Maine has one of New England’s highest food insecurity rates
Phylis Allen spends her days looking for things. She searches for potatoes at Sam’s Club, cheap beets and ginger at Walmart and a local grocery store. She studies the weekly inventory from Good Shepherd, Maine’s only food bank, for good deals on butter and cheese.
Every Monday morning, she shops at three different stores, keeping lists of prices in her head and remembering what particular clients want. On a recent trip to Sam’s Club, she was searching for affordable eggs.
The diminutive 78-year-old food pantry director found them in a huge cooler. Stretching, she pulled two huge boxes off the top shelf — seven dozen eggs each, $21 a box. “$2.82 a dozen,” she said. “That’s a good price for eggs.”
The eggs were destined for Neighbor’s Cupboard, the food pantry in Winterport, Maine, that Allen has helped run for the past 17 years. Every Wednesday, she and a tightknit group of volunteers provide 25 to 30 families with heaping bags of food.
Maine has long been one of the most food insecure states in New England. Directors of food pantries say the task of making sure people are fed is getting harder because of diminishing food supplies, increasing demand and an overwhelming reliance on volunteers, many of whom are retirees with ages up into their 80s.
About one in seven people in rural Waldo County, where Neighbor’s Cupboard is, were food insecure in 2023, a rate that was similar to the state and national average, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Feeding America data.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will stop collecting and releasing statistics on food insecurity after October, saying on Sept. 20 that the numbers had become “overly politicized.”
In March, the Trump administration cut more than $1 billion from two U.S. Department of Agriculture programs — the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which provides free food to food banks nationwide, and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provides funds to state, territorial and tribal governments to purchase food from local farmers for distribution to hunger relief organizations.
“I can watch the availability of federal food going down every month,” Allen said.
Charitable food networks are also bracing for $186 billion in cuts for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the federal low-income nutrition program better known as food stamps. In turn, Feeding America predicts that food pantries will see more demand.
Complicating matters is the infrastructure through which the U.S. distributes most food to those who need help.
