The COVID-19 pandemic was a trying time for a lot of reasons, but it had at least one big silver lining: For the first time in years, northern Michigan’s food insecurity numbers went down instead of up.

So says Taylor Moore, director of Food Rescue of Northwest Michigan. That organization, part of Goodwill Northern Michigan, works to salvage unused food from local grocery stores, bakeries, and farms and deliver it to dozens of food pantries and community meal sites throughout the five-county region. According to its website, Food Rescue picks up approximately 8,000 pounds of food per day and tallies 275 deliveries each month.

Those numbers are difficult to increase – Moore says there’s only so much food in the region that can be “rescued” in any given day – but Food Rescue is looking for ways to grow them anyway. That’s because demand on local food pantries has skyrocketed in the past two years. Per Moore, 2023 saw a 35 percent year-over-year increase in food pantry usage across Grand Traverse, Leelanau, Benzie, Kalkaska, and Antrim counties. In 2024, traffic leaped another 41 percent.

Moore points to the sunsetting of pandemic-era support programs as the main reason for the spikes in traffic.

“During the pandemic, a lot of people took notice of the needs that have existed for a long time,” Moore tells The Ticker. “There was just a lot of assistance being provided – the EBT program, school meals for all, the child tax credit, the stimulus checks – and the data shows that those things led to the lowest rates of food insecurity in the last 20 years.”

For Moore and other leaders in the Northwest Food Coalition – an alliance of local organizations working to fight food insecurity in the region – the pandemic era offered a glimpse of what America could look like if taxpayer dollars were funneled more consistently and comprehensively toward lifting up the least fortunate. But those programs were temporary, and despite efforts by the Food Coalition to lobby legislators for more permanent supports, things ultimately went back to “normal.”

“We worked to make sure our representatives knew that, if these programs went away, that would mean going back to a system of people not having as much access to the food that they need, and that the cost of that was going to come down on the food pantries and meal sites,” Moore says. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

The situation has led to an all-hands-on-deck effort at Food Rescue, and Moore says the organization and the food pantries it serves have noticed a corresponding uptick in volunteer assistance. In any given week, he estimates that “there are 1,000 people involved in making Food Rescue happen.” The extra hands are helping Food Rescue collect more food – particularly from local farms – and explain how the organization was able to rescue more food in 2024 than any prior year on record.

It's still not enough.

“The increases that we're seeing still don't match a 41 percent increase in food pantry usage,” Moore says. “And what that means for families is that they go to food pantries now and there's less food for them because the demand is higher.”

With the book closed on pandemic-era supports, Moore says his priority now is doing everything possible to make sure things don’t get worse.

But “worse” is a very real possibility, especially with Congress debating whether to slash spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). That program is at the center of the federal government’s system for helping low-income families put food on the table, and has already lost funding in recent years. SNAP peaked at $119 billion in 2022, before those extra COVID-era benefits expired, and was down to $100 billion last year. Republican lawmakers have indicated a desire to reduce SNAP spending further, though it’s not clear yet how big those cuts will be.

Beyond SNAP, Moore is worried the federal government’s current push to cut spending could put other food support programs in the crosshairs, including TEFAP (The Emergency Food Assistance Program) and the CSFP (Commodity Supplemental Food Program). Like SNAP, those programs are USDA offerings that work to combat food insecurity across the nation. Other programs have already seen cuts: Last month, the USDA slashed more than $1 billion in funding to the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, two programs that support food pantries and school lunch programs.

According to Moore, some 25 percent of the food across northern Michigan food banks is bought by USDA programs. Bigger picture, taking programs like SNAP into account, the federal government “covers almost 95 percent of all the food that people who are food insecure have access to,” he says.

When asked what further federal cuts would mean for northern Michigan’s food assistance ecosystem, Moore says there are simply “too many unknowns” to offer up a good prediction.

“We’re just doing what we can right now, and waiting for what happens in D.C.,” Moore says. “What we do know is that, already, one in seven people in the region will have a situation at some point this year where they don’t have enough money to buy food. We know that about 40 percent of households in our region are struggling to make ends meet. We know that one in three people using food pantries are children, that another third are seniors, and that, in one out of two food insecurity households, there’s someone with a disability. So, something like losing SNAP benefits would disproportionately affect those vulnerable populations, and that’s really upsetting. It’s not the direction our community wants to go in. I feel very certain of that, and I don't think that people will stand for it.”

“The fact that anyone is going hungry in our community in the first place is unacceptable,” Moore concludes. “That it could get worse Is a travesty. It’s devastating. Where is the dignity? Where is the respect for children? We hear stories all the time about children who did not have dinner the night before because their family didn't have the money. And that, to me, is absurd.”