By Noah Bloedorn

November 7, 2025

The state of emergency food in Dane County is at a turning point. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, our community saw an unprecedented surge of resources and innovative programming. This included significant funding to purchase local food, including programs intentionally investing in BIPOC farmers to supply culturally-relevant food. Coupled with stimulus checks and universal free school meals, these efforts successfully drove food insecurity down to an estimated 6% of the population in Dane County.

A few short years later, the landscape has drastically changed. Most of that crucial funding has dried up: universal free school meals are gone, stimulus checks have ended, and vital programs like the Local Food Purchase Assistance (LFPA) and Local Food for Schools (LFS) are no longer funded. In many cases, this has left farmers high and dry this year with no markets for their produce. Coupled with a challenging economy, this withdrawal has caused demand for food at pantries and food banks to skyrocket.

A System Under Severe Strain

Our data—gathered through lagging indicators and intel from our partner food banks and pantries—suggested that food insecurity was sitting around 13% to 15% before the current government benefit crisis hit. With the combination of furloughed government employees and unstable federal benefits, those numbers are surely climbing, pushing our emergency system past its breaking point.

What we are witnessing now is a state of chaos at the pantry level. Pantries are struggling to stock their shelves to keep up with demand. While judges have ordered that contingency funding should be restored to SNAP, the actual execution of restoring those funds is uncertain. The reality is simple: our food safety net is a house of cards ready to collapse.

Immediate Hunger and Long-Term Fixes

This crisis exposes a fundamental truth: our food system is fragile and designed primarily around profit. This design creates deep inequities in who is able to access food and who benefits financially from its sale.

The purpose of the Food Action Plan project is to combat this fragility and build a local and regional food system that is equitable and based in community values from care to environment, to fair labor and animal welfare practices to equitable profit and access to food. Today, we are faced with two urgent problems: How do we deal with immediate hunger, and how do we invest our time, energy, and money to build a food system that can withstand times of crisis?

In the immediate, check out the article by Abha Thakkar to see how you can best effect change through Mutual Aid strategies. 

In the long-term we need to invest in infrastructure so that our own community can produce, distribute, store, and process enough food to feed and nourish our community, especially in times of need. Following this process and joining these efforts to build a local and regional food system are key to changing the stability of our food system moving forward.