By Daniel Jackson | djackson@repub.com

SPRINGFIELD — The nutrition coordinators came to zhuzh up the lowly black bean.

“Today, we’re making a cowboy caviar, which is a take on a salsa,” said Abigail Killian, standing by a table holding cutting boards, vegetables and spices in a community room of an affordable apartment building.

And so she and Katie Grimaldi, nutrition coordinators for the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, began cutting up tomatoes, red onions and bell peppers. Their purpose? To help people who receive food assistance learn how to eat healthy and stretch their food budgets.

Those family budgets will be tested next year, after the Trump administration and Congress reduced funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. The women’s nutrition work is paid for by a three decades old program called SNAP-Ed. Support for SNAP-Ed will run out this September.

Killian and Grimaldi held the demonstration at Independence House, an affordable apartment building on Roosevelt Avenue for people with disabilities or who are 62 and older. As more residents came into the room, the smell of cilantro filled the air.

About 65% of the 212 residents at Independence and nearby Costello House receive food assistance through SNAP, said Judith Maldonado, certified resident services coordinator. Many live on fixed incomes. They receive brown bags from the Food Bank filled with nonperishable food such as canned tuna fish, spaghetti and veggie soup.

Sometimes, the nutrition coordinators said, the Food Bank adds cans of beans. Grimaldi wanted to demonstrate smart ways to use the foods provided.

Diving into the recipe, Killian announced: “There are no rules — except wash your hands.”

A recipe like cowboy caviar, Killian explained, can be adapted to what’s in the pantry. If a cook doesn’t have fresh tomatoes, a can of diced tomatoes are fine. The amount of jalapeños can be adjusted to taste. A half a pepper (seeds removed to reduce heat) went into the bowl. “I don’t think it will set anyone on fire,” Killian said. She said a cook could use cayenne pepper instead of fresh jalapeño.

She offered more riffs to the recipe. “This might taste really good blended up in the blender, adding the corn after,” Killian said.

SNAP-Ed’s reach

The federal government planned to give Massachusetts $9.38 million for SNAP-Ed in the 2026 fiscal year that begins in October, according to a May memo issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But the budget President Donald Trump signed into law July 4 did not include the $550 million nationwide for SNAP-Ed.

Organizations running SNAP-Ed programs across the state used the money to build community gardens, create recipe booklets for people without access to full kitchens and tap curriculum available nationally to teach lessons about nutrition in schools.

SNAP-Ed funds three and a half positions at the Food Bank. The Ascentria Care Alliance and University of Massachusetts Amherst are two organizations in the Pioneer Valley that help implement SNAP-Ed. The funding goes towards 15 positions at Ascentria and 46 positions at UMass Amherst, 39 of which are filled.

In Massachusetts, cuts leave the future of these programs and the positions they fund in limbo.

For instance, the Food Bank has not scheduled any cooking demonstrations past October, when the federal funding runs out.

UMass Amherst said in a statement it is studying how the changes will affect the people it employs through the program — and the residents who rely on it.

Maldonado, the resident services coordinator, said she tries to arrange for a SNAP-Ed program to come to Independence House and Costello House at least every other month. Residents, she said, look forward to the cooking demonstrations because they plant ideas for budget lunches and offer new recipes to try. Plus, the program teaches residents shopping tips and how to read nutrition labels.

The funding cuts bother Maldonado said. “This particular demographic of people are the first to be affected with anything that has to do with budget cuts for the elderly or the disabled that live on a fixed income,” she said.

Food insecurity is a big problem for the community. Near the end of the month, residents will knock on her door wondering if there is any food available.

Rachel’s Table of Western Massachusetts will bring donations from Big Y, the grocery store chain, ranging from frozen muffins to fresh nuts. And residents keep a garden out back where they grow cilantro, tomato and onions, she said.

Rising hunger

One in six people in Massachusetts relies on SNAP for their food, according to the state Department of Transitional Assistance. While almost 662,000 households in the state receive food assistance, that number has decreased slightly over the last year after climbing in the months following the pandemic.

Many more are considered food insecure.

About 37% of people living in Massachusetts made changes to the variety or quality of their food because they didn’t have enough money sometime in the last year, according to a study released in June by the Greater Boston Food Bank.

That number is higher in the Pioneer Valley.

In Hampden County, 54% of residents faced food insecurity, according to the Boston Food Bank. In Franklin and Hampshire, that number was 50%.

