Bidens’ visit to Houston Food Bank spotlights advocates’ push to bolster food
President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden toured the Houston Food Bank Friday, meeting with volunteers and helping pack boxes of food in the wake of last week’s winter storm.
The Bidens stopped by the food bank as part of a day-long trip to Houston, where residents are recovering from a food shortage after the storm disrupted supply chains and power outages spoiled refrigerated food. Even before the storm, food banks around Texas had begun seeing food shortages after the state Department of Agriculture slashed funding for a program that sends farmers’ surplus produce to food banks and charities.
Jill Biden arrived at the food bank shortly before the president and was joined by Texas First Lady Cecilia Abbott as she placed canned peaches into bags for the Backpack Buddy program, which distributes food on weekends to students who rely on school meals during the week. The first ladies also helped pack food for a federally funded program that distributes boxes of food to low-income seniors.
Katherine Byers, the Houston Food Bank’s government relations director, said officials are hoping the Bidens’ visit will lead to an uptick in donations, as was the case after U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, stopped by the food bank last weekend.
Byers said she also hopes the visit signals Biden’s presidency will bring increased funding for the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, and an extension of the age limit for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC. The program provides food to low-income women, infants and children up to age 5, at which point food advocates say kids can fall into a nutrition gap if they have not yet begun school and started receiving school lunch meals.
“There are a lot of working families out there who really are struggling, and the donations help, but there’s no way we can better people’s lives in the long term by just putting a box of food in front of them,” Byers said. “We want to be able to do that to meet their needs in the short term. But in the long term, we need to see investments in SNAP, we need to see changes in WIC so we’re bridging that 5-to-6-year-old gap.”
Food bank officials also are pushing for the Texas Legislature to reverse Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller’s move to cut funding by more than 40 percent for the Surplus Agricultural Products Grant program as part of the interim agency budget cuts ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The grant pays farmers for fresh produce that would go to waste but instead is delivered to food banks. Houston Food Bank officials say they are losing 4 million pounds of produce due to the cuts, compounding their separate shortage of nonperishable food.
“We really have faced a major dip in supply, mostly in terms of dry, shelf-stable things,” Byers said. “It has an impact on our ability to provide healthy nutrition to families and it has a negative impact on our ability to just maintain our supply, because produce can take the place — at least in terms of poundage — of the dry products.”
State Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, proposed reverting to full funding for the grant program when she laid out the Texas Senate’s base budget last month.
As President Biden toured the food bank Friday, he at one point stopped to give a pep talk to a young girl who was sorting food into bins with her mom and brother, whom Biden had greeted moments earlier.
“My sister has all brothers — me and my two other brothers,” Biden told the young girl. “She’s my best friend in my whole life. My best friend, really. She’s smarter than I am, better looking than I am.”
The girl
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