Austin and Travis County’s first Food Plan nears its finish line

Texas has the second-highest rate of food insecurity in the country, and Austin’s numbers aren’t much better: 158,270 Travis County residents, or 16 percent, are food insecure. Not being able to pay for food is a symptom of larger failures of the social safety net – the Central Texas Food Bank reports that “two-thirds of the people we serve say they had to choose between buying food and paying for housing in the past year. Eighty percent say they had to choose between food and medicine.” What’s more, less than 1 percent of the food consumed in Austin and Travis County is produced locally, and each day more than 1 million pounds of food are wasted.

The local roots of food insecurity are various – farmers struggle to find affordable land nearby as Austin sprawl creeps outward, and they often face powerful competitors like Elon Musk’s Boring Co.

Natural disasters like increasing winter storms and drought, as well as Covid, have further strained supply chains. 

In order to address this crisis head-on, Travis County is in the final stages of adopting a regional food plan that began in 2022. The joint effort between the county and the city’s Office of Sustainability is set for approval at its meeting Tuesday, Aug. 27, and will go to City Council soon after. In a county meeting Aug. 20, county staff, city staff and community representatives in the agriculture space briefed the Commissioners Court on strategies for tackling the region’s food insecurity. 

“A good food system is an interconnected network like a spider web,” the city’s food policy manager, Edwin Marty, told commissioners. “Austin has traditionally relied on San Antonio, Houston and Dallas to essentially be the hubs that ensure we have all the food we need. But when I-35 shuts down, we have significant challenges.”

The Food Plan contains nine broad goals for strengthening Austin-Travis County’s food system, from preservation of farmland and support for food workers to decreasing food waste and addressing the climate impacts of the food system. One of the biggest problems – and the only one with possible funding allocated toward it in this year’s budget – is uneven access to food throughout the county. All the locavore comforts of town, like farmers markets, farm-to-table restaurants and community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, are concentrated in Austin’s urban core, leaving low-income areas of eastern Travis County to deteriorate into food deserts.

“As of 2022, 18 out of 47 (ZIP) codes in Travis County lack a grocery store,” the Draft Food Plan notes.

Though some of that may be out of local government’s hands (and in HEB’s), the federal government certainly can’t solve these problems on its own: Many who are food insecure in Travis County struggle to access federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. According to the Food Plan, there are 687 places that accepted SNAP as of 2022, but around 39 percent of Travis County residents that were income-eligible were not enrolled.

Plus, despite being more food insecure than the rest of the region, “eastern and northwest Travis County have a more limited number of SNAP-authorized retail outlets compared to the concentrations of households receiving SNAP benefits in those areas.” Thus, one strategy in the Food Plan is to explore the feasibility of creating a locally funded nutrition incentive program, with less restrictive eligibility criteria than SNAP/WIC. 

Some strategies to mitigate food insecurity are tied to other county goals, like increasing access to reliable transportation to bridge the gap between food deserts and markets. Others are more specific, such as increasing infant feeding options like milk and formula through collaborations between government and schools, and funding the expansion of food delivery services that prioritize households facing food insecurity. 

The only part of the food plan tied to Fiscal Year 2025 budget funding would be these kinds of investments in social services to increase equitable food access. Commissioners will likely approve a resolution of support for the plan next week, and more clear action items should follow in September.

Commissioner Brigid Shea asked that staff identify top recommendations that the county could act on quickly, and stressed that they figure out where the funding will come from. Federal dollars for pandemic relief have largely run out for these kinds of social programs. Staff assured Shea that the upcoming Farm Bill should provide more federal dollars to the county for this kind of work. (However, the House version of the bill introduced in the spring would cut $30 billion from SNAP, WIC and other similar programs over the next decade.)

Luckily, the Food Plan also posits cultivating partnerships with local businesses and organizations that are already providing these kinds of services, and scaling them up.

“We’ve got good documentation of who’s already working on what the community has deemed important,” Marty said. “We’ve set the table.”

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