The Norwood News, in partnership with WFUV radio and BronxNet television, continue its five-part series on food insecurity issues impacting the Bronx and its residents.

“I come here when the food in my house runs out and I don’t have enough money to buy more,” said Altagracia Peña, a regular at Part of the Solution (POTS), a food pantry and community dining room serving Fordham, Bedford Park, and its surrounding Bronx communities.

POTS is a one-stop-shop for the food insecure and those who need a stable mailing address, access to showers or haircuts, and free legal services, said Jack Marth, the director of programs at POTS. “We try to help anyone who comes to the door for the first time. In the last calendar year, we had close to 7000 unique households use our pantry services,” Marth said.

Many of POTS’s clients are also on the federal supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP). POTS is found within Congressional District 13, where 29.6 percent of households receive SNAP benefits to help cover the cost of groceries. But many have found SNAP to be insufficient, and unable to last through the next month when benefits are replenished, forcing many to rely on food pantries to fill the gap.

“SNAP isn’t adequate to meet people’s household needs. That’s where our pantry comes in. It’s a supplement, not a solution. Increased SNAP benefits would better allow people to choose how they spend in the grocery stores, which is a much more efficient way to distribute food,” said Marth.

POTS’s food pantry is set up like a grocery store, with aisles for dry and canned goods and a wall of refrigerators for meats, dairy and perishables. POTS follows a point system based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) MyPlate nutrition guidelines, meaning clients can’t spend all their points on one food category, such as grains.

Clients lean on POTS after they’ve stretched their monthly SNAP allowance as far as it will go, Marth noted. “We see patterns, especially in our dining room,” he said.

A family of four receiving the maximum amount of SNAP benefits gets $640 a month to purchase groceries, which breaks down to about $20 a day, or about $7 per meal. At the beginning of the month, that money is loaded onto a debit-style electronic benefit transfer (EBT) card. The recipient can only use it to purchase food items such as bread, produce, milk and meat. They cannot buy hot food, household supplies, medicine, alcohol, or tobacco products. SNAP benefits can be used at participating supermarkets, bodegas, and farmers markets.

Other clients at POTS don’t receive SNAP at all due to immigration status. “If there’s no one in the household who has documentation, or if they are documented and they’re recent immigrants, there are all sorts of rules that restrict even documented immigrants from accessing benefits,” Marth said.

</center. But many qualifying SNAP recipients receive less than the maximum amount, said Dr. Mary Beth Combs, associate professor of economics at Fordham University. “What you get depends on your net income per month,” Combs said. “The government expects every family receiving SNAP to spend 30 percent of its own resources on food. So they calculate whatever 30 percent of your net income is every month and subtract it from the maximum monthly allotment.”

For a family of four that has one full-time wage earner working 40 hours a week at minimum wage, their monthly SNAP allotment is reduced by about half because of their additional income.

According to Dr. Combs, those who would argue against increasing SNAP benefits view it as “a supplement to what people are already spending, and should incentivize spending money on nutritional foods.”

But others would argue the limitations on SNAP mean money that fills the program gap do not go towards toiletries, cleaning products, or essentials like electricity or heat.

“I think there’s a misimpression for folks who don’t use SNAP that they think it’s only for the most poor in our society, people on welfare, retired people with low Social Security or disabled folks,” Marth said. “Many people who use our pantry work, but their wages are low. I oftentimes say that almost everything we do is a rent supplement program because housing costs are so extreme. A lot of our households are paying 60 to 100 percent of their cash income on rent.”

The federal government has now proposed changes to the program that include the reduction of SNAP in favor of a so-called “Harvest Box”—a delivery of shelf-stable goods. Brandon Lipps of the USDA told the Associated Press SNAP recipients would still receive roughly 60 percent of their benefits to spend at grocery stores, particularly on the produce they won’t be getting in the Harvest Box.

“Some problems with the Harvest Box that come to mind are the long-term health ramifications, short-term dietary needs, and the issue of autonomy and dignity,” Dr. Combs said. “The proposal to date does not include fresh or even frozen fruits and vegetables—things most nutritionists would say are essential to a healthy diet.”

“The second issue is that there are a lot of kids in our country that have tree and peanut allergies, and lots of processing plants in our country are also processing foods that contain treenuts or peanuts,” Dr. Combs said. “Having a Harvest Box arrive in your house when the government may not be able to guarantee there wasn’t cross-contamination is a really serious issue for families where someone in the household has allergies.”

Lipps told the Associated Press that SNAP recipients can buy fresh produce that’s not in a Harvest Box at their local grocery store. But according to a 2008 report from the New York City Department of City Planning, most of the Bronx has a high need for supermarkets, making access to fresh, nutritious food a challenge. Nine out of 12 community districts in the borough fell short of the city’s average supermarkets to population ratio.

To address the needs of SNAP recipients in food deserts, the USDA is piloting a program that allows beneficiaries to use their EBT card to order groceries directly to their home from online retailers such as Amazon, FreshDirect, and Wal-Mart. FreshDirect, which moved its distribution hub to Hunts Point, is now delivering to SNAP recipients in two zip codes in the South Bronx as part of the program.

“SNAP is a huge resource, but it in no way meets the needs of the community,” said Marth.