John Schmidt sits at a squeaky picnic table outside Dimitri House on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. He was there for the nonprofit's free community lunch that it offers from noon to 3 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
A takeout container and an empty cup of coffee rest on the wooden table in front of him.
“I usually come here a couple of times a week. ... Free food, the easiest way.” Schmidt said. “I have also been homeless, so the food is a lot better here than in the shelters.”
Schmidt, 54, participates in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and receives public assistance. He has his benefits now, but when the federal government would not release those funds during the government shutdown, life got harder.
Schmidt is one of about 3 million people across the state who rely on SNAP for food assistance and found themselves in the crosshairs of a political stalemate this month.
He looked up different food pantries he could get to by bicycle or bus, his current modes of transportation.
“Some of them only do by ZIP code, some of them only do by your family type, kids or not," Schmidt said. "So I had to come up with a plan, because I'm also in school full time, and most of them are open on a day that I'm in school. So, I either had to take off a couple hours of school or find the ones that are open on the weekends. ... The furthest one I had to travel to, I think it's about four miles back, four miles there.”
That meant time away from other things, like studying. He’s attending Rochester Educational Opportunity Center for cosmetology, adding to his skillset as a barber — a service he provides as a volunteer at different community outreach sites. He used to volunteer to cut hair at Dimitri House, too, he said.
Dimitri also has a food pantry, and like other sites, it saw a spike in need from mid-October into mid-November. They usually serve about two dozen households a day here, executive director Laurie Prizel said. That doubled.
“If you could see the cupboards right now compared to what I could have showed you a couple weeks ago, we had empty shelves," Prizel said. "And even if people came and donated, what we were getting, it was coming in and it was literally going out the door the same day. So now we're back to a little bit of a comfort zone as far as our food cupboard goes.”
There have been new faces visiting the pantry, people without dependents who Prizel called “working poor.”
“Without those food stamps to go out and buy their food, they were desperate, absolutely desperate,” she said. “They're paying a lot more for rent, they're paying a lot more for health insurance, all the other things that are kind of happening right now. And by the time they're paying the bills, they don't have money left for food.”
As she’s talking, notifications ding incessantly from her smartwatch, which she turns off, and then from her phone — work emails and texts. She reads some of the messages aloud.
“This one is from a woman that said, 'I just saw your website and your request for food in the Adopt-a-Family. Can I still do this?’” she said, referring to a community food delivery program. “That's kind of amazing that, like, two days before Thanksgiving, somebody is willing to go out and shop? ... There's another person in here that's asking when our food cupboards open."
“So that's just a couple of them that came through in just the time we're sitting here,” she added.
Dimitri House partners with the emergency food distribution organization Foodlink. The regional food bank reported a significant spike in demand across 10 counties in the Finger Lakes and Rochester region.
“We saw a 500% increase in our Find Food map on our website,” said Terra Keller, chief financial and operating officer at Foodlink. “Normally, I want to say it's something like 300 clicks we see per month, and we were at 1,500 clicks of people just typing in their ZIP code to see where their nearest food pantry or meal program was.”
The recent wave of emergency food distribution isn’t the end of heightened food insecurity in the area, Keller said. With SNAP benefit eligibility requirements changing, Foodlink is bracing for more need soon. It's possible that 15,000 to 18,000 people will lose SNAP benefits in the area the organization serves.
“Those are the numbers we've been working with and preparing for to increase the amount of food we make sure we make available ... to meet the need of our partners so they can order the food they need as they continue to see more neighbors coming to the door and needing to access their services,” she said.
