Volunteers sort foods at Tri-City Baptist Food Bank in Westminster, Colorado. HYOUNG CHANG/GETTY IMAGES
By Grace Segers, The New Republic, March 8, 2023
In March 2020, the Minnesota food bank Second Harvest Heartland moved its headquarters to a new location, a massive warehouse three times the size of its previous facilities. At 233,000 square feet, the warehouse is large enough to house four football fields.
The timing was fortuitous: March 2020 also saw the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, with lockdown restrictions and job losses exacerbating food insecurity for low-income Americans. “We tripled in size just at the right time,” said Allison O’Toole, the CEO of Second Harvest Heartland. The food bank, which works with hundreds of agencies and programs to distribute food assistance across a 59-county area in Minnesota and western Wisconsin, has seen a 30 percent increase in distributions.
In response to the unprecedented crisis of the pandemic, Congress took dramatic action to assist struggling Americans, including implementing emergency allotments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, more commonly known as food stamps. These temporary benefits, aimed at addressing food insecurity, helped cushion the economic blow for low-income households. But the end of the emergency allotments means that millions of SNAP beneficiaries are facing a “hunger cliff” this month—a dramatic decrease in their benefits, arriving in concert with high inflation and elevated grocery costs.
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