After seeing the economic pressures people were facing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Center for Small Towns – an organization connected to the University of Minnesota-Morris – began looking into what challenges their community faced when it came to food security.
The team found that many people in Stevens County experienced food insecurity. Separate data showed that between 2016 and 2020, more than 250 households in the county received SNAP benefits and free and reduced lunch rates ranged from 16%-45% in the local school districts.
Of 237 people surveyed in the spring of 2022, at least 22% were food insecure to some degree. The researchers defined food security as “a situation in which an individual or household always has access to sufficient nutritious and culturally acceptable foods that enable a healthy, active lifestyle.”
Two-thirds of survey respondents indicated they experienced at least one barrier to food access with the top barrier being the time of year (availability of garden produce) followed by distance to food sources. After better understanding the factors behind food insecurity in Stevens County, this year, the center sought to conduct similar surveys and analyses of Stevens and its neighboring counties: Traverse, Douglas, Grant and Pope.
Grocery store affordability and access
The center’s first food assessment compared the prices of a supermarket in town to Walmart over three different occasions, purchasing items on the USDA’s Thrifty Food plan, which is the USDA’s guideline for a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet for a family of four. The store in town, Willie’s SuperValu, had significantly higher prices than Walmart, which is more than 45 minutes away, and the research found that the people who were identified as food insecure were less likely than other respondents to shop at Willie’s SuperValu. Its prices for the thrifty food plan at the time were 5-10% higher than the national average, and the weekly trip at Walmart was around 33% lower than Willie’s SuperValu, the study found.
For most people who live in Morris, there is a grocery store within two miles of their home. But residents of other cities – like Alberta, Donnelly, Hancock and Chokio – have to travel more miles to get to a store. The research found that the transit options in Morris did not provide sufficient access to grocery stores since some of them, like Rainbow Rider, a public transit system in several West Central counties, have fewer operational hours on weekends.
“We have a bus system in Morris that can take you to the local grocery store but if students need to go to Walmart or Aldi’s for an expanded selection or cheaper prices, the closest Walmart to Morris is an hour away and the bus doesn’t go from Morris to there, so there’s no immediate access to an expanded grocery store,” said Danny Kenyon, who was an AmeriCorps VISTA team member on the first food assessment.
Kenyon, who had gone to college in Morris and was familiar with the food shelves in the area, didn’t realize how big of an issue food insecurity was for her county until she worked on this project.
“I lived there for four years. But when you’re living on campus … a lot of your life is basically in that same five-block perimeter. I realized I didn’t actually know a lot about the community that I’ve been living in,” she said. “I realized both how many people were struggling, but also how many people that were struggling weren’t getting help. We found a lot of people that were making poverty level income or lower according to the census; those numbers did not at all match up with people on SNAP benefits or on WIC benefits or going to the food shelf. There was just a huge difference there between people that really needed help, but weren’t using the resources.”
She said the food shelf had some people who came more regularly, but many times there would be people who had to pay unexpected bills for one month, which meant they didn’t have money for groceries that week.
And at the food shelves, certain high-demand items would quickly go.
“We’d often get milk in and it’d be gone in two days. And then we wouldn’t have another (shipment) for two weeks,” she said.
Solutions
Based on the first food assessment, the researchers came up with areas of improvement to address the food insecurity their community was facing, including finding ways to increase access to affordable groceries (including reducing food waste), finding ways to connect residents without stable transportation to food resources, increasing the availability of culturally appropriate foods and creating spaces for more locally grown fresh produce.
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This summer, there will be a community garden near the county’s soil and water conservation district office in Morris. It’ll be around 2,000 square feet and will grow things like tomatoes, potatoes, onions, zucchinis, tomatillos and peppers, said Annabelle Scafe, the Americorps VISTA on this project.
Through this project, Scafe has a better understanding of how neighboring counties have also approached this issue. Traverse County, for example, has a community garden where people buy plots and can use them during the summer, she said.
“We decided the best kind of model for that would be, you can go and get whatever you want from the garden at any time and all of the remaining produce and everything will be donated to the food shelf so that hopefully more people can access it,” Scafe said.
Expanding to five counties
The research that’s been going on this year began in September and is examining food insecurity in Traverse, Douglas, Grant, Pope and Stevens counties throughout an eight-month period. That means comparing prices across different grocery stores in those counties and also doing the survey to understand what the barriers are to food access.
“(The team is) looking at two things. One, item availability. They have their list of items. So staples that people would eat, like their milk, grains, vegetables, canned goods, that kind of thing. Are they in the store? And two is, ‘what’s the price?,’” said Ed Brands, a professor at Morris and project co-lead.
The survey on barriers closes on May 15. The team is encouraging residents of those counties who are 18 years and older to submit responses.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story reported that the food survey noted in the last paragraph would close May 1. The university has since extended the closing date to May 15.
Ava Kian
Ava Kian is MinnPost’s Greater Minnesota reporter. Follow her on Twitter @kian_ava or email her at akian@minnpost.com.
