Sara Busse needed to make a hot meal for 40 needy seniors. She had promised a main dish, a starch, a vegetable, a fruit and a dessert.
In the past, she had gotten many of those ingredients for free from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
This time, she had dried cranberries, crackers and vegetable soup.
“What am I supposed to do?” she said. “What am I supposed to cook?”
That put more pressure on charitable organizations that distribute groceries or meals to hold up their corner of the American safety net, dipping into reserves and scrounging for donations to replace the food they had lost.
Ms. Busse’s charity in the shadow of West Virginia’s Capitol illustrates this struggle in miniature. Trinity’s Table serves meals at a senior gathering, a child-care center and a women’s shelter, all to people living in or near poverty. For many of her clients, Ms. Busse said, this may be the heartiest meal of the week — and perhaps the only one of the day.
In the past few months, Ms. Busse had already spent $10,000 — a third of her group’s savings — to keep the meals going, replacing the ingredients the government was no longer providing.
She said she had begun to feel as if she were trapped in some grim reality cooking show, forced to turn a dwindling supply of federal aid into 600 meals a week, for as long she could.
“It’s like being on ‘Chopped,’ every week,” Ms. Busse said, as another volunteer began opening cans of vegetable soup. It was 10 a.m. The seniors ate at noon. “We get weird stuff, and we make it into a meal.”
The Agriculture Department began helping food banks this way in the 1980s, with a program that served a dual purpose: It provided nutritional items to needy individuals but also propped up prices for U.S. farmers, by buying their goods and then giving them away.
During his first term, President Trump did not cut this aid; he increased it, sharply, to accommodate farm surpluses caused by his trade wars and the hunger that followed the Covid-19 pandemic. Spending on food aid quadrupled, to $3 billion in 2020.
This time, however, Mr. Trump’s administration did the opposite. It canceled about $1 billion in food aid announced last fall by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to Feeding America. Feeding America said that, before those cuts, it had projected that the government would spend $2 billion on aid to food banks this fiscal year.
The Agriculture Department has defended these moves as fiscally responsible, paring back pandemic-era aid programs that Mr. Biden had allowed to remain bloated long past their time.
“The program continues to operate uninterrupted, as originally intended by Congress,” a spokesperson for the Agriculture Department wrote.
The sudden cutbacks hit hard in Appalachia, where hunger is especially prevalent and government aid plays an outsize role in fighting it.
Food banks in cities typically get 25 percent or less of their food from the Agriculture Department. They have other options: donations from big-box stores and grocery distribution centers, wealthy benefactors and companies.
Not here.
Facing Hunger Foodbank, which supplies groceries to food pantries and charity kitchens in the southern half of West Virginia, relied on the government for about 40 percent of its food.
It had been expecting 16 truckloads from the government for April. Then 11 of those were canceled, said Cyndi Kirkhart, the food bank’s chief executive.
“Typically, these would be full,” Ms. Kirkhart said, walking through largely empty walk-in freezers at her warehouse in Huntington, W.Va., that held deliveries of Agriculture Department meat. There was a small stack of boxes holding ground pork, and a few dozen boxes of frozen whitefish. “This is the last of the meat that we received from U.S.D.A.,” she said.
Ms. Kirkhart said her deliveries from the government had fallen by 42 percent this year. She said they also had been more disjointed: Instead of supplying meat, cheese and pasta together, she had gotten odds and ends that were harder to assemble into a main dish. Looking ahead into the government deliveries scheduled for later this year, she said, it did not look any better.
“In July, I’ve got baked beans, I have apple sauce and we have rolled oats,” she said, scrolling through deliveries scheduled for the summer. “I don’t know what you do with that.”
It was not just the food banks that were caught off guard.
One of the Biden-era programs ended by the Trump administration paid for food banks to buy food from local farmers, whose goods are often fresher but more expensive.
