While Congress guts food aid, working-class organizers across the country are building local markets, gardens and meal programs to keep their communities fed.
This story was originally published by The ‘Gander.
On Thursday nights, I walk a few blocks along my neighborhood’s cracked sidewalks to The People’s Market. Once a week, an empty lot becomes a thriving, bustling center of activity. Tents are erected, kids run around with no shoes on, and the air smells like pots of collard greens.
I’ve never lived anywhere that wasn’t “south of the tracks,” and this neighborhood is no exception. Most of us are working-class or poor here, often navigating multiple jobs to stay afloat. As a result, we have a lot of needs; the local school is underfunded, the houses are old, and you have to drive clear to the other side of town for a good job, a doctor or a bank.
Nonetheless, The People’s Market is booming—a showcase of local entrepreneurship and innovation.
Shante Woody organizes the market in Greensboro, N.C. She’s figured out how to connect the dots between the sellers and the buyers, creating what feels like a small closed-loop economy designed just for us. Selling cakes, pupusas, lemonade and bean pies, the vendors are working-class people trying to make extra money. Many, Woody says, are bringing their goods to the market directly after getting off work.
The customers are neighborhood people and students from a nearby trade school looking for a quick, no-cook meal or some vegetables for the week.
“People can walk over and get something to eat that they can afford while supporting someone who needs the extra help,” Woody explains about the reciprocity.
Instead of trying to fix this broken system, Congress is punishing the victims of its malfunctioning and is slashing SNAP to enact tax cuts for the rich.
SNAP is the glue that holds The People’s Market together. Woody says that most of the vendors are SNAP recipients, and are selling at the market to supplement their incomes. The majority of the market customers also use SNAP; in fact, a grant helps the market double the value of what’s on someone’s EBT card when it’s used here.
“We have people who only get $8 in food stamps a month, but we can make that go twice as far, and they can buy $16 of food at our market,” Woody explains.
This SNAP doubling is done at other markets across the country—a big help for local farmers and vendors, as well as to the families receiving SNAP dollars. But right now, with Congress considering cutting SNAP by $290-$319 billion, that boost to local food economies is at risk.
We’ve long known that the U.S. food system is upside-down. We have a ton of land but use it sparingly for actual food. What food is grown domestically is distributed through a complex system across the country, but still, 38 percent of what is grown goes to waste. This complicated system is propped up by incentives and buyback programs for farmers, SNAP funding that helps both families and retailers, and a massive nonprofit food bank system that tries to capture waste and leverage charity to keep a persistent looming crisis in check. Despite all this, 47 million people are food insecure in our country—a number that has been rising steadily even as grocers make record profits.
Instead of trying to fix this broken system, Congress is punishing the victims of its malfunctioning and is slashing SNAP to enact tax cuts for the rich.
People like Woody are trying to fix what’s broken and imagine new ways for our food economy to work. There are thousands of other working-class organizers like Woody all across the country who are trying to make sure their neighbors are cared for despite this seemingly impossible landscape.
In Three Rivers, Mich., Casey Tobias and the volunteers at Homeless Outreach Practiced Everyday support churches to provide meals to housed and unhoused people alike in their county. Tobias started the project while working at a gas station and seeing customers pay for gas in spare change because their wages weren’t enough to cover their basic expenses. She started serving food in the gas station parking lot and it grew into a county-wide project of neighbors caring for neighbors.
“The wages just aren’t enough here,” Tobias explains. “And people need some sort of relief.”
While CARE is acting as a food triage in Michigan, With Many Hands in Alamogordo, N.M., is working to rebuild a local food economy. Started as a series of community gardens planted on city-owned properties, the group is teaching their neighbors how to grow food in the desert climate. They plan to ask the city to provide vacant lots for the graduates so they can start small-scale agriculture businesses and sell the food to local schools, daycares, and at the farmers’ market.
“We are asking our community to rethink what our public land is for,” says organizer Courtney McCary Squyres. “And reimagine how we can get healthy food back into our community while creating income opportunities.”
Woody, Tobias and McCary Squyres are each trying to right-size the problems in our fractured food economy in their local communities. They are working to create replicable, scalable projects, seemingly undaunted by the gargantuan task. Their projects may feel like drops in a bucket, but that’s how change starts. Most importantly, and unlike Congress, they are not turning their backs on their communities, but instead diving in, digging for solutions, knowing that everyone—everyone—deserves to eat.
