On a 95-degree day, Vera (not her real name) wears a dark pink T-shirt with her hair pulled back, dressed for work. She has been pulled from her volunteer job sorting and stacking boxes of food to talk to Cambridge Day, obviously disrupting the flow of action. About a dozen people – mostly volunteers, a few staff – are moving fast. They bustle in and out of a double doorway bringing groceries to folding tables arranged in a ring for maximum efficiency. Some bring boxes of food indoors instead. A mountain of banana boxes is just inside the doorway, slightly in the way of people coming and going. Also sheltering from the heat is a line of about 30 people seated in gray metal chairs, lined up against an entire wall of the gymnasium, most with grocery carts and armloads of reusable bags.
The majority of volunteers at this Cambridge food pantry started out as clients, and still are. Vera was a teacher until a torn meniscus got in the way of the job’s physical demands. She says she gets all her groceries here and shares some with her adult child and grandchild’s household. “If it was not for this place distributing to 100-plus people a day, she says, “it would be a lot tougher” on those clients.
Nutrition and food quality is a key advantage of the pantry. There is shelf-stable nondairy milk and many brand-name items on the supply tables, dairy milk in the nearby refrigerator. “Ninety percent is fresh food,” Vera says.
She urges a reporter to spread the word that the groceries run out fast when the pantry is open – usually in an hour – and that people with daytime jobs aren’t able to come when the pantry is open, so their only option is the 24/7 community fridge, supplied by neighborly contributions of food.
Whether in Cambridge, Somerville or Arlington, the picture of building food security looks like a patchwork of food sources people must stitch together to avoid hunger and maximize nutrition. “No single food pantry can be a solution to food insecurity,” says Jon Erdman, the volunteer coordinator at Project Soup in Somerville.
Food Insecurity in Massachusetts
Food-insecure households are those who at times during the year are uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all members because they have insufficient resources to buy food. An estimated 13.5 percent of all U.S. households and 17.9 percent of households with children were food insecure in 2023.
According to a 2024-2025 survey by the Greater Boston Food Bank, food insecurity among Massachusetts households has increased to 37 percent from 19 percent in the past five years. Researchers and other experts make a distinction between food insecurity without hunger and food insecurity with hunger: The survey shows that Massachusetts food insecurity with hunger, also called “very low food security,” quadrupled to 24 percent last year from 6 percent in 2019.“These increases are likely driven by the lasting impacts of the pandemic, surging food and housing expenses and rolling back of pandemic-era increases in federal financial and food assistance programs such as the Child Tax Credit and expansions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” study authors say.
Cambridge
The pantry where Vera volunteers, as well as shops, is in a Cambridge census tract where 34 percent of households were food insecure. It borders on tracts with similar percentages. Those neighborhood level percentages are based on the latest census data, from 2022. These maps are part of the Greater Boston Food Bank’s Closing the Meal Gap map for the 2024 fiscal year.
Like some – perhaps many – people experiencing food insecurity, Vera does not have benefits through Snap, which uses a debit card system to pay for grocery shopping at grocery stores, online retailers and farmers’ markets by people who can’t otherwise make ends meet. The GBFB survey showed that 56 percent of food-insecure households in the state use Snap benefits. Snap isn’t always enough, even for those who do have it. Three-quarters of households in the survey using it also accessed other sources of food, such as pantries.
Ana (not her real name), who emigrated to Cambridge from El Salvador 10 years ago, serves on a local advisory council for pantries made up of 11 people who have experienced food insecurity; between them they speak eight languages. The council is an offshoot of the city’s pantry network, revitalized in part through a three-year grant from the Cambridge Community Foundation. Ana also spends time spreading the word about ways to feed a family among those who need the resource but are hesitant, or afraid, to come.
“My community is a Latina community, ” she says. “Most of them don’t have any [immigration] status, so they are very worried. If they don’t have a job, they won’t have enough to buy food, especially when the food is very expensive at the stores.” She says some “are afraid of going to the pantry because they think the [pantry staff] are going to collect immigration information. I tell them they are not requesting any information about immigration status, just Cambridge residency. I am telling them to come to the food pantries instead of being hungry inside the house.”
Ana does not qualify for Snap – but her two boys, in grades 3 and 8, are U.S. citizens who meet the requirements. Even between their benefits and the one pantry she uses most, it isn’t usually enough. Every week, she often goes to a second or third pantry on the days they are open, and tries to stretch the kids’ Snap dollars for family meals at the Central Square Farmers Market, where Snap spent on fresh produce can be matched. She does shop at stores, usually Market Basket. Others, such as Star and Whole Foods, are for special circumstances because of the higher cost of food items, even though they are closer.
Recently Ana found out about, and added to her patchwork, a state Healthy Incentives Program that can add $40 per month to the budget of a Snap recipient, specifically for fresh produce from farmers markets.
She says her job is taking care of her boys. The younger one is autistic and nonverbal. She says it is a “double challenge to have food insecurity when it’s been so difficult to find resources for him.” On top of that, he has a medical condition and will eat only certain home-prepared foods. This complicates her shopping list at the pantries. She does all the cooking. Even though feeding her household takes effort, that effort has resulted in a healthy child. She reports that his psychiatrist said at the last visit that “he looks so happy.”
