Food Desert Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Food Divide In W.Va. Widens With Rising Costs, Supply Chain Issues

Supply chain issues and rising gas prices are worsening food access in the Mountain State. West Virginian entrepreneurs are looking to meet the demand for food.

The American food retail landscape is structured around hypermarkets, such as Walmart, which carry out large scale food distribution for population centers. Smaller grocery stores have provided services for rural communities. But that may be in jeopardy.

Bridget Lambert is the president of the West Virginia Retailer Association. She says smaller grocery stores are disappearing partly due to an unstable supply chain.

“They rely on food distribution networks that deliver to rural areas,” Lambert said. “About several years ago we had a large distribution center close in the Cabell County area.”

And that has filtered down to smaller locations. On April 1st, 2022, the Poca Foodfair permanently closed its doors, meaning residents have to travel to neighboring towns for the bulk of their groceries.

Jackie Dolan lives in Poca. She travels to Dunbar, Nitro, and Eleanor for her grocery shopping.

“You can’t make 2, 3, or 4 trips, you know I have to plan one whole day,” Dolan said.

The rising price of gas, and the rising costs of products are changing the shopping habits of the state’s rural residents.

“So instead of going to the store weekly, they may go bi-weekly, or once a month,” Lambert said. “Of course, the increased cost of gasoline, that money will come out of a family’s budget somewhere, and it may well come out of the food budget.”

For a long time, residents of Clay County have lived without ready access to a full service grocery store. Clay County is often considered one of the worst food deserts in the state.

In November 2021, a Par Mar store fitted with grocery products opened in Maysel to help meet the demand for a grocer.

“Usually you have to go either to Elkview or Sutton; at Kroger or the Save-a-lot, but since we got this place here, it’s helped out a whole lot,” Par Mar cashier Ethan Smith said.

*Grocery aisle at the Par Mar in Maysel. Credit: David Adkins/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

Aside from the Par Mar, local businesses in Clay County have helped expand food access.

Stores like House’s Supermarket in Brickmore meet the community’s grocery needs, minus certain types of fresh meat.

There’s also Legacy Foods: Market and Bakery in Indore, and the Clay County Farmers Market in Clay.

“Food desert situations have created some very unique opportunities for small business owners in West Virginia to open niche markets, ” Lambert said. “Communities are stepping up and addressing this situation in a multitude of ways.”

According to Lambert, those investing in a local food market need to know the local food landscape, such as demand, population size, store location, and distribution networks. She noted that consumers appreciate shopping close to home, meaning there is a steady demand.

The Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program is part of the American Rescue Plan. The program aims to strengthen local supply chains and support local producers.

An Urban Agriculture Law Ruffles Feathers in Morgantown

Tracey Lea Frisch loves her pet chickens, which she keeps in her yard on the side of her house in the Hopecrest neighborhood in Morgantown.

“This is Pudding and Vanilla and Mr. Looster and Lucky and Star and Moonlight and that’s Roadrunner, and that’s Fluffy – the big one,” she said as she fed them grapes. “I have one broody; she’s pretending to have chicks. It’s not going to happen.”

But last fall, thirty of Frisch’s neighbors sued her, alleging that the chickens smelled bad, were noisy, ran wild and brought down property values. Locally, the chickens have become a sort of cultural phenomenon. They are now known as the “Hopecrest Chickens” – some dedicated community members have even created a Facebook page and a Youtube channel on their behalf. Fun aside, the issues brought up in the case represented a larger discussion about growing vegetables and fruits and raising livestock in cities, a practice known as urban agriculture.

More cities in the U.S. are experimenting with urban agriculture, by growing crops on roofs or indoors with the help of LED lighting. Rick Snuffer, the state executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency, said that the USDA’s push for urban agriculture isn’t only fueled by aesthetic and environmental concerns, but by a sustainable one too. As the country’s population grows, there’s less land on which to grow food to feed them.

Morgantown residents Jodie Rose and Jonah Katz dressed up as the Hopecrest Chickens for Halloween in 2015.

“There are six million dollars in food that has to be brought into West Virginia every year that could be grown here in West Virginia,” he said. “It’s imported from other states or countries. And, that’s one of the things the Commissioner of Agriculture is very concerned about – how can we create more of those crops at home?”

Yet urban agriculture is rare in West Virginia, and in Morgantown, a proposed urban agriculture ordinance combined with the Hopecrest Chicken lawsuit has sparked a prolonged debate between neighbors about who can garden what and where. The ordinance first entered the public’s eye in April 2015, and was modeled after an urban agriculture ordinance passed in Charleston.

“It was viewed as an opportunity to put land into productive use that was otherwise sitting vacant, and to encourage home gardeners and others to practice some of their own food production,” said Jim Kotcon, a professor of plant pathology at West Virginia University who also serves on the Morgantown Municipal Green Team. He helped draft the original version of the ordinance. “Given the long-running desire for fresh vegetables and fruits, and the ability to promote local foods, it was viewed as a positive opportunity and many viewed it as such at that time.”

