Florida’s hungry are about to get hungrier. This month, those who depend on food stamps got a little less to spend and members of Congress are discussing a plan that could cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, even further. Meanwhile, charities and food pantries say they’re already stretched to the max and can’t fill the gap SNAP is leaving.
It’s just after midnight on the first day of November and for Beverly Gonzalez that means it’s time to go grocery shopping.
Gonzalez depends on food stamps and she’s just received the money she’s entitled to for the next 30 days. But Gonzalez, like other SNAP users, is forced to try to do more with less.
Gonzalez’s benefits are smaller because a stimulus bill that had increased SNAP funding expired at the end of October and Congress has not passed a farm bill giving more money to the program. For Gonzalez, that made a big difference for her in the checkout line, where she’d picked out more goods than she had money for.
“Because I had to buy less of meat and I was putting stuff back, but the young lady behind me paid for it,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez says without that help from a stranger, she wouldn’t have been able to afford all the food she needed. A spokeswoman with the Florida Department of Children and Families says the benefits reduction will affect 3.6 million Floridians. The typical four-person benefits-receiving family will get about 36 fewer dollars each month. And Food Research and Action Center President Jim Weill says a second cut is possible as members of Congress work out the details on the farm bill. Weill says the U.S. House version of the bill would cut about 40-billion dollars from the program.
“If all that happens, and people in Congress say food banks and religious organizations can pick up the slack, they’re saying you’d have to triple your food donations per year,” Weill said.
Second Harvest of the Big Bend Executive Director Rich English says he doesn’t see that happening.
“We can’t. It’s not possible,” English said.
Second Harvest is not actually a food pantry, meaning someone who is hungry can’t go there to get food. Instead, the organization collects food and distributes it to partner organizations and food pantries in 11 surrounding counties. English says that food comes from a lot of different sources.
“This is food we got from the government. And we have specific agencies, partner agencies that are U.S.D.A partner agencies that are U.S.D.A recipient agencies. There are a lot more stringent guidelines in how you handle it and everything. So, that’s why some partner agencies don’t get U.S.D.A. And then we have purchased products, we have donated products,” English said.
English says organizations like his don’t get enough food through donations, so they end up buying food to make ends meet. In the Second Harvest warehouse some shelves are full of shrink-wrapped pallets stacked with canned fruits or vegetables, and some entire walls of shelves are empty.
“You know, our food levels right now are low and that’s why we’re really, really pushing, because this is not a good time to be low on food. The holidays are coming up. We have the SNAP benefit reductions. Normally these shelves will be full and they’re not. And you know, we just purchased a load of food, last week and it will last us probably three weeks and we’ll be bringing in another truck load of food,” English said.
English says it costs about 10-thousand dollars a week to meet the Big Bend area’s current food need. And he says as SNAP cuts go into effect that’ll increase. One solution, he says, it to ask people to donate money instead of food, since he says organizations like his can often get better deals. But English says paying the cost to distribute the increased amount of food, even if it comes, is still better than the alternative -- people going hungry.
