Walk through the side door of Watson Grove Baptist Church in Edgehill and you’ll find the food pantry Rev. Margareat Smithson has managed to carve out — roughly 200 square feet of tables and shelves and a single refrigerator she shares with two other ministries.
It may not look like much, but this one-woman operation has been feeding families every day for decades. There are half-million dollar homes popping up around the church in this rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, but there are also mixed income MDHA housing communities just down the block, which is where a lot of the families come from.
Looking over a list of that day’s recipients, every family had kids, sometimes three or four. On a typical Thursday, she might feed six to eight families, but today it was 14. Smithson tries to make sure every bag has a starch, green vegetables (usually canned green beans), two cans of corn and something like spaghetti sauce or macaroni and cheese. On the rare occasion that they’ve got meat — usually ground beef — she’ll include that, too.
“I forgot peanut butter,” Smithson said. “We have peanut butter. That’s a good staple. And since we get bread, you can always do peanut butter.”
Smithson is always working her magic in order to keep these families fed. It’s the second week of the month and she doesn’t know yet where the food will come from for the fourth week. Between her allotment from Second Harvest of Middle Tennessee and the money she has to buy through their social enterprise program, she’s already used most of her month’s supply. A donation from Ladies of Charity will help her make it into the third week.
“We actually struck up a relationship somewhere 30 years ago. They made the mistake of saying, ‘If you ever need us, call us.’ That was a mistake, them telling me that,” Smithson said, laughing. “Then, I didn’t have to use them as much, but now I have to use them at least once a month.”
Hunger is an insidious foe. Because it is less visible, we often don’t witness the chronic effects it has on health, particularly in children. Feeding America estimates that half of the households it serves have at least one member with high blood pressure and one-third have one member with diabetes. Children who go hungry perform worse in school and are more likely to be in poor health. In Tennessee, one out of every six kids struggles with hunger.
The USDA reports that 47 million people in America are food insecure. Which makes the news that the federal government’s DOGE efforts are taking a cleaver to major anti-hunger programs pretty frightening. Second Harvest, which supports 615 partners in 46 counties in Middle Tennessee, will lose 700,000 pounds of food shipments from the USDA as well as $3 million in grants to buy fresh food from local farmers.
Nancy Keil and her counterparts saw this coming. As the CEO of Second Harvest of Middle Tennessee, she’s part of a network of 198 major food banks around the country. They’re scrambling to figure out how to meet the need because it’s substantial. And with looming cuts to SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that used to be called “food stamps” — Keil and others are trying to inform policymakers and the public about the looming disaster.
“SNAP is the initial safety net. If we don’t have SNAP, we cannot serve the community,” Keil said. “We can’t food bank our way out of what needs to happen in this community. We talk about how individuals being food insecure are usually in a place because there’s been something traumatic. Either they don’t have a livable wage, or there’s a health issue or something that’s caused a need in their life, so they need support. It gives them the dignity to be able to use that money to go in a grocery store and to shop like everybody else does, and to purchase what they want. If they don’t have access to those snap dollars, our lines just get longer and longer and longer, and that’s just something that, long term, can’t be sustained.”
Keil is constantly looking ahead to solve the next problem. These cuts, sadly, were predictable. When I ask her a pointed question about federal and state officials, she’s a diplomat. She won’t say that these cuts are abjectly stupid and make their job that much harder or call out the people and their enablers who are responsible.
In their last fiscal year, across Middle Tennessee, Second Harvest and its partners:
- Distributed more than 47 million pounds of food
- Provided more than 41 million meals
- Rescued more than 29 million pounds of food from producers and retail outlets
- Distributed almost 16 million pounds of fresh produce
That last number is important, because a substantial amount of that came from local farmers through the “Farm to Families” program that just had its funding slashed. In March alone, that program distributed 35,111 pounds of food to more than 40 agencies. The cuts will have a downstream effect, impacting Tennessee farmers who are able to plan their crops because of guaranteed contracts.
Second Harvest has a list of 118 things it tries to get from local producers, including fresh fruits and vegetables, meat and specialty items like honey. Over the winter, for example, sweet potatoes are one of the most popular items.
Getting fresh food into the hands of the hungry is vital, for health and also for dignity.
“When the farmers are delivering, they get so used to the agency’s cadence that sometimes they’re pulling in as distribution is happening,” said Jessie Lumpkins, Second Harvest’s Farm to Families coordinator. “Those folks visiting the agency truly feel like there’s some dignity restored because they see that farmer delivering it. There have actually been people describing that there’s still dew on [the produce] when it’s being handed to them, because it was harvested in the last hour.”
I’ve seen some of those moments and they’re amazing. For years, my mother helped run a food pantry in Coffee County, and I watched during the Great Recession as the number of people she served doubled when jobs started going away. As hard as that work could be, the ability to help another mother feed her children meant more to her. The ability to help someone salvage dignity meant everything.
One of the Bible verses that always sustained Mom was Matthew 25:35: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
It’s the same one Smithson, 77, cites as being central to her decades of ministry.
I asked her about the cuts. Did she think that the hungry were ever considered?
“I’m livid,” Smithson said, before pausing to gather herself. “If these people sitting up there in the White House — Musk, Trump — if they had to live like some of these people over here had to live, I bet you we’d have a whole lot of stuff.”
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