$3 million will disappear from Durham County food systems this month as additional SNAP benefits end
Congress terminated SNAP “emergency allotments” at the end of February. Food pantries and SNAP recipients grapple with reduced food budgets and prepare to make ends meet.
Welcome back, fellow critters.
This week, I’m delivering part one of a two-part series on food insecurity in Durham County. Later this month, I’ll dive into the history of food insecurity in Durham and discuss how urban farming can help Black and Indigenous communities generate wealth.
If you haven’t already listened, check out last week’s episode of the Swamp Boy podcast on pay-what-you-can models. The episode features interviews at A Place At The Table, jambalaya ASMR, and yours truly awkwardly standing in the way of food deliveries. What does any of that have to do with climate change or the environment? Listen to find out.
This week, we’re discussing some actual news: Congress authorized SNAP “emergency allotments” during the pandemic but voted to end those additional benefits earlier this year. Durham County residents will feel the effects of this decision by the end of the month when the supplemental payments don’t arrive. This article is free because I want y’all to have access to the resources Mary Oxendine, Durham County’s food security coordinator, shared with me regarding food pantries, mutual aid, and other tools for injecting knowledge straight into your cerebellum.
So, please share. Even if you don’t live in Durham County, this issue affects all counties in North Carolina, and many counties host similar organizations.
Additional SNAP benefits have ended
In early February, I met with Mary Oxendine, Durham County’s food security coordinator, and John Lyttle, an agricultural agent with the Durham County Cooperative Extension, to learn more about urban farming. They recently received a grant from the USDA Office of Urban Agriculture to assess if and how the Durham County Cooperative Extension could bring urban farming resources to the county through a “farm campus.”
“One of the biggest barriers [to farming] is land ownership,” said Oxendine, “and the resources that people need to buy land and buy equipment. All of that would be available to people at Farm Campus without any cost.”
More small-scale local farms in Durham County would increase the abundance of fresh produce in urban areas. “About 10% of Durham County’s population reports either skipping or reducing their food intake because there’s not enough money to buy food,” said Oxendine before adding that food scarcity in Durham County was about to worsen.
Congress voted to end additional SNAP benefits earlier this year, ending the “emergency allotments” at the end of February 2023. Households will receive $95 less per month on average starting in March. Some seniors may see their monthly benefits drop from $200 to $20.
This decision arrives amidst a continuing pandemic, despite grocery store prices rising 12% in the last year, rising housing costs, and research showing increasing access to SNAP benefits lowers instances of child abuse and neglect.
I called Oxendine back on Monday to discuss the expiring supplemental benefits and how Durham is preparing for the $3 million-a-month loss to local food systems.
This interview has been edited for clarity (I cut out filler words and fixed fragments).
Z: So, who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Mary Oxendine. I am Durham county's first food security coordinator. And that means lots of different things. But the short version is that I work on a lot of things related to emergency food provision and making sure that we're enhancing our safety nets. I also think about, “how do we create a more equitable food system so that it supports people with long-term food security and economic security?”
Z: Recently, you had a big challenge to that mission: Additional SNAP benefits started towards the beginning of the pandemic, have been ongoing for about the last three years, and just ran out. Could you walk me through what has been happening and what that's meant for families?
So, during COVID, SNAP beneficiaries were getting what are called emergency allotments, or these extra SNAP benefits. It was based on your income and the number of people in your household, but essentially, all households were getting at least $95 more each month. And some folks were getting even more. For example, if you're a single older adult, you were able to get the maximum out of those household benefits, which is around $280.
The extra SNAP benefits ended at the end of February. As of March, folks will not be getting those extra benefits. Going back to my example with older adults, a lot of those folks will return to only getting $23 a month.
It’s a huge impact on many, many households, particularly in Durham County. We did some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, and just the extra benefits that were going to SNAP recipients in Durham County are around $3 million a month. It's a huge decrease not just for SNAP beneficiaries, but also for grocery stores. That will definitely impact the food economy in Durham, as well as people's food access.
Z: Have you had conversations with people that are working in those industries, and what will this mean for them as well? Because that’s a lot of money flowing into Durham County, that has been flowing into Durham County during these additional benefits that’s going to disappear.
I haven't had conversations yet with actual grocery stores or food providers. The county's been more focused on “how do we create more resources in the community for families that are on SNAP benefits?” I imagine that I will eventually get to talking to grocery stores. But right now, our focus has definitely been on how do we support our emergency food providers. How do we support safety net organizations?
I think the county is doing a little bit of scrambling. We definitely can't make up for that shortfall. $3 million is a lot every month, but how do we work with our partners in the community to make sure that people have food? We’ve been having a lot of conversations to create some strategies around that.
Z: To clarify, when will we see the impacts of these benefits running out?
People will start seeing it closer to the end of this month. I do not work for Durham County Social Services, but my understanding of the way the payments work is folks were getting their regular benefits at the beginning of the month, but towards the end, they would also get these additional benefits.
So, towards the mid-slash-end of the month, folks will start seeing that. Even before the extra SNAP benefits, folks tended to run out of SNAP benefits toward the end of the month.
