Gloria Cadotte stood in line with her 5-year-old grandson Adrian. Slightly hunched and with a slow gait, Cadotte wheeled her walker full of cardboard boxes, collecting the onions, carrots, apples and potatoes being distributed at the Waite House Food Shelf in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning.
Cadotte, 75, has been coming to Waite House ever since it opened in the 1980s, and has seen a reduction in food quantity over time, with fewer options for protein and fresh produce. She needs both in her diet as she awaits kidney transplant surgery.
Waite House isn’t the only food shelf struggling to maintain the quality and supply of its food. A wave of federal funding cuts has strained food shelves nationwide, pushing places like Waite House to rethink how they operate in order to meet rising demand with fewer resources.
The federal cuts
In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cancelled $1 billion in funding for schools and food banks to buy food from local suppliers. Of that, $420 million was for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement (LFPA), which allowed food banks to purchase local produce, increasing their supply of fresh produce and boosting local farmers…