IDAHO FALLS, Idaho - Food banks have seen increased need since pandemic-related food benefits expired in Idaho. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare decided not to extend SNAP Emergency Allotments in the state, which were designed to increase benefits to the lowest-income households during the pandemic shutdown.

Ariel Jackson, executive director of the Community Food Basket in Idaho Falls, said numbers went down after the expanded benefits went into effect last year. But this announcement has reversed that trend, and she saw the first signs of it posted on Facebook.

"People were panicking because they had received a letter and they weren't going to be getting this extra allotment anymore, and they didn't know what they were going to do," she said. "Within days of that, our numbers at our food bank spiked back up. We were seeing 20 to 30 families a day - and now, we're back up to 60 a day."

Jackson said her colleagues in food banks across the state have seen similar increases. The enhanced benefits stopped at the end of April. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 42,000 Idaho households received SNAP emergency allotments in March.

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare did not respond to a request for comment.

Idaho has announced that additional unemployment benefits from the federal government also will end in the state in mid-June, and the federal eviction moratorium is set to expire at the end of June. Jackson said she thinks the combination could mean a "benefits cliff" for some people, who either have struggled to find jobs or haven't returned to work because of health concerns.

"One of the biggest concerns that food banks have," she said, "is that these programs will all end at relatively the same time - and we'll feel it here. People won't know what to do."

Jackson said she believes families didn't have enough time to cope with the SNAP benefits change. She said she's also concerned about what will happen over the summer, when kids are out of school and don't have access to school meals.

"We know the programs are going to end - I mean, they just were never intended to go forever," she said. "And so, anything we can do to help our families adjust to the changes that are coming - if that's getting information sooner or being able to help them navigate through some of that stuff - that's what we want to do."

Jackson said food banks across Idaho are in need of volunteers and donations.

By Gabriella Sotelo for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Sentient/Just and Climate-Friendly Food System-Public News Service Collaboration

For the past four decades or so, the Florin farmers market has been a source for affordable produce for many living in the small Sacramento, California suburb. According to Sam Greenlee, executive director of the Sacramento-based food justice group Alchemist CDC, the market’s vendors take steps to meet the needs of the community. “They tend to set their prices a little bit lower here than at other markets,” Greenlee tells Sentient.

Of the 196,524 households in Sacramento, around 40 percent rely at least in part on California’s food assistance program.

Helping communities eat more plants has many benefits — health and food justice among them — but it’s also good for the climate. Food production accounts for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to Brent Kim, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, the largest source of these food-related emissions comes from the farm itself, not food miles. “What we eat and how it was produced matter more for the climate than how far it travels.” Eating a plant-based diet, even for just one day a week, can have a greater positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions than eating local food every day, Kim says.

While the largest source of food-related emissions stems from meat made from methane-belching ruminant animals, namely beef and lamb, successful grassroots initiatives, like community gardens and farmers markets, play an important role when they help shift what people eat. Local programs encourage sustainable and healthy food choices, but also offer a path for addressing challenges important to each community.

Elizabeth Bowman, former executive director at Food Access LA, sees these local efforts as part of a broader vision for sustainable food that includes, but also goes beyond, greenhouse gas emissions.

“To me, sustainability is very holistic, bottom up, top down, and allows people to have access to healthy foods without barriers,” Bowman says. Transparency and food sovereignty are two very important goals in the work. And that means, Bowman adds, making food choices from the “soil up” — starting with healthy soil but also thinking about whether farm workers have good working conditions.

Bowman’s work with Avenue 33, a small hillside farm in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, illustrates this approach. Avenue 33 partners with Los Angeles Leadership Academy (LALA) to operate LALA Farm, which offers opportunities to zero in on different aspects of food systems. Classes held on the farm include hands-on topics like composting and its climate impacts to science students learning about photosynthesis. Lessons also include the history of agriculture, the farm labor movement and how farming practices of some Indigenous populations compare to contemporary farming.

Both Avenue 33 and LALA farms provide fresh produce to farmers markets that are EBT-authorized (an electronic system that enables people to use government assistance dollars for food purchases) as well as a free weekly food distribution at a nearby school. Food grown on the LALA farm, like tomatoes and peppers, are added weekly to the high school’s salad bar, sometimes alongside a nutrition lesson. 

California supplies nearly half of the fruits and vegetables eaten in the United States. Yet a significant portion of the population, around 8.8 million Californians, face food insecurity. The issue is not only economic — though affordability is a key factor — but also one of access, rooted in land-use policies. These policies have contributed to a disparity in food access, with larger supermarkets concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods. This is known as “supermarket redlining,” and forces people to rely on convenience stores or fast food outlets as their main source of food. A 2008 study found that individuals without access to supermarkets were 25 to 46 percent less likely to maintain a healthy diet.

Farmers markets, supported by federal, state and private food assistance programs, are helping to bridge the gap by offering a direct distribution model. While there are systemic abuses that stem from a system of “food apartheid,” these programs are at least an effort to get more produce at competitive prices in markets close to food insecure communities, at prices lower than those in chain grocery stores. 

