Happy Friday, and welcome to Food Fix. If you work in the food space, it’s worth upgrading to also get Tuesday newsletters, which cover more topics and are (I’m told) enormously helpful for making sense of the food policy landscape. This week, I wrote about the potential impact of the CDC layoffs and why MAHA leaders are eyeing the midterm elections.
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Alright, let’s get to it –
Helena
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Why SNAP benefits are at risk as shutdown drags on
We are now on day 17 of the government shutdown, and there is no end in sight. By now, we’ve all seen the steady stream of headlines about things that are at risk amid a funding lapse, like routine food safety inspections and air traffic control.
In the early days of this debacle, there was a ton of focus on funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, commonly known as WIC — and rightly so, as it appeared funding was set to run out within a week or two. Just under half of all infants born in the U.S. receive WIC benefits — we’re talking about sweeping impact here.
With the clock ticking and pressure mounting, the White House found a workaround to keep WIC funded: Using tariff revenue.
“President Trump and the White House have identified a creative solution to transfer resources from Section 232 tariff revenue to this critical program,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios earlier this month. “The Trump White House will not allow impoverished mothers and their babies to go hungry because of the Democrats’ political games.”
Batten down the hatches: In many ways, the Trump administration has bent over backwards trying to lessen the impact of the shutdown, which makes this shutdown super weird. Usually, there’s an incentive to make a government shutdown as painful as possible — a form of leverage to force negotiation and, ultimately, a resolution.
For this shutdown, however, President Donald Trump seems to be daring Democrats to dig in: Go ahead, insist on fixing health care subsidies first, we’ll just keep it all shut down – and also lay off thousands of government workers in the meantime. (A court did temporarily block these reductions in force during the shutdown, for what it’s worth.)
Top officials have been saying as much: “[The White House Office of Management and Budget] is making every preparation to batten down the hatches and ride out the Democrats’ intransigence,” an official told Punchbowl News this week. “Pay the troops, pay law enforcement, continue the [reductions in force], and wait.”
SNAP cliff: So the White House has been clear: They are preparing for this to drag on, but what does that mean for the other nutrition programs? WIC was uniquely vulnerable, but as I wrote when the shutdown first began, other programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are basically OK as long as the shutdown doesn’t last long. We’re now entering a zone where things are not OK as there are very real concerns about whether the federal government will be able to pay out November SNAP benefits.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Thursday outside the White House that SNAP will run out of funds: “We’re going to run out of money in two weeks. So you’re talking about millions and millions of vulnerable families, of hungry families, that are not going to have access to these programs because of this shutdown.”
The Trump administration was able to find a fix for WIC, but that program needs somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 million per month to operate. SNAP is on a whole different level, with monthly costs more like $8 billion per month. That’s real money, even for USDA, which has more spending leeway (and frankly slush funds) than many federal agencies.
Anti-hunger advocates are raising alarms about all of this right now.
“USDA must ensure that funding is available for SNAP so that participants continue to receive benefits as they have done during previous shutdowns,” said Crystal FitzSimons, president of Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). “Just as the administration has found ways to protect its other priorities during this shutdown, it must also act with the same urgency to protect SNAP. USDA should utilize its contingency reserves and any additional funding sources to ensure that benefits are not disrupted.”
Contingency funds: There is a SNAP contingency fund to help bridge the gap during debacles like this — and let’s be clear, this is a debacle — but I’m hearing conflicting things about how much is available in that pot. Multiple sources told me it’s around $6 billion. But some in Washington are worried the fund is lower than that, closer to $4 billion. Either way, it’s short of the more than $8 billion USDA probably needs for November benefits.
Because there isn’t enough to cover November, the administration would need to get creative to fix this. They could find money elsewhere to make up the gap, or they could issue a pro-rated amount of benefits for November. This is all a huge mess, but if there’s a will, there’s a way. (Of course, the most direct fix is for Congress to re-open the government ASAP, but that doesn’t appear likely.)
Ripple effects: As the benefits cliff approaches, Minnesota has already said they will stop processing new SNAP applications. That means a single parent with two kids who just lost their job can’t count on those benefits when they really need them, heading into the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. If this continues on, other states will likely follow.
The scale of this cliff is enormous: Nearly 42 million people rely on SNAP benefits to purchase groceries each month. We’ve had government shutdowns over time, but SNAP benefits have never just not gone out (though they did once get issued early to avoid a lapse).
We’re staring down a very real impact on millions of households and also the entire grocery industry — that $8 billion flows through the economy quicker than a lot of other federal money because it’s mostly spent within weeks.
This is a big deal — and I wonder if it could alter the dynamics of the shutdown. Messing with food is playing with fire.
