By Mary Hennigan for The Arkansas Advocate.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Arkansas News Service reporting for The Arkansas Advocate-Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation-Public News Service Collaboration.

More than 567,000 Arkansans — 18.6% of the state’s total population — know what it’s like to experience food insecurity and struggle to find access to healthy food.

Arkansas’ food insecurity rate in 2022 was the second highest in the nation, with only Mississippi in front by 0.2%. This top two pairing is not new, however, as Arkansas has trailed Mississippi for the last decade, according to Feeding America data released in May.

Feeding America was established as a national nonprofit in the 1960s and is part of a network that organizes with food banks and other meal assistance programs, including the Arkansas Food Bank. The nonprofit has mapped food insecurity data down to the county level for more than a decade; the most recent information reports findings from 2022.

The food insecurity rate in Arkansas has been steadily increasing since 2020, and the 2022 rate was the highest it’s reached in five years, according to Feeding America. Arkansas also ranked second nationwide for the highest food insecurity rate among children, with nearly one in four children lacking access to healthy options.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Brian Burton, CEO of the Arkansas Food Bank. “I can’t say I’m surprised because there’s been sort of a vortex of pressures and economic events … just the inflation that has put lower income families in a real bind in our country. They can’t catch a break.”

Burton said he thinks the increased food insecurity rate could be related to the rising cost of groceries and the loss of additional assistance since the COVID-19 public health emergency ended.

“I think we are a state that has under participated in public assistance programs,” Burton said. “We’re one of the lowest participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and that is self-inflicted harm.”

Last year the Arkansas Legislature approved a bill that raised the asset limit for SNAP, commonly referred to as food stamps, from $2,250 for most families to $6,000. This change expanded the qualifications for people in need, but not to its originally intended level.

The bill initially sought to raise the limit to $12,000, but sponsor Sen. Jonathan Dismang, R-Searcy, lowered it to have a stronger chance of approval. At the time, Dismang said he thought $6,000 was too low and discouraged poor Arkansans from saving enough money to become financially stable.

Having any SNAP asset limit is a barrier for folks, Burton said. He said he would rather see the limit be removed entirely so it wouldn’t be a “hindrance to someone who’s trying to move out of poverty.”

The existing limit is one feature that could stop someone who falls in Arkansas’ ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) population from qualifying for assistance. The ALICE population includes people with income levels too high for programs like SNAP, but they still struggle to pay for their basic needs.

The Feeding America report isn’t limited to people who fall below the federal poverty level; it includes others who have difficulties accessing healthy food. Burton said the study is self reporting, which means more Arkansans than the reported 587,000 could be food insecure.

County snapshot

Every county in Arkansas reported a food insecurity rate higher than the national average of 13.5%, which Burton agreed shows that the issue is not dependent on rural or urban settings.

Searcy County, located in north central Arkansas, reported the highest overall rate at 24.5%. 

Giezele Treat, director of the Searcy County Senior Center, was unsurprised to hear the county ranked first. 

“It’s just sad,” Treat said. “We’re a poor county.”

Located in Marshall, any resident older than 60 can visit the senior center to receive a meal, Treat said. A staff dietician ensures the meals are well balanced and nutritional. Menu picks can include hamburgers and beef stroganoff with accompanying vegetables and bread, Treat said.

Staff also dispatches meals to about 70 households in Searcy County through Meals on Wheels, Treat said. Both hot and frozen meals are available to people who meet homebound criteria, meaning they physically can’t get food for themselves.

Burton, who has worked closely with people experiencing food insecurity for nearly three decades, said the toll it takes on one’s body is visible.

“It ages a person — the strain, anxiety and stress that are created by that constant worry,” he said. “The result of years of poor diets and nutrition when someone does not have sufficient resources to buy healthier, more expensive food … you see that shorten their life expectancy.” 

Phillips County, located along the state’s eastern border, reported the highest rate of food insecurity among children with 45.8%, according to Feeding America.

Burton said children experiencing malnourishment are largely affected in the classroom.

“They are not as alert, their bodies are not developing to their potential, and it’s particularly harmful, I think, in the youngest years of physical development,” he said.

Feeding America also reported the food insecurity rate among Arkansas’ Black, Hispanic and white populations. The rates came in at 30%, 22% and 16%, respectively.

“One out of three of our African-American neighbors struggle with food insecurity,” Burton said. “That would be called an epidemic. It’s not just something that happened in the last year; I think this is a result of years and decades of people who have been marginalized, obstacles they’ve had to transcend and limited access to opportunity.”

Statewide efforts

Food insecurity doesn’t have a simple solution. Arkansas has a myriad of organizations and programs scattered across the state that help residents access food, including the Arkansas Food Bank and its participating pantries.

“It’s a complex problem, but we can all be a part of the solution,” Burton said. “We can all donate to our local food banks and our favorite charities that are doing heroic, life-changing work on the front lines.

Last September the Arkansas Rice Federation donated 240,000 pounds of rice to the Arkansas Food Bank. In November, Arkansas State University joined the fight against hunger and announced it partnered with Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry to provide beef jerky snacks to school children.

The Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, a prominent food assistance nonprofit, addresses hunger by promoting nutrition education, securing funding, increasing out-of-school meal participation, advocating for food policy and more.

In January, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced the state would participate in a federal food assistance program called the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer. The program provides students’ families with money for meals while school is not in session. It starts in June.

“That’s a bright spot on the horizon,” Burton said. “That’s work that our own [U.S.] Sen. John Boozman helped bring about. … It’s a brand new program that could bring tens of millions of dollars into the state if everybody would participate in it.”


Mary Hennigan wrote this article for The Arkansas Advocate.


get more stories like this via email

North Dakota's governor this week signed a bill maintaining state funding for rural communities in dire need of thriving grocery stores.

The state launched a specialized grant program in 2023, setting aside $1 million for smaller communities to share if their local grocery store was in danger of closing its doors, a problem seen in many rural counties.

For example, one small community used its share to match funds for the purchase and reopening of a local convenience store, which added groceries and a restaurant.

Ellen Huber, rural development director for the North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives, spoke in support of the new bill extending the grant opportunities.

"Without action, our rural communities are becoming increasingly reliant on distant markets for basic needs and are paying the transportation and fuel costs," Huber pointed out.

Huber told lawmakers since 2014, North Dakota has lost 47 rural grocery stores, leaving only 90 operating around the state. Like the initial funding cycle, the grant program receives $1 million to cover the next two budget years. The bill received overwhelming support in the Legislature but there were some "no" votes as competing rural investment plans surfaced this year.

Just like water, emergency services and health care, Huber argued grocery stores are essential to small-town survival.

"To attract people to live in communities, (those residents) need ready access to healthy, affordable food," Huber emphasized.

Huber and policy experts said shifts in federal law have given bigger chains an edge in buying products in bulk at cheaper prices. It has inspired efforts in parts of North Dakota to establish local grocery store co-ops, where a handful of smaller shops buy items in bulk together.


get more stories like this via email

Two leading Colorado nonprofits working to end hunger are collecting hand-written letters from a wide range of people who would be directly impacted if Congress cuts funding for SNAP, formerly known as food stamps. The letters will be delivered to Colorado's congressional delegation on May 6th.

Carmen Mooradian, senior public policy manager with Hunger Free Colorado, said lawmakers need to see that these cuts are not just about abstract budgets and datapoints.

"We're talking about the real-life effect of cuts on real people. And so we want to hear from Coloradans what impacts SNAP cuts would have on them, and how SNAP has shaped their life," she said.

Letters can be uploaded at 'endhungerco.org' until next Tuesday. Republicans have charged the Agriculture Committee that oversees SNAP to cut $230 billion to pay for priorities such as mass deportations and extending tax breaks. The committee's chairman says SNAP won't see cuts because savings can come from reducing fraud. But some Republicans say the scale of the cuts would require changes to SNAP.

President Donald Trump is currently facing the worst economic approval rating of his political career, according to a new CNBC survey, and cutting SNAP may not improve economic outlooks.

Dayana Leyva, policy manager with Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger, said state and local economies would take a big hit.

"It's an economic engine. For every dollar that is invested into the SNAP program we can expect between $1.50 to $1.80 in local economic activity," she explained. "Currently in Colorado, there are 3,100 authorized SNAP retailers."

Some 600,000 Coloradans currently depend on SNAP to put food on the table. Mooradian said cuts would put even more pressure on the state's already overstressed food pantries. She adds that SNAP cuts would also impact public health.

"SNAP participation is linked to better overall health, especially among children and older adults and people with chronic health conditions. And food insecurity, on the other hand, is tied with higher rates of illness, including asthma in children and more frequent emergency room visits," she continued.

By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has kicked off his Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA Commission, food system advocates are wondering which of his ideas will come to fruition. One promise was to revamp the food system with a plan to “reverse 80 years of farming policy.” But what exactly would it mean for the average American to eat like we did in the 1940s? Experts tell Sentient the reality was not as idyllic as Kennedy and his supporters might believe. It’s also not at all feasible, as it would require the U.S. to make drastic changes to the way we eat. To put it bluntly — Americans would have to eat much less meat.

The Way We Ate Meat 80 Years Ago

At first blush, the historical picture does sound like locavore heaven. Food systems were still mostly regional, food historian Sarah Wassberg Johnson tells Sentient. People living in rural areas were more likely to have access to their own fresh produce, drink dairy from their own cow and can their foods for the winter.

The typical middle class family would eat “very Anglo-influenced foods,” Wassberg Johnson says, like “meat and potatoes and vegetables.” But back then, meat tended to be beef or pork, as chickens were considered a delicacy. That would all change after the birth of the industrial poultry farm, which kicked off the era of cheap and abundant chicken.

Dig a little further into the history and you quickly realize that the amount of meat consumed then was far less than what most people eat today. The average American only ate around 113 lbs pounds of meat in 1945 — less than half of the nearly 230 pounds of meat consumed annually today per capita.