Then, a couple of months before the Hopecrest Chickens lawsuit was served, city council discussed a more restrictive draft of the ordinance. It would put tighter limits on how much livestock residents could own, possibly require permits to build structures like doghouses or trellises and restrict how close those structures could be to the neighbor’s yard. Though some gardeners believe that this ordinance discourages urban agriculture, others appreciate some restrictions.

“They haven’t mowed. They have not weeded at all,” said Kevin Downey, a longtime Morgantown resident, of his neighbor’s front yard. “You can see the watermelons has grown through there so you can’t get a lawn mower in there. The trellis – you can see it’s made out of pipes, metals, plastics, pieces of wood, pieces of anything. I don’t know, personally I don’t think it belongs in the front yard.”

Axel Anderson, 10, picks raspberries from his mother’s garden in Morgantown.

Kotcon says the issue of who gets to garden what isn’t a petty one at all. On a global scale, being able to self-sustain is important to a country’s national security. On the backyard scale, he thinks gardening is a radical act, and being able to grow one’s own food especially resonates with young people.

“It is the fundamental right of each person to wrest a living from the land, free of any corporate control, working with nature to create their food and perhaps a surplus for sale and profit,” he said. “That is something inherently American.”

It’s unclear when Morgantown’s proposed ordinance will return to the city council agenda. But until then, some residents will continue doing what they love best – growing and eating the food they grow in their own backyards.

When Walmart Closed in McDowell, a Local Food Pantry Lost Their Main Source of Food

This week, we’ve been hearing a series of stories from the Inside Appalachia team about the challenges that some Appalachian families face when trying to eat fresh food. Sometimes it’s the cost, or poor choices. Sometimes it’s limited access because they live in what’s called a food desert.

Seven months ago the Walmart in McDowell County closed, and this was especially difficult for the Five Loaves and Two Fishes food pantry, run by Linda McKinney and her husband Bob. They say the superstore’s closing has actually inspired their family to rethink how they get food for the pantry.

Once a month, the McKinney family, and a small group of volunteers, provide shopping carts full of canned food, oatmeal, and macaroni and cheese.

“I just never want anyone to go hungry, cause I watched as my grandmother provided for the children who lived in out holler that would come in our yard and play. She always had fresh bread, hard salami,” said Linda McKinney.

She and her husband Bob, a retired minister, have been running the food pantry since 2009. She says the need to help hungry people keeps growing in McDowell County.

Last year, the food pantry gave away enough food to feed half the population of McDowell County. Now, Five Loaves doesn’t keep track of customers who return month to month, so it could be a much smaller portion of the population who use the food pantry, but it’s still a lot of food.

Linda McKinney stands outside the Five Loaves Two Fishes Food Pantry, which she runs with her husband Bob

McKinney says she serves laid off miners and their families, as well as grandparents raising grandchildren. She says it’s important to remember that most of us are equally vulnerable.

“You know, you and I are probably just one paycheck away from poverty. I mean it’s not just the mines.”

It’s also now Walmart, she says. The Walmart closure is a double whammy for the food pantry. 140 people were laid off, which means demand might go up at the pantry, but Linda and her family have relied heavily on donations from Walmart. Last year, they received 95,000 pounds of donated food from the company. Walmart delivered the food at least three times a week.

McKinney says when the superstore closed, she almost lost hope.

“I was in the fetal position for two days. I cried, I said ‘what am I gonna do?’ And then I just took a deep breath and I said, God will provide. It does get overwhelming. Especially with the children. It gets overwhelming.”

Some people have stepped up to donate- a group of ATV tourists from North and South Carolina drove up a truckload of canned food for the food pantry.

Linda McKinney cooks her grandmother’s recipe for pasta sauce at the Five Loaves Food Pantry kitchen. She’s using the sauce on spaghetti pizza

Walmart wouldn’t agree to an interview, but their communications director Brian Nick did send us an emailed statement that said the decision to close 154 Walmart stores was based on a variety of factors, including financial performance, but he didn’t provide any specifics about the superstore closure in McDowell County.

West Virginia University Geography professor Bradley Wilson has been paying close attention to the Walmart closings. He says they can be really difficult for communities. That’s especially true for towns where the small local store closed after Walmart first arrived.

“Walmart convinces everyone to put their eggs in one basket. When you’ve got one person holding all the eggs, and they drop them, you don’t eat. So they’re gonna have to find another route to finding food. They’re gonna have to start over again.”

In McDowell County, there are locally owned grocery store chains – Goodson’s in Welch and Grants in War. But these aren’t big enough stores to supply the food pantry.

So McKinney has had to seriously rethink how she is going to continue feeding people in need.

“My philosophy is, you better learn to grow your own food, cause if something happens to McDowell County, and you would wake up and you’re the only person in McDowell County, you better learn to grow your own.”

The McKinneys are starting to grow food in the parking lot outside their food pantry. Here is a high tunnel, under construction, where Linda’s son Joel plans to grow vegetables year round.

Desperate times call for creative solutions, and McKinney is hopeful as she heads back to work. Lately, she’s had a lot of sleepless nights, but the anxiety doesn’t seem to slow her down. Feeding people is a job that’s never over.