CADILLAC — Feeding America West Michigan learned that its scheduled food delivery from the United States Department of Agriculture is now cancelled until further notice.
“Yesterday afternoon we were notified that 32 truckloads of food were cancelled that we were planning to receive between April and July,” said Feeding America West Michigan CEO Ken Estelle.
That food is worth more than 1 million dollars and stocks local food banks with healthy staples.
“It was pretty good food, it was things like cheese, ground chicken, ground pork, 2% milk, chicken breasts, drumsticks and turkey. So, it’s basically protein and dairy that was on the trucks, which is generally more expensive.”
While federal cuts are nothing new, this time the process leading to the cuts came swiftly.
“This is the result of the new secretary of agriculture trying to determine how she’s going to spend some of the discretionary funds that are at our disposal,” Estelle said.
Feeding America West Michigan supplies nearly 400,000 people in those 40 counties, and they work through 800 partners that get food from them.
With 600,000 pounds of expected food now halted, people may be wondering what the impact will be for food banks helping those in need.
“It may not be as much of the frozen protein like the turkey and the pork, the ground beef, chicken, and the kind of things that we had hoped, but there will be food there. It may not be as available in terms of protein as we were expecting to have.”
Feeding America West Michigan said the community has already stepped up to ensure local food banks stay stocked.
“I’ve actually had some of our major donors calling me saying how can we help, and so we’re very grateful for not just our food donors that have reached out, but also the financial partners that contacted me as well, saying, we heard about this and we want to know what we can do to help,” Estelle said.
Feeding America typically runs a distribution day in the Wexford County Civic Center in Cadillac, but high winds damaged the roof, so events have been cancelled at the Wex, but that won’t affect the Feeding America distribution.
“So, there will not be a change in that distribution, you may not be inside because there is no roof, but that will absolutely be a distribution there as scheduled, no change.”