Not two hours before Vic Garcia arrived at the Legacy Foundation’s “Let’s Talk Food: Groceries, Urban Farming and Food Access” talk Friday afternoon, he got more upsetting news.
The NWI Food Bank President and CEO received notice that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has cut from the food bank $400,000 worth of food delivery through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, he announced during the panel. The USDA previously allocated $500 million in deliveries to food banks for fiscal year 2025 through it, it announced in October 2024. This news comes on the heels of the U.S. Department of Agriculture canceling more than $1 billion in funds for schools and food banks to purchase food directly from local farmers via the Local Food to School program two weeks ago,
With food prices still 20% higher than they were in 2020, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Garcia told the crowd at the Avalon Ballroom that he truly has the “perfect storm” that no one dealing in food wants: more people with less money.
“Prior to COVID, we were conducting our Mobile Markets twice a week and serving 4,000 people a month; during COVID, we were doing six a week and serving 14,000 people a month,” Garcia said. “Now, we’re doing five a week and serving 12,000 people per month. We’ve not seen a decrease (in people needing help with food).”
The panel, which is part of the Legacy Foundation’s Lake County Advancement Committee’s bimonthly panel series, came together because “people need to eat,” moderator and Foundation President and CEO Kelly Anoe said. Garcia, Strack & Van Til CEO Jeff Strack and Faith Farms Founder the Reverend Curtis Whittaker, of Gary, planned to focus the conversation on how inflation, supply chain and labor shortages affect local food access, but government funding cuts dominated much of the discussion.
To run the NWI Food Bank, Garcia said it costs $4.2 million per year, and that figure doesn’t even factor in the cost of food, making any cut to his budget a nightmare. And federal funding cuts don’t just affect nonprofits, Strack said. Right now, the grocery chain is paying 25% to 30% more to get food from its sources, which also means that the cost of ingredients its bakeries use has gone up, he said.
When you add in the cost of labor and supply-chain issues, such as the avian flu epidemic which has driven up egg prices, running a grocery store is a challenge on a good day. The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, plays a not insignificant role in grocers’ budgets, Strack pointed out, and when that money is cut, it’s felt.
“People think that SNAP is this terrible thing that people waste, but it’s not. Five years ago, our stores collected $90 million in SNAP benefits; last year, we collected $50 million, and now they’re talking about cutting it even more,” he said. “When that happens, we’re going to have to come up with solutions (to restore that loss).”
Partnerships, naturally, are key to the solutions, the three agree. The Food Bank and Faith Farms, for example, have a partnership where they flash-freeze food Faith Farms for longer keeping, Whittaker said.
“Forty percent of all food ends up in landfills across America. Let me say that again: 40% of food ends up in landfills,” he said. “Flash freezing extends the useful life of food, and our partnership has 20% of our food going to the food bank and 80% that we get to sell to keep our operation going.”
Faith Farms also has a partnership with Methodist Hospitals and Indiana University Northwest to provide medically tailored meals in the community, he said. The 200 people signed up for that program have seen “great results” in weight loss and reduction of related side effects of conditions like heart disease and diabetes.
Faith Farm’s youth-centered program, Next Urban Agriculture Generation, or NU-AG, teaches children 12 and up how to grow food, and a newly formed Black Church Food Security Coalition provides the space in which food is grown in Gary, Whittaker added.
“You know these churches have all this land and money set away for when they’re going to ‘build something.’ Well, nothing’s being built, so why are you waiting? Let’s use the land and tackle these issues,” Whittaker said. “Superman isn’t coming to save us. Wonder Woman isn’t coming to save us. Black Panther isn’t coming to save us, so we have to empower ourselves and make sure people have access to healthy food.”
Any partnerships the food bank with others don’t discount the relationship they have with grocery stores, Garcia said. In fact, Garcia has many of his best conversations about food insecurity at the grocery store.
“Sometimes we forget how important the local grocery store is to the community,” Garcia said. “It’s a place where people can interact and fuel social partnerships.”
Anne Massie, co-Executive Director for the NWI Food Council, an organization that acts as the conduit between Indiana farms and schools in food-insecure communities, asked the panel what opportunities there are to “weather the funding-cut storm.” She and co-Director Virginia Pleasant have had many a panicked meeting in the past couple weeks with their clients after hearing the funding for the first round of one of the grants, Local Food for Schools, runs out in May; and the second, Local Food Purchasing Assistance, is done in September.
“We have farmers who expanded and put themselves into contracts with no reason to believe cuts were coming to feeding programs,” Pleasant said. “We’re not just giving food away — we’re building capacity and supporting economic development.”
“This is going to impact the whole country, not just Indiana,” Massie added. “Our purpose is to re-regionalize our food system and build up farmers with the community so that we can feed ourselves if something snaps,” Massie added. “Ninety-eight percent of our food is imported, and it’s too risky (not to have a solid food supply).”
River Forest Community School Corporation’s Food Service Director, Nick Alessandri, is beside himself with the funding cuts. Most of the students receive free or reduced lunch in the district, and for the first time in a while, he’s been able to serve quality food through the LFS Grant, he said.
“We were getting ground beef free-of-charge, and now, at $10 a pound, we can’t afford that, but I refuse to lower my food standards,” he said. “Because students are enjoying the food we’re making, meal participation has gone up. Cutting funding is just absurd.”
And it couldn’t come at a worse time, either: Applications to another grant for which he could’ve applied to defray some of the costs were due March 6, but because he’d had no reason to think the LFS was going to get cut, he missed the window.
“A billion dollars is like 1% of the budget. It’s not the problem,” Alessandri said. “The local economy is going to take a huge hit because some of those farms will go out of business. It doesn’t make sense.”
For his part, Vic Garcia is reasonably sure some of his money will be restored through other means, and he hopes it’s soon because the USDA is his most efficient way to move food, and he’s proud to be a partner in their work. For now, though, there are a lot of sleepless nights.
“We can’t buy our way out of these losses,” he said. “We provided 9.2 million pounds of food to Northwest Indiana in 2024, and our goal was 10 million this year. We’re not getting to 10 million pounds.”
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