A 2021 study highlighted the role farmers markets can play in reducing food insecurity, noting that by 2019, around 50 percent of farmers markets accepted some form of federal food assistance. Access alone does not address all of the challenges associated with dietary change, programs like California’s Market Match, where EBT value is doubled, can help improve the affordability of fresh, local food. The Florin market has become one of the top 10 EBT markets in the country, with around $300,000 in EBT and Market Match funds spent in 2023. 

“Neighborhoods that lack access to fresh produce have an abundance of fast food and heavily processed foods,” Bowman writes, yet “communities are responsive when fresh produce is simply made available and especially when incentivized with programs like Market Match.”

“I think that when people have access to fresh produce, they will buy it,” Bowman told Sentient in an email. There are many reasons they might make a change in what they eat. “In general, fresh produce is less expensive than meat products, so there is evident economic value there,” writes Bowman. 

Earlier this year, budget cuts in California threatened the program’s success when California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a $37.8 billion cut to the state budget. The threat was averted after advocacy groups, including Alchemist CDC, were able to persuade Newsom to preserve the program’s full $35 million budget. 

There are other challenges however, says Kim Bowman, who worked on food security for decades in Southern California. “Accessing healthy food in Los Angeles can be really challenging. While grassroots initiatives are making strides, there is a lack of infrastructure to support these efforts comprehensively.” 

Bowman stresses the need for policies that not only help younger generations enter agriculture by making land acquisition easier, but also support farmers adopting regenerative practices. Subsidies for such practices could help reduce reliance on synthetic chemicals and build a more sustainable agricultural sector. However, these efforts must be paired with broader systemic changes. This can mean subsidies for farmers like Bowman mentions, or in other cases, could mean changing livestock productivity.

“Ultimately there’s no one silver bullet recipe for a sustainable food system — and we benefit from a diversity of different scales, including local, regional and, sometimes, national or international,” according Johns Hopkins’s Brent Kim. “The important thing is approaching what we grow, how we grow it, and what we eat with an eye toward kindness, conservation and equity.”


Gabriella Sotelo wrote this article for Sentient. If you have a climate solution story you'd like to share, you can do that through Project Drawdown's Global Solutions Diary.


get more stories like this via email

Foodborne illnesses from meat and poultry products kill thousands of people a year and a new report from the Government Accountability Office offers ways Virginians and others can cut down on illnesses.

The report found federal food inspectors face two main challenges to reduce pathogens in meat and poultry: developing standards as the industry changes for pathogens and limited oversight outside the slaughterhouses and processing plants. Some advocates said it is not much different from past reports.

Jaydee Hanson, policy director at the Center for Food Safety, said the recommendations are essentially the same as previous reports to the Department of Agriculture.

"The big challenge is that the GAO has been giving advice to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for a number of years now, that they need to -- pardon the pun -- literally clean up their act and make sure that they are doing their job to make our food safe," Hanson emphasized.

More than 18,000 Virginians are employed in the poultry industry, and contributes to more than $12 billion in economic activity in the Commonwealth.

The Government Accountability Office said federal oversight of food safety has been on its high-risk list since 2007. The list comprises programs and operations vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement.

Hanson explained part of the issue stems from concentrated feeding operations.

"When we crowd beef and pork and chickens into these concentrated feeding operations, it's just like taking the kids into kindergarten for the first time. They all get sick," Hanson stressed. "The difference is, when our kids get sick, we take them home until they're well. When animals get sick, they get butchered."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported nearly 3,000 people die from foodborne illnesses each year.


get more stories like this via email

Mississippi families struggling with food insecurity are bracing for another difficult summer after state officials declined millions in federal funding meant to help feed low-income children during school break.

The decision affects more than 324,000 children statewide and leaves families with fewer resources at a time when school meal programs are unavailable.

Sarah Stripp, director of socioeconomic well-being for the nonprofit Springboard Opportunities, works with families in federally subsidized housing and said the rejection of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Summer EBT program puts additional strain on struggling households.

"We know that many of our families struggle to be able to provide food for their families during the summer when they are not receiving those meals during the school year, which affects their ability to be able to do any of the things they want to do," Stripp explained. "If they're hungry, their children are hungry. That limits what they are able to do."

Gov. Tate Reeves cited a desire to reject "attempts to expand the welfare state" as the primary reason for opting out. Under the Summer EBT program, eligible families would receive $40 per month per school-aged child, amounting to $120 per child for the summer in grocery benefits.

Springboard Opportunities is stepping in to provide cash assistance to Jackson families living in federally subsidized housing but the organization can only reach a fraction of those in need. Stripp pointed out without federal aid, families are forced to redirect money from other essential expenses, such as gas and child care, to afford groceries.

"To not be willing to take federal funding that would go directly to families, that would be spent at local grocery stores, at farmers markets, to prevent summer food insecurities," Stripp observed. "To me, it's a baffling choice."

Stripp called on policymakers to listen to families' real struggles rather than rely on outdated narratives about poverty. While some school districts and community groups provide summer meal programs, many families in rural areas lack access to these resources due to transportation barriers and program limitations.


get more stories like this via email