Sara Busse was tasked with preparing a hot meal for 40 struggling seniors. She had committed to providing a main dish, a starch, a vegetable, fruit, and dessert.
Previously, she had sourced many of these ingredients at no cost from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
However, this time she only had dried cranberries, crackers, and vegetable soup.
“What am I supposed to do?” she questioned. “What can I possibly cook?”
This situation has increased the strain on charitable organizations that provide groceries or meals, forcing them to exhaust their reserves and seek donations to replace the lost food supplies.
Ms. Busse’s organization, Trinity’s Table, located near the West Virginia Capitol, exemplifies this struggle. It serves meals at a senior center, a child-care facility, and a women’s shelter, catering to people living in or near poverty. For many clients, Ms. Busse noted, these meals might be the most substantial they receive during the week — and possibly their only meal for the day.
In recent months, Ms. Busse had already spent $10,000 — a third of her organization’s funds — to keep the meals going, replacing what the government had previously provided.
She expressed feeling trapped in a bleak reality cooking competition, challenged to convert diminishing federal aid into 600 meals a week for as long as possible.
“It feels like being on ‘Chopped’ every week,” Ms. Busse remarked, as another volunteer opened cans of vegetable soup. It was 10 a.m., just two hours before the seniors would eat. “We receive unusual items, and we have to turn them into a meal.”
The Agriculture Department began its support for food banks in the 1980s, establishing a program that achieved two objectives: providing nutritional food to those in need while stabilizing prices for U.S. farmers by purchasing their products and distributing them.
During his first term, President Trump opted not to reduce this aid and instead significantly increased it to manage farm surpluses resulting from trade disputes and the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Spending on food assistance surged to $3 billion in 2020.
However, this time, the Trump administration took a different approach. It canceled approximately $1 billion in food assistance that had been announced by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last fall, according to Feeding America. Before these cuts, Feeding America had anticipated that the government would allocate $2 billion for food bank assistance in the current fiscal year.
The Agriculture Department defended these decisions, claiming they were a prudent financial move, scaling back pandemic-era aid programs that had grown bloated under President Biden.
“The program continues to function as originally intended by Congress,” a representative from the Agriculture Department stated.
The sudden reductions have significantly impacted Appalachia, where food insecurity is particularly high and government assistance plays a vital role in addressing this issue.
In larger cities, food banks typically receive 25 percent or less of their food supplies from the Agriculture Department. They also have alternative sources, like donations from large retail stores, generous individuals, and corporate sponsors.
Not in this region.
Facing Hunger Foodbank, which provides food to various pantries and charity kitchens in southern West Virginia, relied on government supplies for roughly 40 percent of its food stocks.
It had anticipated receiving 16 truckloads from the government in April, but 11 of those were canceled, according to Cyndi Kirkhart, the food bank’s executive director.
“Normally, these would be full,” Ms. Kirkhart stated while inspecting the largely vacant walk-in freezers at her Huntington, W.Va. warehouse, which had a few boxes of ground pork and a limited supply of frozen whitefish. “This is the last of the meat we received from the USDA,” she remarked.
Ms. Kirkhart noted that her government deliveries had decreased by 42 percent this year and had often been inconsistent. Instead of receiving cohesive shipments of meat, cheese, and pasta, she had been given an assortment of random items that were challenging to combine into a complete meal. Looking ahead at the government deliveries planned for later in the year, she saw little improvement.
“In July, I’ll have baked beans, apple sauce, and rolled oats,” she said while reviewing the summer’s scheduled deliveries. “I have no idea what to do with that.”
Food banks were not the only ones caught by surprise.
One of the initiatives from the Biden administration that was discontinued by Trump’s administration allowed food banks to purchase food from local farmers, which often provided fresher but pricier options.
In Ripley, W. Va., farmer Aaron Simon had significantly scaled up his operation to support this market, investing over a million dollars into a slaughterhouse and meat-cutting facilities, expecting to sell 7,000 pounds of ground meat to food banks monthly, generating $50,000 in revenue.
