By P.J. Huffstutter
COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) -On a warm spring morning, volunteers at the Mid-Ohio Food Collective plucked cucumbers from a greenhouse where a state psychiatric hospital once stood and the land lay fallow. Now the state’s largest food bank is working that ground again, part of an urgent effort to shore up supplies amid shrinking federal support, including deep funding cuts under President Donald Trump.
They are planting more. Prepping soil for fruit trees, and installing hives for honey. In the greenhouse, crates of romaine and butterhead lettuce were packed for delivery, bound for a pantry across town. Back at headquarters in Grove City, staff chased leads from grocers, manufacturers, even truckers looking to unload abandoned freight. Every pallet helped. Every pound counted.
In a state that handed Trump three straight wins, where Trump flags flap near food aid flyers pinned on bulletin boards, the cost of his austerity push is starting to show.
“Food banks will still have food,” said Mid-Ohio CEO Matt Habash. “But with these cuts, you’ll start to see a heck of a lot less food, or pantries and agencies closing. You’re going to have a lot of hungry, and a lot less healthy, America.”
For decades, food banks like Mid-Ohio have been the backbone of the nation’s anti-hunger system, channelling government support and donations from corporations and private donors into meals and logistics to support pantries at churches, non-profits and other organizations. If a food bank is a warehouse, food pantries are the store.
Outside one of those – the Eastside Community Ministry pantry in rural Muskingum County, Ohio – Mary Dotson walked slow, cane in hand.
The minute she stepped through the doors, her whole body seemed to lift. They call her Mama Mary here, as she’s got the kind of voice that settles you down and straightens you out in the same breath. The regulars grin as Dotson, 77, pats shoulders, swaps recipes.
She had tried to do everything right: built a career, raised five children, planned for the quiet years with her husband. But after he died and the kids moved away, the life they’d built slipped out of reach. Now her monthly Social Security check is $1,428. She budgets $70 of that for groceries, and she gets $23 in food benefits as well.
She started as a volunteer at Eastside. Simple math convinced her to become a customer.
“I figured if I’m going to take these things,” Dotson said, “I’m going to work here, too.”
CAMPAIGN FODDER
The Mid-Ohio Food Collective was born out of church basements and borrowed trucks nearly a half-century ago, when factory closures left more families hungry. It’s now the state’s largest food bank, feeding more than 35,000 Ohio families a week. It supplies more than 600 food pantries, soup kitchens, children and senior feeding sites, after-school programs and other partner agencies.
When Trump returned to office in January, Mid-Ohio was already slammed. Pantry visits across its 20 counties hit 1.8 million last year, nearly double pre-COVID levels, and are continuing to grow this year. The biggest surge came from working people whose paychecks no longer stretch far enough due to pandemic-era inflation under Joe Biden’s presidency, staff said.
Then came the Trump cuts. In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) cancelled the pandemic-era Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) program, which funded about $500 million annually for food banks; and froze about $500 million in funding for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), one of the agency’s core nutrition programs that supplies food to states to pass on to food banks for free.
Much of the food Mid-Ohio distributes is donated, but donations alone can’t stock a pantry consistently. Its current $11.1 million purchasing budget, built from federal, state and private dollars, helps fill the gaps. The March cuts wiped out about 22% of Mid-Ohio’s buying power for next fiscal year – funds and food that staff are trying to replace.
In early December, Mid-Ohio ordered 24 truckloads filled with milk, meat and eggs for delivery this spring and summer. The food came through the TEFAP program, using about $1.5 million in government funding. The first delivery was scheduled to show up April 9. The only thing to arrive was a cancellation notice.
USDA said in a statement Secretary Brooke Rollins is working to ensure federal nutrition spending is efficient, effective and aligned with the administration’s budget priorities.
More cuts could come. Last month, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed Trump’s tax and spending bill. It called for $300 billion in cuts to food benefits for low income people under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which fed nearly 1.4 million Ohioans in January, according to the latest state data.