In Ripley, W. Va., Aaron Simon had vastly expanded his operation to cater to this business: He built a slaughterhouse and meat-cutting facilities for more than a million dollars, borrowing money on the expectation that he could sell 7,000 pounds of ground meat every month to West Virginia food banks, for $50,000 a month in revenue.
Now, Mr. Simon said his orders from food banks have shrunk to a fifth of that, as the remaining money in the program is exhausted. He was told that next month’s order would be the last. He has halted his expansion plans, and stopped buying cows from local farmers.
He said he agreed with Mr. Trump’s desire to cut waste in the budget. But, in his view, this was not waste.
“They don’t understand: ‘Hey, you’re cutting the backbone of America,’” Mr. Simon said. “If he knew what was exactly happening right now, I don’t think he would support that at all.”
In West Virginia, food pantries are often run by rural churches, facing extreme poverty. Some say they make sure to stock foods that can be cooked over a fire, for clients without electricity. Seeing this shortfall coming, many leaders said they prayed for another source to emerge, something that would replace what was missing.
Then, in late February, something did.
“The Cheez-It truck crashed,” said Kim Dockus, who helps runs a food pantry at reGeneration Church in Huntington.
Mr. Dockus was celebrating the fact that a semi hauling 21,000 pounds of cheese crackers had overturned on a bridge that connected Ohio and West Virginia. The insurance company donated the Cheez-Its. “Most of them were good,” Mr. Dockus said. “It was just a few that came in a little bit smashed.”
“We don’t pray for those things to happen,” said Jackie Thompson, who runs a food bank at the Church of Christ in Guyandotte, W.Va.
It was a mixed blessing, in any event: The charities lost truckloads of meat and vegetables and gained a truck of snack foods, which would fill the belly but not provide much in the way of nutrients. The demand had not changed, even if the supply had.
That was the reason Ms. Busse, a former newspaper reporter who runs the soup kitchen and food pantry at Charleston’s Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church, felt like she had suddenly been cast on a reality show.
Even in good times, hers is a job that requires creativity and relentlessness. When people in the community die, she asks for their spices. When she was stuck with a glut of dried split peas at the food pantry last year — clients found them too hard to cook — she fed them to deer. The deer later became lunch.
“Made the venison into spaghetti,” she said.
But now, she had lost about a quarter of her food. Ms. Busse said that she began to fill the gaps by spending down the savings, and by wheedling more donations out of parishioners. She worried that, if she served incomplete meals, her clients might not show up, missing out on one of the few full meals they eat in a week.
That meant that she had do make something complete out of the crackers, cranberries and vegetable soup.
First, she needed a main dish. So she used $35 of the church’s money to buy ground beef and chicken stock, fortifying the government’s wan soup. The crackers would be her starch. Then she got a parishioner to make three big pans of spinach salad, to go with the government’s cranberries. Vegetable, check.
For the finale, she thawed out an apple crisp that dated to the Biden administration. There was the fruit. It was coated in sugar, but it was fruit. When noon arrived, the seniors liked it enough to take home leftovers (though they left most of the cranberries).
“This affects professional people, who have always worked, always contributed,” but wind up in need, said Patricia Rosebourgh, 75, a retired teacher, as she waited in line for the food at the Roosevelt Community Center. She said she was not a supporter of Mr. Trump, and that she had predicted he and Elon Musk would cut aid. “People just didn’t think: It could affect me.”
One client gratefully slipped a chocolate egg into the pocket of Ms. Busse’s apron.
But Ms. Busse said both her money and her parishioners’ patience appear to be dwindling. It will be hard to keep this up for months more.
Ms. Kirkhart had already seen next month’s challenge. Ms. Busse’s next delivery would include none of something that Ms. Busse needed: green vegetables. And it would include 48 pounds of something she didn’t need at all: fig pieces.
“Fig. Pieces.” Ms. Kirkhart said, pausing for emphasis. She had not had the heart to tell Ms. Busse yet. “It’s not even a whole fig.”