Food insecurity often means people have poorer nutrition and chronic illness, and they choose to buy food – any kind of food – rather than selecting healthy options, the study said.

The cuts to SNAP-Ed come as the budget bill reorganizes how the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program is run, with many changes to begin in October 2026. Among them: tweaks to how the federal government calculates food benefits, an expansion of the program’s work requirement and a shift of program costs to the states.

This comes as the federal government trims programs addressing hunger. In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut funds going to Massachusetts under the Emergency Food Assistance Program, a sum of about $3.4 million. As part of that cut, the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts lost $440,000 in funding, which represented 1% of its distribution of food in the previous year.

At the same time, the USDA canceled a $384,000 grant that was going to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to help connect school cafeterias with locally sourced food, the Healey administration announced in March.

The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Worcester, said the cuts to SNAP-Ed were “cruel and rotten” because they helped fuel tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. McGovern, who speaks often on hunger issues, said the program wasn’t critiqued and there was no reason given before it was eliminated from the budget.

“If there was an issue about the integrity of the program or the effectiveness of the program, well, let’s have that debate, let’s do a hearing,” McGovern said.

Last week, McGovern participated in a listening session in Boston with Project Bread and U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Boston. They heard from people about how changes to food assistance will affect them — stories McGovern said he plans to share on Capitol Hill.

“We’re going to look at every vehicle possible to try to reverse what they did,” McGovern said. “We’re not going to go back to normal. What they’re doing is going to adversely impact millions and millions of people in this country.”

In response to changes at the federal level, Gov. Maura Healey created a task force that includes cabinet secretaries and commissioners and representatives from the state’s food banks to advise her on the state’s next steps.

“President Trump’s cuts are going to force millions of people – children, seniors, veterans, people with disabilities – into hunger,” Healey said in a statement July 17. “They’re also going to hurt local farmers and retailers who rely on these programs to support their business and create jobs.”

Canned collard greens

Killian and Grimaldi, the nutrition coordinators with the Food Bank, said that besides holding demonstrations, they distribute recipes at farmers markets or meet with school children visiting a local farm and hand out fresh spinach.

“Basically, we do an event almost every single day of the week,” Killian said.

Grimaldi said she has seen recipe cards the Food Bank hands out in the shopping carts of local grocery stores — evidence that their lessons are spreading. Some of those recipes, like one for Mexican quinoa, are ones she first prepared in her own kitchen.

Killian said the Easthampton Community Center once called saying people weren’t taking cans of collard greens it had received and the cans were piling up.

The Food Bank developed a recipe that used the greens in a tomato-based Italian soup with rice and white beans.

Before SNAP-Ed

Kristina Mullin, direct programs manager at the Food Bank, said in the 2025 fiscal year, the Food Bank received $472,000 for the SNAP-Ed program. So far this year, it has held 120 cooking demonstrations and classes and they have 30 more on the calendar through the end of September. They are on track to reach 12,000 people, Mullin said.

Ascentria Care Alliance, which operates offices in Worcester and West Springfield, employs 15 people with the $1.5 million it receives for the SNAP-Ed program, said Kristin Foley, director of youth and family services at Ascentria. Ascentria operates in Hampden, Hampshire and Worcester counties, and it is on track to work with 20,000 participants by the end of September, its largest year ever.

UMass Amherst, meanwhile, received about $5.2 million through SNAP-Ed. Between October 2023 and September 2024, the SNAP-Ed program there engaged with 36,000 residents. Its handouts and newsletters went to about 118,000 people, the university said.

UMass Amherst said almost all participants of its programs changed how they eat, with 96% making improvements on budgeting for food, for instance.

The Food Bank has run a SNAP-Ed program for about three years. Mullin said before SNAP-Ed, cooking classes and nutrition information were “minimally funded,” with the money from community foundations often running out mid-year. Other times, funding would be intended to benefit a specific community, forcing the Food Bank to pivot to reach one community or another.

“This also gave us the flexibility and consistency to continue spreading outreach in Western Mass. without having to go back on some of the things we were doing,” Mullin said. It also helped the organization concentrate on rural parts of the region.

Now, the Food Bank is exploring how to fund nutrition education through other means. This fall, Congress is set to consider the farm bill, Mullin said. The Food Bank is reaching out to lawmakers about possibly including funding there.

“We’re concerned that it’s 30 years of really great research and momentum in nutrition education,” Mullin said. “And we’re really hoping that with the removal of funding October 1st, all those resources also don’t go away. … And we just hope we can continue the momentum and not lose all this great work.”