ELKO, Nev. — On a cold morning in early February, Tammy King prepared and loaded boxes and bags of vegetables, fruits, milk, frozen meat and snacks into cars lined up outside the Friends in Service Helping food pantry, known in rural northeastern Nevada as FISH.
The beginning of the month is busy for the food pantry, King said, because people who receive benefits from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, come to stock up on free food that helps them stretch their monthly allotments. The food pantry, one of a few in this city of about 20,000 people, serves more families now than at any point in King’s 20 years of working there, she said. In January, FISH provided food boxes to nearly 790 people.
But King and other food bank managers fear that demand will spike further in March, when officials roll back pandemic-era increases to SNAP benefits. The program, administered by the Department of Agriculture, provides monthly stipends to people with low incomes to spend on food. Before 2020, those payments averaged a little more than $200 and were hiked by a minimum of $95 during the pandemic.