The Cambridge Community Foundation launched a Food Access and Security Initiative in 2023 to strengthen and coordinate the city’s food pantries through mostly multiyear grants to pantries and to Mass Farmers Markets – part of a five-year strategic plan. The July 4 passage into law of a federal budget bill reduces the number of Snap-qualified recipients in Cambridge from just under 10,000 to a number yet unknown; in response, the foundation announced July 30 that additional emergency funds will be directed toward food security.
The Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee is the foundation partner heading up the capacity-building of the network of food pantries. At the beginning of 2025, between 150 and 175 people were accessing the committee’s own pantry each week. Rachel Plummer, associate director of the committee, says that figure is now “sometimes as much as 250 folks” in the lines forming every Wednesday, “a huge increase since the beginning of the year.”
An increase in demand forced the CEOC to restrict pantry access to Cambridge residents only in early January. “Even since we put in the residency requirement, in the hope of better serving our home community,” Plummer says, “the numbers have still continued to rise.” What explains the increase? She’s not certain. “We’ve gotten a lot of people who many years ago had used food pantries but had gotten to a stable place. Now they’re coming back because there is some kind of current crisis, like unemployment,” she says.
She estimates about half of the pantry clientele are people who are employed at least part-time.
Plummer says the CEOC pantry gets and distributes 7,500 pounds of food weekly from the Greater Boston Food Bank. It also gets deliveries of rescued food from the nonprofit Food Link and fills in the remaining gap by buying items not otherwise available. The Community Development Block Grant funds that enables these direct purchases does not continue in fiscal year 2026, Plummer says.
The Cambridge Community Center in the Coast or Riverside neighborhood, founded in 1929, is unique in the city: Open four days per week, it does not require documentation of income, need or residency, as most do, nor does it limit what shoppers take home. It opens at 1 p.m., and by 2 p.m. most of the food is gone.
Also unlike other pantries, this one was launched at the start of the pandemic when others were shutting down.
“For the first three months, the pantry operated two days per week and served 50 families. At the height of the pandemic, we were serving up to 150 people per day,” says Zach Goldhammer, the center’s director of engagement and strategic partnerships. The number of clients dipped in 2022 as people went back to work, but “since 2023, there’s been a steady uptick due to inflation and rising grocery prices.” Welcoming 50 to 70 people per day to the pantry, four days per week, is the norm. According to its 2024-2025 impact report, the center’s food pantry served 450 to 500 households in the past fiscal year.
Inflation is also a factor in who is food insecure in 2025. “Even people with more stable jobs, and even middle-class jobs, can’t necessarily afford the price of basic proteins and milk” due to inflation, Goldhammer says. The Consumer Price Index issued by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics documents a 5.3 percent increase for the proteins category of groceries in the Northeast over the past 12 months.
Despite its schedule and lack of barriers, there is a downside to the pantry, Goldhammer says: People who work during the day can’t access it. So the center also hosts a community fridge.
At about 1 p.m., we open the cheerfully painted wooden cupboard containing one of two fridges. Inside is a dozen loaves of fresh bread, but no other shelf-stable foods. Next to it is a second fridge, this one stocked with prepared single meals. The pantry gets rescued food from Food for Free and from Spoonfuls, another food rescue organization, but the two fridges and cupboard are stocked largely by the public. Goldhammer says community members and neighbors are supplying these fridges with food, but “they’re emptied pretty quickly.” People with daytime jobs who can’t attend the pantry’s open hours rely on the fridges, say staff and patrons.
Somerville
Project Soup, a program of the Somerville Coalition for the Homeless, is housed in an old fire station in East Somerville. It’s one of four food pantries in Somerville. In addition to those, one Medford and two Cambridge pantries are listed on the Somerville Food Resources flyer published by the Somerville Food Coalition, illustrating that pantries are as different in their restrictions and protocols as they are in their particular histories and atmospheres.
Erdman, of Project Soup in Somerville, estimates his pantry’s clientele has increased by 20 percent to 40 percent in just the four months he has been at the job. He isn’t seeing an increase in any one particular type of client.
“Food pantries are used by people who are just trying to deal with, and manage, the food cost crisis. Sometimes that’s homeless people, but more often it’s individuals who aren’t in danger of homelessness. In reality, it’s a person just trying to stretch their dollar to get to the next paycheck.”
Project Soup, which serves only Somerville residents, limits visits to twice a month. The pantry also rations how much people can take each time they visit: For potatoes, it’s one big bag per person. Erdman’s volunteers and staff go outside the old firehouse to cook and serve hot meals at a church on Mondays, as well as once a month at another church.
Restrictions on residency, as well as on visits per month, speak to the pantry’s need to respond to increased demand. People sometimes ask for more than what the pantry allows. It never feels good to say no, Erdman says, but “there are a couple of pathways for people to increase caloric opportunity,” he says, including showing the shopper to a section of the pantry with less high-demand items.
