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

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

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

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

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.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/06/14/the-struggle-for-food-sovereignty-in-immokalee-florida/ Wed, 14 Jun 2023 08:00:55 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=52181 Although Vasquez handled food every day for work, she couldn’t afford to buy groceries. Instead, she began exchanging food with friends and learning about Immokalee’s community-based resources through word of mouth. Immokalee is known as the tomato capital of the United States, yet 28 percent of the town’s 24,500 residents—the majority migrant farmworkers from Central […]

The post The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Immokalee, Florida appeared first on Civil Eats.

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After leaving three children in Guatemala, Maria Vasquez spent 15 years working in the agricultural industry in Immokalee, Florida. She worked in the fields for three years picking jalapeños, watermelons, cucumbers, melons, tomatoes, and pumpkins before spending 12 years processing tomatoes in a warehouse.

Although Vasquez handled food every day for work, she couldn’t afford to buy groceries. Instead, she began exchanging food with friends and learning about Immokalee’s community-based resources through word of mouth.

Immokalee is known as the tomato capital of the United States, yet 28 percent of the town’s 24,500 residents—the majority migrant farmworkers from Central America, Mexico, and Haiti—live below the federal poverty line and without easy access to healthy foods. This poverty rate is more than double the statewide average, and it’s compounded by higher-than-average food prices, a housing crisis, and minimal public transportation options.

A volunteer distributes bags of free food at the Meals of Hope weekly Thursday distribution at Immokalee’s Farmworker Village. (Photo credit: Julia Knoerr)

To face these challenges, Vasquez connected with local organizations committed to mutual aid and self-reliance. She began attending meal distribution events at Misión Peniel, a ministry of Peace River Presbytery that supports the Immokalee farmworker community, and joined the mission’s women’s group to build connections.

When she gave birth to a son with Down syndrome in 2015, she gave up the demanding hours of agricultural work to care for him and began providing cleaning services for the mission. She volunteered at the community garden behind the building run by Cultivate Abundance, an organization that addresses food insecurity and livelihood challenges in low-income, migrant farmworker communities, until the group hired her on as a garden aid.

Like Vasquez, many in this tight-knit community have found strategies for collaborative resilience as the pandemic and Hurricane Ian have made food access even more challenging in recent years.

A combination of informal mutual aid networks, small-scale farms, foraging, and donated meals from local organizations such as Misión Peniel and Meals of Hope keep the community nourished. Additionally, Cultivate Abundance is growing crops such as amaranth, Haitian basket vine, and chaya (a nutritious shrub native to the Yucatan peninsula) to move beyond charity and equip community members with culturally relevant, locally recognized produce.

These efforts not only bolster food security, but they also support the community’s autonomy to grow their own food and engage in collective healing. While many Immokalee residents report that they practice grueling labor each day and have experienced xenophobia, sexual violence, and rent gouging in their recent pasts, the garden behind Misión Peniel offers a safe space for community members to speak their own languages, share memories from their home countries, practice meditation, and return to their ancestral cultural knowledge to grow their own food as stewards of the land.

One of Cultivate Abundance’s community gardens sits behind Misión Peniel and has helped the organization produce over 59 tons of produce since beginning operations in 2018. (Photo credit: Julia Knoerr)

Food and Housing Insecurity in Immokalee

Immokalee’s Main Street boasts a few blocks of small markets featuring products from the community’s predominant Mexican, Guatemalan, and Haitian diasporas, as well as money-transfer services for migrants to send money home. Old school buses transporting farmworkers to work pull into the parking lot of La Fiesta supermarket, a key intersection in town bordering on the land owned and occupied by Misión Peniel and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a high-profile farmworker advocacy group.

Here, wild chickens cluck at all hours of the day, their chorus mixing with broadcasting from Radio Conciencia 107.7, the CIW’s community radio station. Green space is scarce, and beyond the town’s center, sidewalks fade into neighborhoods of run-down trailers and busy roads lined with fast food restaurants.

Though Immokalee sits just 30 miles from Naples, one of the wealthiest cities in Florida, wages remain a primary barrier to residents’ adequate food access. The most recent Census found an average per-capita annual income of $16,380 in Immokalee between 2017-2021. Nearly 39 percent of the town’s population was born outside of the U.S., and the number of farmworkers varies based on the season; some sources estimate that as many as 15,000–20,000 migrant seasonal farmworkers typically live in the area.