Folks are going to be seeing those impacts soon. Some folks sooner than others. The way that the SNAP benefits work, you don't have to use all your benefits each month. So, if I was able to save a few benefits each month, and I still have some on my EBT card, then maybe my family isn't immediately impacted. But if you were a family and really needed every single dollar every single month, then you don't have those benefits left on your card to use.
Z: What are [food pantries] doing in preparation for the end of the month when people are going to have to make that choice about where [they’re] going to get food now? Now that they have, in some instances, 250 dollars less to spend on food this month.
Food banks and food pantries are looking at how they can access food in other places. A lot of them already have relationships with grocery stores and other restaurants where they can do a lot of food recovery. [Food banks and pantries are] trying to explore any other places that they don't have relationships with.
I know some of the pantries are working together to figure out, “can we create a fundraiser so that we can generate more donations?”
And the county — nothing is final just yet — but we are looking at how we can better support the food banks and food pantries to make sure that they have some additional resources. We already have a lot of resources in Durham for food. It's just making sure that those organizations or entities have the amount of food that's needed to support the extra need.
Z: Are they doing anything in terms of getting additional staffing?
Staffing is one thing. Most of these organizations rely heavily on volunteers. So, volunteer recruitment is always a need. I don't know if there's extra effort towards volunteers because the organizations are always promoting and trying to get more volunteers. But because of the number of folks that are going to be coming, the limitation is probably food and not as much volunteers. Volunteers do play a role in making sure food boxes and bags are packed.
Z: For people using SNAP, I feel like this change is not the difference between shopping at Wegmans or ALDI; this is going to have a lot more ramifications in terms of what their diets are going to look like. What have your conversations with people looked like? How are they going to make ends meet? And how are they thinking about food choices going into next month?
I think people will try to cut as many corners as they can while making sure that their families are fed. Meat is really expensive. Eggs are really expensive also, right? So, I imagine a lot more people will be using more plant-based proteins like beans and legumes.
Where folks might have been able to afford more fresh produce, I imagine that a lot more people will be buying frozen and canned items, sticking more towards your staples, like rice and pasta. Cheaper items that will last longer.
I’m hoping that we can support people and [make] sure that they're eating as healthily as they can. But cheaper foods are sometimes not as healthy for you. Families are going to have to make those choices, unfortunately.
Z: SNAP is one of those rare programs in the US where we're literally giving money directly to citizens to make a choice. It’s money that’s earmarked for food, but they get to choose how they spend it. Another program that comes to mind is stimulus checks. [Stimulus checks and additional SNAP benefits] have had enormous impacts on people in terms of improving mental health and giving people an opportunity to breathe a little easier. Talk to me a little bit about some of the impacts that this additional SNAP money has had for people during the last few years, beyond just what they're eating.
Whenever we think about food security, we do think about what are people eating and how much they're eating. But food security is very much so connected to mental health. Thinking about how stressed someone [is] because they're worried about where their next meal is going to come from, or how does that impact children whenever they're going to school and they haven't had anything to eat. Or [these children are] just anxious for their other family members because they are able to get free meals at school, but whenever they go home, they know that they're not going to have anything there.
Mental health is a huge thing and something that's definitely come up as an issue during COVID. Most people’s mental health has been impacted, potentially, in a negative way during COVID.
So, the extra SNAP benefits, the stimulus checks, also the expanded child tax credits — the expanded child tax credit was essentially just cash for families that could be used on anything. But a lot of studies have shown that the funding was used for essentials, like food and housing. People weren't using it on frivolous things, usually. That had a big impact on keeping people out of poverty, or at least as deep into poverty.
The extended childhood credits [are] gone, there's no more stimulus checks, and now the SNAP benefits are being reduced. Low-income families have still not recovered from COVID. And they won't recover for a while. But there's kind of a tale of two stories, where there's a part of our population that is moving on and wasn’t as impacted by COVID. But I see a lot more struggling and a lot more potential mental health issues, crime, and all the things that surround poverty that could potentially keep going up.
I asked Oxendine for a list of resources for anyone interested in helping families who rely on these benefits to provide for themselves and their families. You can give directly to families in need through Durham Neighbors, a program that Ninth Street Bakery started to supplement the income of local families. North Durham Mutual Aid is another organization that provides direct relief to local families for food and housing. I’ll include a list of additional resources with links in a separate email to avoid spam filters targeting this article.
Oxendine has been a tremendous resource for all things food security related, and I will include the complete interview in the podcast later this month, so stay tuned for that.
In other news…
Swamp Boy visits a mountain bog! PBS Sci NC published the documentary I produced with other students in my environmental documentary film class last semester. The documentary, Bog Turtles: Big Trouble for Our Smallest Turtle, gets real mucky in true Swamp Boy fashion; I nearly lost a several-thousand-dollar (rental) camera rig in the mud filming these little guys. So, if you’re conservation curious or just like looking at videos of baby turtles, then this is the mini-doc for you.
I plan to return next week with Oxendine to learn more about Durham's food security history. It’s peak thesis writing time — I defend April 12th — so if I miss a post, please be gentle with the pitchforks. I’m feeling extra squishy these days.