If the cuts survive the Senate and are passed into law, it annually would cost Ohio at least $475 million in state funding to maintain current SNAP benefits, plus at least $70 million for administrative program costs, said Cleveland-based The Center for Community Solutions, an independent, nonpartisan policy research group.
That would consume nearly every state-controlled dollar in Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services budget, roughly 95% of the general revenue meant to help fund everything from jobless claims to foster care.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and other lawmakers in this GOP supermajority state capitol, facing a constitutional requirement to pass a balanced budget, told Reuters that extra money for food banks isn’t there. The proposed fiscal 2025 Ohio budget would set food bank funding back to 2019 levels – or about 23% less than what it spent this year, in a state where nearly one in three people qualify for help.
Federal safety-net programs have become campaign fodder, too. At a recent Ohio Republican Party fundraiser in Richland County, Ohio, voters in suits and Bikers for Trump gear alike listened to Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech millionaire turned presidential candidate now running for Ohio governor.
He spoke out against “a culture of dependence on the entitlement state that has festered in our country for 60 years.”
SAVING A PENNY
So what happens when the government pulls back and supplies thin? If you’re Victoria Brown and her small team of four, it means working the phones, chasing leads, watching markets, and moving fast. At Mid-Ohio’s offices in Grove City, the food bank’s director of sourcing sipped her coffee and squinted at her screen, eyes tracking the price-per-pound of cucumbers down to the cent. Saving a penny might seem inconsequential, unless you’re trying to buy 40,000 pounds.
In a supply chain that has relied on steady government support, food donations have become even more important, even as they grow more haphazard in both timing and what’s available.
Outside Brown’s office, one staffer was trying to track down a shipment of pineapples. The rest were on the road, talking crop conditions with farmers, negotiating delivery times with suppliers and checking with grocers to see what might be sitting in the back, waiting for a second life. Brown glanced at her inbox, where new offers stacked up:
At 11:10 a.m., one pallet of frozen chicken.
I’ll find out why it’s being donated, a staffer promised.
At 11:13 a.m., four pallets of cereal, bulk packed in industrial totes.
Brown jotted a note for the volunteer coordinator: Anyone available to scoop a thousand pounds of cereal into small bags?
RACING THE CLOCK
Some of that food may be headed for Mid-Ohio’s Norton Market, a modern food pantry built to feel like a real store in Columbus. The man in charge here is Denver Burkhart. He moves with the kind of precision the military teaches and life reinforces. At 35, he looks every bit the soldier he still is – broad-shouldered and lean, squared off at the edges.
Fifteen years in the Army, two tours in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, now he has a mission back home until he serves overseas again with the Ohio Army National Guard. He started the morning as he always does: at a laptop in the back cramped office, racing to secure whatever free or discounted goods Brown’s team had found.
He leaned over the keyboard, one eye on the clock, the other on the blinking screen. The inventory system had just refreshed. The race was on to fill his mental list. His fingers clicked fast, steady, practiced. He hovered over baby formula. More moms have been showing up lately. Forty cases into the cart. Maybe too many – but if he waited, they’d be gone.
“I rely heavily on the free product,” he said. “Without it, we’d be hurting really bad.”
“WATER DAYS”
Across town, Shannon Follins checks on her ice supply. It’s for what she calls the “water days.”
Follins, 37, is raising three kids, including 3-year-old twins. One is autistic; he hasn’t found his words yet. Until recently, Follins worked third shift at Waffle House for $5.25 an hour, and now she’s studying for a degree in social services. Family brings groceries when they can.
But it’s the pantry at Broad Street Presbyterian Church, stocked by Mid-Ohio, that lets her make meals that feel like more than survival. One recent night, her daughter Essence twirled barefoot across their kitchen floor, dancing to the sounds of boiling pasta and chicken simmering in the pan.
When there was nothing else to eat, she filled her kids’ bellies with tap water and a mother’s promise that tomorrow might be better. “It gives me a sense of security,” she said, nodding toward the plastic jugs stacked in her freezer.
If the government cuts food aid? She’s prepared for more water days.
(Reporting by P.J. Huffstutter in Columbus, Ohio, and Chicago. Editing by Emily Schmall and Claudia Parsons)
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