Now, according to Mr. Simon, his orders from food banks have dropped to only 20 percent of that, as funding for the program diminishes. He was informed that next month’s order would be the last, causing him to halt his expansion efforts and stop purchasing cattle from local farmers.
He expressed his agreement with President Trump’s aim to reduce budget waste, but in his opinion, this was not a waste at all.
“They don’t understand: ‘Hey, you’re cutting the backbone of America,’” Mr. Simon criticized. “If he were fully aware of what is happening right now, I doubt he would support these actions.”
In West Virginia, many food pantries are often operated by rural churches, grappling with…
Extreme poverty affects many communities. Some ensure they stock up on food that can be prepared over a fire, catering to clients without electricity. With this shortfall anticipated, numerous leaders expressed a desire for alternative sources to emerge, something to compensate for the missing provisions.
Then, in late February, something unexpected happened.
“The Cheez-It truck crashed,” mentioned Kim Dockus, who helps manage a food pantry at reGeneration Church in Huntington.
Mr. Dockus was relieved to report that a semi-truck carrying 21,000 pounds of cheese crackers had overturned on a bridge linking Ohio and West Virginia. The insurance company chose to donate the Cheez-Its. “Most of them were fine,” Mr. Dockus shared. “Only a few were slightly damaged.”
“We don’t wish for such events to happen,” remarked Jackie Thompson, who runs a food bank at the Church of Christ in Guyandotte, W.Va.
It was a mixed blessing, however: The charities lost truckloads of meat and vegetables, gaining instead a truck filled with snacks that would satiate hunger but lack essential nutrients. The demand for food remained unchanged, despite this new supply.
This scenario made Ms. Busse, a former journalist now overseeing the soup kitchen and food pantry at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Charleston, feel as though she were part of a reality show.
Even in better times, her role demands innovation and persistence. When community members pass away, she collects their spices. Faced with excess dried split peas at the pantry last year—clients found them too difficult to prepare—she fed them to deer, which later became part of the meal.
“I turned the venison into spaghetti,” she recalled.
Yet now, she had lost around 25% of her food supplies. Ms. Busse mentioned she began using savings and soliciting more contributions from church members. She feared that serving partial meals would cause clients to skip coming, missing one of the few substantial meals they enjoy each week.
This meant she needed to create a complete meal from the crackers, cranberries, and vegetable soup.
First, she required a main dish. So, she spent $35 from the church’s funds to buy ground beef and chicken broth, enhancing the government-supplied soup. The crackers would serve as her starch. She then enlisted a volunteer to prepare three large pans of spinach salad, complementing the government-provided cranberries. That secured the vegetable portion.
As a final touch, she thawed an apple crisp that had been stored since the Biden administration. It had fruit, albeit coated in sugar. When noon arrived, the seniors enjoyed it enough to take home leftovers (though they mostly left the cranberries behind).
“This affects professional individuals who have always worked and contributed but now find themselves in need,” shared 75-year-old Patricia Rosebourgh, a retired teacher, as she waited for food at the Roosevelt Community Center. She mentioned her disagreement with Mr. Trump and her concern that both he and Elon Musk would reduce aid. “People never considered: It could happen to me.”
One client gratefully tucked a chocolate egg into Ms. Busse’s apron pocket.
However, Ms. Busse expressed concern as both her funds and the patience of her parishioners seemed to be running low. Continuing this effort for several more months appeared daunting.
Ms. Kirkhart had already noticed the challenges awaiting the next month. Ms. Busse’s upcoming delivery would omit something essential: green veggies. Instead, it would include 48 pounds of something completely unnecessary: fig pieces.
“Fig. Pieces,” Ms. Kirkhart emphasized, taking a pause for effect. She hadn’t yet found the courage to inform Ms. Busse. “It’s not even a whole fig.”
