San Francisco farmers’ markets are overflowing with summer’s plentiful bounty, but many lower-income residents will never get a taste.
The Bay Area has a plethora of not-for-profit programs dedicated to healthy eating but it can’t seem to figure out how to get the food grown here on to the plates of some of the residents who need it most.
Despite an increase in visitors to farmers’ markets across the region, some venues have seen a decline in shoppers paying with food stamps.
“Farmers’ markets were meant to be community spaces for everyone – they weren’t designed to just cater to white, educated foodies with disposable incomes and day tourists,” said Julia Van Soelen Kim, a social scientist at the University of California Cooperative. This summer, Van Soelen Kim launched a research project examining why Marin and Sonoma counties’ farmers markets struggle to draw a racially and economically diverse crowd of shoppers.
“If we don’t make them more accessible for everyone then we’re not creating a successful space for farmers or for the community.”
The Alemany Farmers’ Market in the city’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, California’s oldest, for example, recently reported a decrease, from $50,000 of food stamp purchases in 2016 to about $44,000 in 2018. So far this year, the market has seen an even more drastic reduction with monthly EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) sales nearly half of what was made in 2016.
The decline took place despite a push to get recipients of CalFresh or Snap (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) to use the markets through programs such as dollar-matching incentives. Kaiser Permanente, the largest not-for-profit private healthcare system in the country, has joined the push, offering access to farmers’ markets at the same locations where patients pick up their prescriptions.
The dip in low-income shoppers at the farmers’ market couldn’t come at a worse time. Food insecurity in San Francisco is on the rise, with one in four residents at risk of hunger, according to a 2018 report released by the city’s Food Security Task Force. The most recent report, for years 2015 and 2016, found that 50% of low-income residents said they struggled to get enough food to eat – up from 44% in 2013-2014.
Even in produce-rich San Francisco, fruits and vegetables are perceived as luxury items, said Hilary Seligman, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, who studies the health implications of food insecurity. One out of five households buys zero produce, she said.
“People are making changes in the quality of the foods they eat in order to survive here,” said Seligman, who also founded EatSF, a program that provides free vouchers for fruit and vegetables to needy residents.
“In order to maintain a low food budget, they have to buy fewer nutrient-rich foods for calorically dense foods that have a long shelf-stable life, basically highly processed foods.”
Her thoughts are echoed by Briana Tejuco, who teaches low-income families in San Francisco how to shop and cook healthy meals on a tight budget at the community cooking school 18 Reasons. “We should be able to help people shop locally and seasonally because food is in abundance here,” she said. “People shouldn’t have to worry about how they’re going to make their food dollars stretch until the end of the month.”
Food insecure, but also ineligible
About 50,000 San Franciscans collect CalFresh benefits each month, according to San Francisco’s Human Services Agency, which runs the federal food program. To qualify, a person must have no or low income. A household of four that earns a monthly income of $4,184 can qualify for $642, for example.
Those on public assistance mirror San Francisco’s neediest populations, who are disappearing as gentrification has transformed this city. Many Chinese residents, especially the elderly, receive the largest share of public food assistance at 22%. Hispanics make up 18%, while blacks represent 16% and whites 13% of the recipients on CalFresh.
And those numbers reflect only those who enroll in the program. Food justice advocates say it’s an undercount of who is food insecure in San Francisco. Residents must meet federal poverty guidelines, though San Francisco’s high cost of living means that those who earn the local minimum wage of $15.59 an hour may have need but are ineligible for public food assistance.
In addition, many immigrants now avoid applying for public assistance altogether as the Trump administration has proposed barring them from applying for US citizenship if they have collected federal benefits, deeming them a public charge. Over the last week, the Trump administration also proposed new regulations to cut back the number of people receiving food stamps across the US.
“It is an incredibly important program, but we live in an environment now where many people are very fearful to even apply,” said Shakirah Simley, a food justice activist and legislative aide to the San Francisco supervisor Vallie Brown. “And the sad thing is they are entitled to the benefits.”
Even among farmers’ markets that accept government assistance, other hurdles keep many in the city’s low-income population away. Some shoppers say they often have to track down market staff to process their benefits.
Starr Britt, a mother of two, said she had made a point of getting to know the manager at San Leandro Farmers’ Market at Bayfair Center so that she can track him down to swipe her EBT card and receive the wood tokens the market’s vendors accept like cash. But, she said, “it’s not that straightforward”.
How one market gets it right
For years now, the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market has been attracting the bulk of EBT shoppers from all corners of the city thanks to its Market Match program. Market Match, run by the Berkeley-based nonprofit Ecology Center, provides EBT shoppers with an extra $5 each time they shop. Its long hours, between 7am to 5pm on Sundays, Wednesday and Fridays, also help draw visitors.
The money isn’t much, but it’s welcomed by many of the market’s loyal shoppers.
Rene McIntyre changed her diet after doctors told her she was pre-diabetic a few years ago. She became a regular at the Heart of the City which is near her home in the Tenderloin.
Formerly homeless, the retired piano teacher collects $15 in food stamps and stops by monthly to stock up on zucchini, potatoes, celery, citrus and carrots – produce that will not rot quickly.
“It’s a necessity for me to eat good fruits and vegetables because my health depends on it,” said McIntyre, 62.
Wendy Ng, 73, a Hong Kong native, bypasses farmers markets in her own neighborhood of Outer Sunset to travel an hour by bus to a market she believes is more friendly to people using food stamps.
She stocks up on bok choy, honey, eggs and nuts. With her adult son paying her rent and providing her with a little pocket money, her resources are tight. She doesn’t have a kitchen – she cooks most of her meals in her rice cooker – but she gets by.
She spends small amounts at each visit and returns twice in the week to receive the bonus dollars. “If I didn’t get this extra money, I wouldn’t be able to come here,” Ng said. “Most of the farmers markets in the city are just too expensive for me.”
• This article’s text and subheading were amended on 1 August 2019 to clarify that the use of food stamps has not fallen at all farmers’ markets in the Bay Area; a reference to a “sharp decline” in food stamp shoppers at the Alemany market was removed; and text has been added to state that the Market Match program is run by Ecology Center, a nonprofit organization.
