On Tuesday, Urban Institute released an update on how the federal SUN Meals To Go program is coming along in each state.
SUN Meals is a USDA program enacted in 2023 – critically, at the tail end of the Covid pandemic – that augments school meals by funding summer feeding programs in rural districts.
That year, there were 40 noncongregate – meaning not on school grounds – sites for food distribution and pickup in the state. Last year, there were 22.
Why the drop by almost half?
Erinn Rowe, CEO of Harvest Hope in Columbia, said the main driver of the falloff is the tighter restrictions on who and what qualifies for SUN Meals.
“A lot of the federal programs had loosened regulations during COVID for different types of USDA [programs],” Rowe said. “With COVID, they had expanded what the rural designation was in the qualification, so it was a much easier access point to be approved for a noncongregate feeding site in COVID.”
Noncongregate programs started out of social distancing requirements in the pandemic, but they immediately showed a benefit to rural communities by removing the need to bring children to a specific school building during lunch, every day, and waiting for them to finish eating their meals in a group.
Noncongregate sites allow for parents to pick up multiple days’ worth of food and take it home, saving them lost work and travel time.
In March, a pair of cuts took approximately $1.1 billion in food aid out of American school districts. One was a $660 million cut to the Local Food for Schools and Childcare program; the other was a $500 million cut to the Local Food Purchase Assistance program.
Tighter restrictions on the SUN program translate into fewer sites and, by extension, less access to food, despite that demand for food is at best where it’s been, and at worst, growing, Rowe said.
“The need’s still there, and it creates a burden on families that are struggling anyway for this resource,” she said.
And it isn’t just tighter restrictions, it’s also a lot of bureaucratic barriers that Rowe finds ridiculous and frustrating.
For example, there is a paper document required for SUN Meals sites to fill out. It contains squares that must be checked only in blue ink.
“And the squares are teeny tiny,” Rowe said. “So if you're feeding 100 or 200 kids a day and you miss a square in the middle accidentally, it doesn't count. It's that asinine. And if you don't use blue ink, it doesn't count on all of these documentations.”
Rowe said Harvest Hope is trying to build its capacity to work with partner agencies to expand SUN Meals back into more places in rural South Carolina. That requires doing a lot of paperwork and coordinating volunteers – most of whom are seniors, who themselves are increasingly struggling with food insecurity.
“USDA is really hard to work with,” she said. “That's why we really, as food banks, take the burden of that even from our senior boxes. It is insane the amount of paperwork we have to do for that. So we do most of that heavy lifting so our agencies don't have to do it, because it's just complicated.”
Beyond school meals in rural areas, food banks are struggling to keep up with demand in the face of federal budget cuts to food programs, too.
“I’ve been here nine years and I’ve never seen it like this,” said Gordon Bell, executive director of HOPE in Rock Hill. “We’re down, probably lower than we’ve ever been.”
Before federal cuts, HOPE usually kept from 35 to 45 pallets of food ready to distribute. On Tuesday:
“We have eight pallets of dry food,” Bell said, “and two pallets of meats.”
The money HOPE had relied on from the federal government would get the pantry items like peanut butter either for free or for 18 cents per jar. Having to go buy food without assistance, a pallet of peanut butter will set HOPE back $2,700, Bell said.
“That makes a big difference in a food pantry’s life,” he said.
HOPE received a $10,000 donation that will allow it to buy six more pallets of food this week. Bell is grateful to donors, but said that the massive scaling down of purchasing power – and fewer truckloads of food from supermarkets -- make things extremely difficult at the pantry.
“They’re trying,” Bell said of the local supermarkets. “They just don’t have as much [extra food] as they used to.”
Bell fears the line for food at HOPE will grow, given that USDA has paused $500 million in TEFAP funding – The Emergency Food Assistance Program – that provides funds to households to buy food.
“We’re still seeing 250 families a week,” Bell said. HOPE saw 110 families on Tuesday. Bell expects to see 60 to 70 families per day through the rest of this week.
One of those families is that of Rock hill resident Dinah Baker, who has supplemented meals for her mother and daughter through HOPE and another pantry at a neighborhood church.
Baker typically has gotten enough food to share with friends and neighbors in need, but she now can’t do that so easily.
“I used to get about 10 bags [of food],” she said. “Now I get four or five. It’s not enough to spread out.”
As for the politics of all this, Rowe said that during the first Trump administration, there was a downturn in hunger in South Carolina, largely due to the USDA buying more domestic food, rather than shipping it overseas.
“Because the USDA was buying agriculture from the American farmers, because they could not sell it to Venezuela and China and Russia and everybody else, we actually got a lot of food, and the food insecurity rate dipped at that time because there were enough resources out there,” Rowe said. “So I'm hoping that we do that again, and we are going to get that influx of food resources that are available for us to distribute, because it really made the food insecurity rate go down.”
Whatever happens, Rowe wishes the issue of hunger would stop being politicized.
“It can't be looked at as socialism. It can't be looked at as states’ rights,” she said. “It's no one factor that drives [hunger], there's multiple factors that drive hunger in this country. It took us a long time to get this point, and it's going to take a long time to get out, with everybody working together.”