Arlington
Arlington Eats, a pantry and home delivery program, serves 530 households weekly, says Andi Doane, the organization’s executive director. The program pays for “FreshBucks” that match up to $15 from Snap with certain vendors at the Arlington Farmers’ Market, and it runs a summer and school vacation lunch program.
Like the CEOC pantry and Project Soup, Arlington Eats gets the majority of its food from the Greater Boston Food Bank. But 30 percent of what it distributes is from other sources: local stores and food rescue organizations FoodLink, the Boston Area Gleaners and Spoonfuls. It also buys some fresh food through a wholesaler. The pantry requires proof of Arlington residency and serves almost all clients by appointment. (Some walk-ins are allowed.) Households can visit the pantry only once a week, taking what they need, with restrictions only on eggs and a few other items. Like Cambridge’s pantries, Arlington Eats is preparing for cuts in Snap and other safety net programs. In the fall it will expand its hours by adding one more evening, and it has secured funding to increase its cold storage capacity.
Stereotypes mask reality
All pantry staff interviewed for this article describe the community who shows up at the door on pantry days as not easy to pigeonhole, although several said the majority of clientele are immigrants. “There are individuals who have disclosed to me that they are owners of property, such as landlords. There are individuals who are extremely vulnerable, and there is everything in between those two extremes,” says Project Soup’s Erdman. Doane, of Arlington Eats, says that in February, a “dad” called and asked for help because he and his spouse had lost their federal government jobs at the same time. “We see a lot of people who are employed, sometimes working a couple of different jobs,” she says. “They come because of the high cost of living” that’s not matched by wage increases.
The public face of communities such as Cambridge and Arlington is one of wealth. Says Doane: “There’s this misconception in Arlington that food insecurity isn’t much of an issue. After all, everywhere you look there’s a house being torn down and a multimillion-dollar house being put in its place. There are a lot of neighbors that have lived here their whole lives. Something changes for them – a health crisis, or a lost job or just the effects of inflation. In a place like Arlington, hunger exists.”
Snap gap will grow
Formerly called Food Stamps, the state-administered but federally funded Snap program is also the latest safety net program that the Trump administration has tried to mine for information about beneficiaries. Twenty states including Massachusetts sued July 28 to block a demand by Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture for Social Security numbers, birthdates, names, addresses and other personal data of Snap recipients. The move follows similar Trump administration attempts to collect this data on Medicaid recipients. This lawsuit is not the only reason Snap has been in the news.
The budget reconciliation package passed by the U.S. Congress in early July signals a major shift in national, but also local, food security. By 2028, states will for the first time pay a percentage of Snap food costs (varying according to a state’s payment error rate) as well as 75 percent of Snap administrative costs.
The people who must work 80 hours per month has expanded dramatically under the new law’s rules. The new law means “states must now enforce stricter rules on Snap recipients ages 18-64, including groups previously exempt: veterans, individuals experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth,” reports the Food Research and Action Center, a 55-year-old nonprofit antihunger organization. Until now, the work requirement for able-bodied people without dependents ended when an individual turned 55.
FRAC predicts the enforcement of work requirements for all the additional people will “trigger a cycle of benefit loss and reapplication … that raises costs and harms stability for vulnerable households.”
The new law also means certain noncitizens who could previously qualify for Snap will be excluded from the program completely. Refugees, people seeking or granted political asylum and trafficking survivors will not be able to qualify unless they belong to certain very limited categories that are exceptions.
Solidarity in food pantry lines
What’s on the horizon for local food pantries? In addition to the major challenge of meeting increased need with quantitative changes in supply, open hours or staff, another priority of the Cambridge Food Pantry Network is creating community and making sure clients feel at ease and respected.
Ana, the mother of two boys says who is on the advisory council, says she helps by translating for those who are Spanish-speakers when she is waiting in line at her food pantry. She shares information about other sources of low-cost or free food, or other resources, and they listen to each other’s stories. Since the line at her main pantry is an outdoor one, with extreme heat and cold conditions, the recent increase in people she is seeing there speaks even more to the need of the clients, she says.
Creating community at a food pantry so it is not depressing – and making it possible to break bread with each other – is important, Goldhammer says. The volunteer community at the CCC pantry consists of some 50 people (or anywhere from 10 to 20 daily) most of whom also shop there. The center holds a cookout for the volunteers every year.
“There is a lot of solidarity that happens in food pantry lines,” Goldhammer says. It’s an opportunity for “people closest to this issue to come together to create the solutions.”
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.
As the past director of the Cambridge Food Pantry Network I know from personal experience that the heroic work of food pantry volunteers is at the heart of responding to the food insecurity crisis. At the same time I am discouraged by the minimal resources that are directed at identifying and uprooting the causes of food insecurity. I am also not surprised that so little is done to cast light on the growing divide between the poor/working class and the wealthy. When the director of the Boston Food Bank can be allowed to be unapologetic about her yearly salary of more than $500,000 is it any wonder that many of the executives and agencies that shape our responses to food insecurity shine very little light on the growing economic inequality in our cities and towns.