“I hope that is going to be sufficient,” mentioned the coordinator at Silver Lake Neighborhood Church meals pantry, wiping her brow as she chopped off dangerous ends of donated celery. Each Wednesday morning for the previous 12 months, I, together with a dozen or so different volunteers, type and pack donated meals for about 150 households.
However a couple of months in the past, the meals pantry began ordering sufficient meals to feed 175 households per week. This week we ordered sufficient for 200 households. Increased numbers are our new regular. The individuals who come to us are dealing with challenges not simply from the federal shutdown but in addition from widespread layoffs.
Now, as SNAP advantages run out throughout the shutdown, we fear that there gained’t be sufficient meals to feed everybody who strains up. And that ought to scare all of us.
Throughout the nation, 1 in 7 folks — together with 1 in 5 kids — have been meals insecure in 2023. This implies they apprehensive about the place they’d get meals and struggled to afford to place meals on the desk.
For many years, the U.S. authorities has responded to our relentless meals insecurity disaster via the Supplemental Vitamin Help Program, previously often known as meals stamps — which in 2024 have been distributed to 1 in 8 folks. On common, beneficiaries in California — the place this system known as CalFresh — obtained about $189 a month. In L.A. County, greater than $300 million in SNAP advantages have been issued in June 2025 alone.
SNAP is an extremely efficient device to battle starvation. It reaches folks all around the nation, even in hard-to-reach rural areas, as a result of the advantages go on to folks’s wallets. This system lifted greater than 700,000 folks nationally above the poverty line in 2024.
However SNAP alone has not closed the meals insecurity hole. Its advantages solely cowl about 80% of the price of meals a household wants, and never everybody who qualifies participates in this system — neither is everybody who’s meals insecure eligible. It’s estimated that some 45% of meals pantry customers are already using SNAP. Meals pantries and soup kitchens — just like the one the place I volunteer — fill the hole by distributing donated and bought meals to folks in want.
Nationwide, some 60,000 such organizations distributed greater than 4 billion kilos of meals to greater than 50 million folks in 2023. And even with the efforts of SNAP and charitable meals applications, greater than 40 million individuals are nonetheless meals insecure.
With the disruption to SNAP funds, meals pantries like my very own will bear the brunt of responding to actually unprecedented want. Even because the state authorities deploys the Nationwide Guard to assist food-distributing organizations such because the Los Angeles Regional Meals Financial institution, my private expertise and analysis present that native organizations will wrestle to tackle the elevated demand. Many pantries don’t have house to retailer extra meals nor the volunteers to type and distribute further meals. Most have been working at full capability for years.
What’s worse is that pantries could merely run out of meals. Meaning sending hungry folks residence empty-handed. To have to inform a neighbor you can’t assist them is an expertise I want on nobody.
But it surely isn’t solely food-insecure individuals who profit from SNAP. This system is a boon to native economies as a result of folks spend their SNAP {dollars} within the communities the place they stay and work. Even in a weak financial system, the Agriculture Division estimates that $1 of SNAP generates greater than $1.50 in financial exercise. Greater than 30,000 shops within the state of California settle for SNAP, which signifies that all communities profit when folks use meals stamps.
But regardless of the billions of {dollars} they depend on from buyers who use SNAP (lots of whom are their very own workers), giant retailers reminiscent of Walmart and Amazon haven’t fought laborious to forestall the present interruption to advantages. Retailers could also be extra involved with stopping hungry folks from shoplifting. The police division in Barstow posted on Oct. 28 that it could be stationing extra cops at grocery shops to discourage theft.
A deep and lasting interruption to SNAP will kill folks. And it’ll additionally damage us all. Maybe that’s the purpose. The Trump administration has been ordered to fund SNAP even throughout the federal government shutdown, however federal officers apparently see extra worth in wreaking havoc by issuing solely partial funds — and doing so in sluggish movement. A folks that’s hungry doesn’t have the time or power to battle again or vote or name representatives when primary human functioning is on the road.
The answer, broadly, is to fund SNAP. Some on the left fault the Trump administration as making an attempt to “weaponize starvation,” within the phrases of the Home’s high Democrat. Some on the suitable search to blame Democrats for the shutdown. However no effort to attain political factors justifies making fellow Individuals go hungry. Our legislators work for us. We ought to be calling our representatives and demanding that SNAP be taken off the bargaining desk and that funding be completely and totally reinstated.
The primary Trump administration used its authorized switch authority throughout the final authorities shutdown to fund SNAP, and will achieve this once more. This administration purposefully chooses to not.
Within the meantime, these wanting to assist may give cash to native meals pantries and feeding organizations. Though donations of meals are well-intentioned and priceless, cash stretches additional within the palms of neighborhood organizations, which know what is required — and it could be issues like plastic gloves and paper baggage required to soundly get meals into the palms of our neighbors. Organizations that sponsor vacation meals drives may take into account a fund drive as a substitute or as well as.
Donations to native teams might be solely a Band-Assist, not a everlasting resolution. Even SNAP, when totally funded, will not be sufficient to fulfill meals want within the U.S. — however it’s a patch that will get nearer than the rest ever has. When SNAP is underfunded and lower, it isn’t simply the meals insecure that suffer, however all of us.
Leah E. Gose is an assistant professor of sociology at USC.