In the winter months, the majority of those workers are there to pick tomatoes. From 1980 to 2009, farmworkers received 50 cents per bucket picked rather than a guaranteed minimum wage, meaning they had to harvest at least 150 buckets per day to make enough income.

Cultivate Abundance’s banana circle offers different varieties of banans and plaintains. (Photo credit: Julia Knoerr)

CIW’s Fair Food Program, which began in 2010 to create a fairer food industry for workers, farmers, buyers, and consumers, improved those conditions. The program is known nationally as a model for providing farmworkers with human rights, and requiring that growers selling to participating buyers (such as McDonalds, Walmart, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s) clock workers’ time and pay them minimum wage (currently $11 per hour in Florida), as required by federal law. Participating buyers also agree to pay at least a penny more per pound of tomatoes they buy, translating to a bonus that gets split among qualifying workers.

However, not all buyers participate in the Fair Food Program. The CIW has called for Publix, Kroger, and Wendy’s to join the Fair Food Program, but so far, they have refused. Julia Perkins, education coordinator for the CIW, says even with these gains, many workers struggle to feed themselves. Agricultural work is inconsistent, and an individual’s income will vary greatly by season.

“When there is a lot of picking to be done, when it’s not raining a lot, [if] it’s the first pick, you can do pretty well for a number of weeks,” Perkins says. “[But] not well enough to feed you for the rest of the year.”

The pandemic exacerbated farmworkers’ struggle for adequate income. The market for wholesale crops declined because industries like cruises, hotels, and restaurants shut down, lowering the prices of commodities and increasing grocery store prices.

Farmworkers experienced the brunt of the economic downturn—lower demand for the crops they picked meant fewer jobs, and inflation limited their wages’ reach. If farmworkers fell sick with the virus and couldn’t go to work, they received no pay, and as they remained essential workers, they couldn’t shelter in place.

Furthermore, many Immokalee residents are undocumented, meaning they didn’t qualify for federal stimulus checks under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), nor have they received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to help them purchase food.

Beyond wages, housing often demands 60 percent of Immokalee residents’ income, according to Arol Buntzman, chairman of the Immokalee Fair Housing Coalition. The same five or six families have owned the majority of Immokalee properties for years and charge weekly rent for each individual, including small children, living in 50-year-old trailers. Multiple families and strangers often share rooms.

In September 2022, Hurricane Ian further increased the cost of rent. Intensifying the already severe housing shortage, Hurricane Ian destroyed housing in Naples and Fort Myers, leading some residents of those towns to move to Immokalee and outbid farmworkers, which Buntzman says in turn raised rents even more.

Feeding Farmworker Families

To address these growing needs, nonprofit and religious organizations have been providing fundamental support through basic health and food services.

Julyvette Pacheco, office manager at the food security organization Meals of Hope, saw need increase in the wake of Hurricane Ian, compounded by inflation. Her organization used to feed 200 families in Immokalee every week, but after the hurricane, that number rose to 350.

“Something we have been noticing since the hurricane,” Pachecho says, “is that people are not patient. When they come here, most of them are struggling. They need food, they have been waiting.”

Meanwhile, Cultivate Abundance addresses food insecurity by growing produce reflective of migrants’ foodways and empowering them with skills to grow their own. The main garden behind Misión Peniel is one-tenth of an acre and has produced more than 59 tons of fruit and vegetables since its start in 2018.

During the garden’s inception, members of the mission’s women’s group contributed to a participatory decision-making process about the type of produce they valued, and community members can now volunteer in the garden in exchange for produce to take home. Whether through their families or professional lives, staff members share connection to the agricultural industry and have built partnership with other local farms and gardens.

Lupita Vasquez-Reyes, Cultivate Abundance’s community garden and outreach manager, grew up in Immokalee as the daughter of migrant farmworkers from Mexico. After 20 years away, she returned in 2019, just one year after the garden started in collaboration with Misión Peniel. Vasquez-Reyes says the group has worked to build intentional solidarity with an intersectional approach to diversity in the garden. The beds now boast a wide variety of medicinal herbs and produce, including edible weeds like yerba mora that many would discard.