Meats were usually prepared in dishes designed to feed more people with less meat. Home cooks incorporated them into sauces, stews and casseroles. The “quintessential American food,” meatloaf, is typical of this practice of meat-stretching. “You’re taking ground beef, which is already the cheapest meat…and you’re stretching it with onions and breadcrumbs, egg or milk. So you’re trying to stretch a pound of beef to feed more than four people,” Wassberg Johnson says.

People also ate more meat alternatives, even if they weren’t called that. Grains, nuts and beans were common sources of protein. Following the war, dry bean consumption in the U.S. was around 11 pounds per capita annually — compared to just 5.5 pounds per capita in 2023.

Americans were encouraged to grow “victory gardens” to help supplement the national food supply, and beans were an important crop, including soybeans, sometimes called “‘wonder beans’ or ‘miracle beans.’”

And yet, the transition to an industrialized food system was already underway. “There’s a lot of romanticization of food production in the past,” says Wassberg Johnson. “A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, if only we ate how grandma ate, everything would be better.’” But even then, she says, there was heavy dependence on things like railroads for food transport and access, and processed foods like flour, cornmeal, sugar and canned goods.

Farming Then, Now — and in the Future

Americans ate less meat back then, and we produced less meat too. In 1945 — prior to the rise of factory farming — there were just under 6 million farms in the U.S., with each operation ringing in at a little less than 200 acres in size on average.

Contrast that with 2024: researchers counted 2 million farms in the U.S., but the average size is much larger at about 464 acres. Over the decades, farms became more consolidated. Smaller farms merged or went out of business, and larger, more industrialized operations flourished.

The massive growth in industrialized farming was made possible by technology that did not exist 80 years ago, such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, farms that focused on one or two commodity crops and concentrated animal farming operations, or CAFOs. These developments enabled the U.S. food system to produce massive amounts of cheap meat — primarily chicken — that consumers happily gobbled up.

Industrial poultry operations were first developed in the 1950s. Around 275 million chickens were raised for meat in 1946 in the U.S; by 2023, that number skyrockets to 9.16 billion.

All of that “cheap” meat is not without other costs. Today, 99 percent of farm animals are raised on factory farms or industrial operations with cramped quarters for dairy cows, chickens and pigs. The beef that Americans eat at higher rates than the global average fuels climate pollution and deforestation. CAFOs and slaughterhouses are responsible for polluted air and water, and worker injuries and poor mental health.

So, why not trade factory farming for the good old days of American food — small-scale farms and the agricultural policies of 80 years ago? Sentient asked American agriculture historian and professor at Purdue University, R. Douglas Hurt, whether RFK Jr.’s proposal is at all realistic. “Of course not,” Hurt says, and here’s why.

Factory Farm Reality vs. Small Farm Fantasy

To turn the U.S. food system back to the small-scale style farming of the early 20th century would be extremely costly for farmers and consumers alike. Small farms, Hurt explains, “historically have not provided enough income to keep farmers on the land.” Farmers need “hundreds of acres to generate a profit and an acceptable standard of living” — with very few exceptions, like “a high value specialty crop such as avocados.”

Small-scale farms — like hobby farms or the homesteads you see on social media — might provide an alternative lifestyle, says Hurt, but they usually aren’t profitable. “To be profitable, the money must come from sources other than free-range chickens, eggs and a few grass-fed beef cattle. Quantity of production matters.”

To revert back to small farms, says Hurt, “the federal government will need to subsidize” those farmers, in order for them to make a living. “This will be very expensive,” Hurt says.

It also might be pretty unappealing. “The good old days, they were terrible,” Hurt says. “Farming is hard work. That’s why so many people leave it if they can for a better job and more money.”

So what if we all turned into subsistence farmers, and grew our own food? Some people are trying to do just that, as I reported on last year, but many learned in the process that raising and butchering their own animals was far more difficult than they had hoped. For some nascent homesteaders, instances of “butchery gone awry” turned out to be cruel to the animals, and upsetting for them.

There’s yet another reason why switching from industrial factory farms to small farms would be a disaster — the environment. Even if we were to only focus on transitioning beef to an all grass-fed approach, at current rates of beef consumption that would require far more land and resources than we have.

In 2018, environmental scientists Matthew Hayek and Rachael D. Garrett found that “a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30 percent,” but there simply isn’t enough pasture available.

There is one way a shift to much smaller farms might be feasible, and that’s if we were to drastically reduce how much meat we eat. A transition to a plant-based food system could save an estimated 24 percent of total land use and feed around 700 million people — about double the entire population of the United States. 

That doesn’t seem to line up with the way Americans still want to eat meat. And it’s a far cry from the approach RFK Jr. and his MAHA acolytes are championing. A recent interview on Fox News took place over burgers at a fast food chain — one that had apparently agreed to stop serving seed oils. Even if current trends have made RFK Jr.’s plans for taking the food system back in time sound appealing, his ideas are simply not going to play out that way in reality.


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


get more stories like this via email