With many community (and home) kitchens damaged by floodwaters, Vermont has rebooted a recently sunsetted pandemic-era food distribution program in the wake of July’s catastrophic storms.
Vermont Everyone Eats, a program that paid restaurants $10 per ready-made meal for free distribution through local charities and food pantries, shut down this spring after nearly three years in operation when federal Covid aid dried up. But a new iteration of the program — called Vermont Emergency Eats — is now back in operation.
Nate Formalarie, the director of communications and strategic initiatives at the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development, said that, before the floods came, state officials had already been in discussions about how to reactivate the popular program in case of a crisis. Officials have since set aside $900,000 in state funds, he said — enough to pay for about 3,000 meals a day for a month.
“It being an emergency, it was just said: ‘Yes, let’s do this.’ I think as the dust settles, we’ll probably look to (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) to see if they would kick in some reimbursement on that,” he said. “But we wanted to get it going as quickly as possible.”
Restaurants that are paid to prepare the meals must be located in one of the nine counties included in the federal government’s major disaster declaration — that’s Caledonia, Chittenden, Lamoille, Orange, Orleans, Rutland, Washington, Windham and Windsor counties. People don’t necessarily need to live in those counties to receive the meals, but that’s where distribution hubs are located.
Amanda Witman, the program’s coordinator, said the first round of meals went out on Monday, and about two dozen restaurants are already participating.
“It’s pretty exciting to be in a position of taking our long-term, pandemic-era model and adapting it on the fly to create an emergency program,” she said, adding that officials hope to create an enduring model that’ll be ready to be reactivated in the case of future crises.
The rebooted anti-hunger and economic development initiative comes amid widespread disruption of Vermont’s food system. Local farmers sustained major crop losses, downtown restaurants were devastated, and food pantries and churches that were serving vulnerable Vermonters in some cases themselves lost equipment — or entire kitchens.
The Montpelier Food Pantry, for example, which was operating out of the Trinity United Methodist Church basement in Montpelier, lost all of its equipment and inventory when the capital’s downtown core was inundated last month. And local churches that were cooking daily community meals, and serving a large population of people experiencing homelessness, also had major damage to their kitchens.
Jaime Bedard, the Montpelier Food Pantry’s executive director, proudly noted that, aside from the Tuesday immediately following the storm, the food pantry hasn’t missed a distribution day. (It’s currently operating out of a temporary location at the Center for Arts and Learning.) But with much less cold storage space available, she’s stocking less perishable food — and worried about finding a permanent and affordable space to eventually relocate to.
“I’m getting a little sticker shock when I’m looking at real estate here,” she said.
Statewide, meanwhile, the Vermont Foodbank is seeing what it calls “Covid levels” of ordering from its local partners, and notes that, during the pandemic, the food bank distributed higher volumes of food than any time in the organization’s history. In the month after the July floods, the nonprofit moved over 1.2 million pounds of food — a 45% increase from the prior month.
“It’s kind of a crisis on top of a crisis,” said John Sayles, CEO of the Vermont Foodbank.
In Cabot, Elizabeth Vitale, executive director of Neighbors in Action, which operates the local food shelf, said traffic at the nonprofit’s most recent weekly food share was actually roughly double what it was seeing at the height of the pandemic. She said she’s thrilled the pandemic-era program is back — and hopes it sticks around at least a little longer than the 30 days it’s been approved for.
There are plenty of practical reasons why ready-made meals fill an important need, Vitale said. Many of the food pantry’s clients are homeless, and have nowhere to cook. Elderly clients or those with disabilities can struggle to prepare a meal at home. And those impacted by the flood may be displaced, or even if they’re home, some of their appliances or utilities might still be offline because of storm-related damage.
But Vitale said there are also more intangible ways in which hot, prepared foods bring comfort in times of stress.
“You know, when somebody’s sick, you bring them a meal, right?” she said. “And so it’s kind of like our state being like: ‘We care about you and your situation.’”
