While the Dow Jones hits records, surpassing 30,000 points and covering the pockets of the nation’s richest, Greg Meyer of Soldotna, Alaska, is trying to figure out how to feed his community.
Meyer, the executive director of the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank in south-central Alaska, ensures that people in one of the country’s most difficult-to-reach regions have enough food on the table. Alaskan residents, already in a budget crisis, were hit hard by Covid-19: oil prices plummeted, the Canadian border closed, tourism fell, seasonal fishing was complicated by travel restrictions and cruise ships were not they lined up more on the coasts of the state – not to mention the growing number of cases. Demand for food assistance on the Kenai Peninsula has become impossible to meet.
Aid came in the form of the Department of Agriculture’s Farmers to Families Food Box program.
As part of the $ 19 billion Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, the Department of Agriculture announced in April that it would establish partnerships between food banks and food distributors, whose workforces have been “significantly impacted by the closure of many restaurants, hotels and other food service entities. “Through the partnerships, the Department of Agriculture has supplied boxes of fresh produce, dairy products and meats to food banks like Meyer’s, ready to meet growing demand.
The boxes were a hit, giving people on the Kenai Peninsula and elsewhere access to food of quality and quantity previously inaccessible. The Department of Agriculture ran four rounds of the program from April to December and delivered more than 110 million boxes across the country.
Despite some logistical challenges, boxes filled with high quality food cut the middleman, facilitating delivery and keeping the products fresher, while providing the necessary relief to food banks, whose demand soared when Covid-19 moved up. spread to all corners of the country. Distributors and charities said the program was effective. The people who received the boxes were satisfied with the product. But the final round of the program ends in 2020 and it is unclear whether it will continue in 2021.
“This has been a very exciting week for our community,” said Meyer. “We are informing everyone that this is the last time that we have the boxes and that people do not know what to do.”
In October 2019, the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank distributed 80,670 pounds of food. In October 2020, the number tripled, to 242,479 pounds – 112,500 of those pounds came from the Family Farmers boxes.
A Department of Agriculture spokesman said that “with the 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act becoming law, the Department of Agriculture is evaluating all funding opportunities for food purchases.” The spokesman did not comment specifically on the future of the program.
In Kenai, boxes provided not only a crucial amount of food, but also a quality that most people had never seen before. Transport, Meyer said, often gets in the way of obtaining fresh food for needy families in Alaska, where the growing season is incredibly short. Seward Highway, which winds around the peninsula, is more aptly described as a two-lane road. A winter storm can bury the road in a meter of snow in just a few hours, and cuts in the plowing schedule mean residents can be isolated from Anchorage, where most of the food is distributed. In addition, cuts in ferries have led to fewer boats arriving, and if a boat has a mechanical problem or is temporarily out of service due to exposure to Covid-19, food may not arrive. Winter makes expensive air travel even more difficult.
A gallon of milk can cost $ 12 on the Kenai Peninsula. In winter, residents are lucky to get products with a longer shelf life, such as potatoes or cabbage.
Recently, a rock that fell from an avalanche hit the truck that Kenai Food Bank uses to deliver groceries while it was en route to residents in remote villages. The windshield was broken, the Department of Agriculture’s truckload of food crates was in need of repair, and Alaskan officials at Meyer were hungry. People in Meyer’s line of work have enough challenges; the possible disappearance of the program adds another.
In Nebraska, Brian Barks, CEO of Food Bank for the Heartland, expects the program to continue.
“I really hope that our leaders in Washington look at this program and the benefits it has brought and consider taking it forward,” he said.
Its food bank, which serves most of Nebraska and parts of western Iowa, would spend about $ 80,000 a month on food before the pandemic. For January to June 2021, he has a budget of $ 1.5 million per month. The need is high, and it is not diminishing.
“Food security usually lags behind an economic recovery,” said Barks. “We will see an increase in demand for a significant period of time.”
Banco Alimentar do Coração prepared for the end of the program and secured sufficient funding through community and state support to essentially recreate the Small-scale Farmers for Families program. But the quality of the product provided by the Department of Agriculture program is difficult to match, said Barks.
Food banks typically guarantee what Barks said you could call “seconds” – foods that are good to eat, but not “level A products”. These boxes, straight from the producers, were level A, he said.
“People who are in a position who need food assistance, especially those who navigate it for the first time, need to show that they are important and that they deserve to receive high quality food like everyone else,” he said.
Ginette Bott, president and CEO of Utah Food Bank, expects the program to continue, but says the organization is preparing to live without it.
“It would be incredible if that happened, but we don’t have it,” she said. “The families around us who have been affected by the pandemic are not going to recover on New Year’s Day.”
Utah Food Bank, said Bott, is looking for long-term sustainability plans as it hopes to maintain record levels.
On the Kenai Peninsula, the possible end of the program adds another layer of darkness to Alaska’s harsh winters.
“Our community is generous, but there is no way to duplicate the program,” said Meyer.
The people who received the boxes thanked him very much, thrilled to see fresh vegetables and milk with a long shelf life that did not need to freeze.
“At the beginning of the year, we bought lettuce,” said Meyer, “which is a great pleasure here.”