly mobile distribution to food insecure students at Ozarks Technical College on Thursday. It’s typical to distribute 30 to 35 bags of food per month, Wilber said.
“Some federal employees are getting paid and some are not here,” Wilber said. “We have had a number of folks last week come that had not come before. And again, we’re just expecting that to increase.”
Beginning Nov. 12, Wilber said the food pantry will be open later on Wednesdays, from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m., to accommodate people who work or have limited transportation. The food pantry is currently open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
In the St. Louis area, the federal shutdown and potential suspension of SNAP is compounding heightened need from tornadoes earlier this year and a strike of Boeing workers that has lasted almost three months.
Angela Gabel, executive director of Ritenour Co-Care Food Pantry in Overland, one of the largest pantries in St. Louis County, said she doesn’t know how food pantries will be able to take the place of SNAP.
“It’s like we were invited to Thanksgiving dinner and asked to bring a side dish, and now all of a sudden the cooks quit, and we have to make a whole meal,” Gabel said.
On Wednesday alone, the food pantry served 185 families, Gabel said, and registered 25 new families. The pantry is preparing to increase the number of volunteers signing up new clients and helping them shop the pantry’s shelves.
“Another part of the plan that we haven’t worked out,” Gabel said, “is how are we going to manage inventory for all of these new faces that are likely to appear because all of a sudden, they have no food budget?”
Patrick McKelvey, executive director of Gateway Food Pantry in Arnold, said the pantry served a record 135 families Thursday. The previous daily record was 122 families in September — double the number of families the food pantry was serving on a typical distribution day two years ago, McKelvey said. The pantry signed up 40 new families in a recent week.
“We are setting new records every day, month, week, quarter,” he said.
McKelvey said the food pantry’s support from its largest food source is down $300,000 from January to September.
“In the past week, I’ve spent $10,000 just to shutdown-proof my pantry,” McKelvey said.
The pantry is likely to open extended hours and extra days to meet demand, McKelvey said.
Food banks throughout the state source food from an array of retailers, private donations, federal programs and their own purchases.
“We try not to put all of our eggs in one basket,” said Katie Adkins, chief communications officer at the Food Bank for Central & Northeast Missouri in Columbia.
The food bank, one of six members of the statewide coalition Feeding Missouri, turns around about two million pounds of food every two weeks, Adkins said.
Adkins said that although the food bank receives strong community support, resources are finite.
“We can continue to try to use those other avenues of food sourcing to grow what we have,” Adkins said, “but when you have a specific amount, and you’re serving more people, that could mean that people are taking home less when they’re seeking help.”
Several St. Louis area food pantries have formed a coalition of their own, said Diemer, director of the Wellston Center.
McKelvey said St. Louis area food banks are sharing information on the cheapest places to buy food items and planning to exchange supplies to allow variety for clients. They’ve started to pool bulk food orders in order to split shipping costs.
“That is new,” McKelvey said. “That is basically in direct response to the food crisis we’ve seen since the beginning of the year.”
McKelvey said people receiving food have been expressing frustrations about the federal lawmakers’ lack of a plan to end the shutdown or fund SNAP.
“There are people making decisions about their lives hundreds of miles away in Washington, D.C., and [they’re saying] how can we tell them how badly we need it?” McKelvey said.
Jackson, the single mother from Columbia, said she has been trying not to worry, “because it just causes stress and anxiety for my family.”
“But it’s just me and my four kids,” she said, “so how can you not?”
