An Interview with Michael Burger of Tri-Area Ministry Food Pantry
By Matt Moss
How have the changes to TEFAP affected Tri-Area Ministry’s ability to serve our community?
It’s nuanced. There are three food banks in North Carolina, one to the east, one sort of in the middle, and then one on the west. The food banks can essentially act as wholesalers for food pantries like us. The food banks work with companies, supermarket chains, large donors, etc. and they get donations of food or sometimes of money, with which they buy food. They then make that food available to each of their distribution partner agencies, like us. The Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, which is down in Raleigh, has around seven hundred different distribution partners, and we’re one of them.
One of the programs that the food bank participates in is TEFAP, The Emergency Food Assistance Program. It is a USDA program designed to provide food for food banks, who in turn get it into the hands of food pantries like us for distribution to the public. The TEFAP program has been significantly cut, as many others have been recently, and it has been sudden and without warning, as most of these changes have been as well. Contracted deliveries have been turned around en route, and overall it has dramatically decreased the amount of food that we’re receiving from the food bank through that grant.
A little less than half of the food that we distribute comes from the food bank. So if that amount gets reduced, even by half, that means that we have 25 percent less food that we’re going to be able to distribute, because we’re not going to make up that shortfall easily, at least not in the short term.
We’re waiting to see what’s going to happen, and the food bank only knows what they read in the paper—there hasn’t been any official announcement other than to say that things are being canceled, but no definitive word on what’s going to happen. The justification that we’ve heard is that the program was envisioned to be an emergency food assistance program and the federal government is saying, “Well, whatever that emergency was, it’s over, so we don’t need this program anymore.”
TEFAP has been around since 1981. It’s not something that was created just for COVID or something like that—it’s been around for a long while. So food banks and pantries depend on it because it’s a good source of food that is paid for by the government. There was an increase in the amount of food running through the TEFAP program during COVID. Some of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds that were approved by Congress were put into the program, so the amount of had increased, and then began to decrease because the ARPA funds were spent.
But it has now dipped lower than it ever was. I’ve been doing this for eight years, and this is the smallest amount that we’ve seen through this program in all that time. There was also another grant program designed for food banks to purchase produce from local farmers which has been discontinued, called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Program. We prefer to support local farmers as opposed to nationwide wholesalers like Sysco, US Foods, etc. But the challenge is that the pricing that you can get from Sysco and US Foods is far better than from a local farmer simply because of their infrastructure and the way those national companies do business.
So the idea behind the grant was to subsidize the cost of the locally grown produce so that it’s on par with a national wholesaler, so the farmers cover their costs and still sell locally, and the food pantries have local produce to distribute. That grant program started in 2024 and was administered through the food bank. It was a good program for a couple of reasons. It supported the local farm community, and it supported food security. And that program has just been terminated. There are now zero dollars for that.
So what that means is, when we go or the food bank goes to buy produce, instead of going to local farmers, we’re going to purchase from the national wholesalers because it’s significantly less expensive. While we would love to support local, we won’t have enough food if we spend all our money locally.
The good news is that there’s still lots of locally grown produce. We get food from four different community gardens, as well as backyard farmers and gardeners. When they have too many vegetables, they’ll bring them to us. So we do have a lot of locally grown stuff, and the termination won’t be quite as impactful until the growing season here is done. Then, we’re going to have to go back to purchasing produce from somewhere.
Each family that comes to see us is able to come once a month and gets about a hundred pounds of food. About half of that poundage is fresh food. They get meat, milk, eggs, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, a loaf of bread, etc. Those are sort of the staples. In addition to that, they receive non-perishables: rice, beans, breakfast cereal, those sorts of things. We offer baby diapers and feminine hygiene products as well.
We have some funds in the bank that we have put away for a rainy day because our operating expenses generally are a little bit lower than our income, so we have some money that we’ll be able to use to keep that variety and the quantity stable. But we don’t have the kind of income to cover the significant amount of food that we’re getting from TEFAP. The only alternative there is to just reduce the amount that we give to each family.
It’s almost the perfect storm, because we have people who are federal employees losing their jobs and there are more and more people who need help with food, especially considering impending cuts to SNAP benefits. And then there’s less and less food in the donation channel for those people to receive. It’s a tough spot.
I recall you mentioning nothing like this has ever happened before. Is this completely unprecedented?
Well, there have always been fluctuations in what is available in the donation channel. When the economy is tough, corporations and individuals have less to donate, and so as a result, there is less food available in the channel for us to distribute. But those kinds of peaks and valleys are minor compared to this because of how significant the TEFAP program is as a contributor to food banks. And it’s not just here—TEFAP is a federal USDA program. Every food bank across the country is a participant in TEFAP. So across the country, there’s a dramatic reduction in the amount of food that’s available in that channel. That means that every food pantry, large and small—we’re one of the bigger ones—even those in a church basement only open once a month—if they’re a participant with a food bank, chances are some of the food that they’re getting comes through TEFAP. So this is a pretty dramatic change.
Now, I was thinking, you have to believe that the glass is half full, right? I can’t imagine that a politician gets reelected on a platform of: “Let’s just let hungry people starve.” So, sooner or later, I think that cooler heads will prevail because I don’t think that anyone can argue that it’s not appropriate for the USDA to be funding to this program. Especially since they’re purchasing these commodities from US companies, farmers, and businesses. It’s not as if we’re buying from China just to hand things out in the US. It’s a full circle thing. All the different commodities through the TEFAP program are US-grown, US-packaged, and US-sold.
So my hope is that after the shock and awe has subsided, people will think about it and say, “yeah, this is probably something that we ought to do and to maintain.” Maybe it won’t be at the same level as it was in the past, but to stop it 100 percent is tough, especially with no warning. If they told us it will be eliminated a year from now, then at least we would have a year to figure out a game plan. Maybe we could find other sources, maybe we could lean more on private industry. There are a bunch of things that could be done, but none of those things can be done in a month.
If you could wave a magic wand and have everything exactly how you envisioned, what would you want to do, besides restoring TEFAP?
Well, our goal as a food pantry is obsolescence. We would rather not have a reason to be here. If everybody had plenty of food, then there’s no reason for us. We’ve been here since 1988, and yet we serve more families now than ever before. So the problem is still growing. The true solution to food insecurity is jobs and housing. If people have affordable housing and employment and a wage that they can live on, they don’t need food from the food pantry. Those are issues which are far greater than I or our food pantry can address, but if you wanted to look at the big picture and what solves food insecurity, what solves it is to have people be able to support themselves so they don’t have to decide, “Do I pay the rent or do I buy food?”
That’s the big picture answer. The small picture answer is for the support we receive from programs like TEFAP to be both steady and predictable. Not really knowing what’s happening and for there to be just a sudden snap of a finger and it stops—that makes it really difficult for organizations like ours. We have people who come once a month, and if suddenly next month I give them half as much, their first question will be, “How am I going to feed my family?”
Things change. I get that. Things are much different now than they were eight years ago when I started doing this. And we’ve evolved with the changes—when they can be steady and predictable, then at least we can deal with them.
Matt Moss is a Wake County resident and passionate advocate for a just transition in response to the ongoing polycrisis.