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What I’m reading
At least 27 states turned over sensitive data about food stamp recipients to USDA (NPR). “Since late July, most Democratic-led states have refused to give in to an unprecedented demand from the Trump administration to turn over personal information on federal food assistance recipients going back to 2020, including their names, dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers and benefits amounts,” reports Jude Joffe-Block. “Yet most states with a Republican governor have already complied. NPR’s reporting found at least 27 states have already shared data on millions of people who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP. Democratic state officials have argued the data demand is unlawful and likely part of a pattern of the Trump administration aggregating Americans’ personal data for purposes that include immigration enforcement. Those states won a victory in court on Wednesday when U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney in San Francisco issued a preliminary order blocking the Trump administration from punishing them for refusing to turn over SNAP data.”
How America got hooked on ultraprocessed food (New York Times). “Humans have been processing food for millenniums. But in the late 1800s, food companies began concocting products that were wildly different from anything people could make themselves,” writes Alice Callahan. “Over decades, they came to dominate the American food supply. During World War II, shelf-stable foods like powdered cheeses, dehydrated potatoes, canned meats and melt-resistant chocolate bars were developed to feed soldiers. After the war, food companies realized that they could adapt this foxhole cuisine into profitable convenience foods for the masses. By the 21st century, you couldn’t walk through a school cafeteria, supermarket or airport without being inundated by ultraprocessed foods. Obesity kept ticking up, affecting about 36 percent of adults and nearly 17 percent of children in the United States by 2010. For generations, obesity was seen as a problem of willpower — caused by eating too much, and exercising too little. But in the last decade, research on ultraprocessed foods has challenged that notion, suggesting that these foods may drive us to eat more. Are we at a tipping point?”
Open-source moment for cultivated meat as GFI releases SCiFi Foods’ cell lines to academia (AgFunderNews). “Developing new cell lines takes time and money, two things the cultivated meat space sorely lacks, says The Good Food Institute (GFI), which has acquired cell lines and serum-free media formulations from defunct startup SCiFi Foods to make them available first to academia and later, the wider industry,” writes Elaine Watson. “Making SCiFi’s cell lines and serum-free growth media recipes widely available will remove barriers to entry for future startups and help catalyze the field, reducing redundancies for all key stakeholders, claimed Dr. Amanda Hildebrand, VP science and technology at the GFI, a nonprofit dedicated to finding alternatives to industrial-scale animal agriculture. GFI and Tufts University are initially making the cell lines available to academia and are working to enable industry access, said GFI principal cultivated meat scientist Dr. Elliot Swartz, who noted that the cultivated meat sector lacks commercially relevant cell lines that can serve as ‘research workhorses’ analogous to CHO, HEK, and C2C12 cells used in biopharma.”
In Texas, ex-vegan restaurateurs put MAHA’s vision for farming to the test (STAT). “You could be forgiven for thinking Ryland Engelhart is religious. ‘This is very me,’ the 45-year-old says as he maneuvers his golf cart past a massive, three-dimensional heart he carved out of wood using a chainsaw. ‘The heart is the vessel in which we receive messages.’ This place, Sovereignty Ranch, is his message received,” writes Isabella Cueto. “Engelhart is not a person you would expect to find in a sparsely populated county one hour northwest of San Antonio. He has no drawl or spurs or try-me macho demeanor. He has more of a yoga teacher vibe. After decades of dishing out raw vegan bowls to stars and their wranglers at his family’s California restaurants, he’s decided to take up a new life as a ‘regenerative’ farmer in Texas. That transition has been a long time coming for Engelhart and his sister, a successful vegan chef, who decided to move their families onto this compound in January 2023. Now, with the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ideologically blended Make America Healthy Again movement, the Engelharts’ project is also a proof-of-concept. It’s precisely the kind of decentralized, small-scale, family-owned, and chemical-free farm Kennedy and many of his followers hold as a utopian vision for the future.”
Something weird is happening with Halloween chocolate (The Atlantic). “My first thought upon seeing the Halloween-candy display at my local CVS last week was: Ooh, new treats! Then a second thought barged in: These new treats seemed awfully light on the chocolate,” Yasmin Tayag writes. “Candy manufacturers release new versions of old sweets all the time, but the timing of these decidedly un-chocolaty varieties is curious: They’ve all launched within the past two years, as the world supply of cocoa beans has dwindled, causing prices to skyrocket. Making cheap chocolate treats is no longer a cheap endeavor—unless they contain less chocolate. Since 2023, West Africa, where most of the world’s cocoa is grown, has had consecutive below-average harvests, owing to bad weather, crop disease, and illegal gold mining on farmland. A global shortage ensued, and the price of cocoa fluctuated wildly, reaching a record high of more than $12,000 a ton last December … Cocoa prices have become so volatile that banking on chocolate-based products is now a huge risk for candy makers.”
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