by Matthew Busch (’25). This story was originally published on Oct. 27, 2025 for Des Moines Register.

CRESTON — The line outside the Creston Area Food Bank was already about six people deep an hour before the pantry was scheduled to open. As it inched along, a few seniors made their way into the crowded waiting room, where Jodi Rushing, the pantry’s treasurer, was racing through check-ins.

“Our seniors are fairly proud and private,” Rushing said. “They don’t want others to know their business.”

When his number was called, John Fredrickson, 71, wound his way through the aisles, picking out mostly canned goods, as well as cereal, bread and a few fresh vegetables — zucchini, onions, potatoes. The pantry food supplements what he’s able to buy on a fixed income and what he’s not able to grow in his backyard garden. A cement worker by trade, Frederickson said he’s had to lower his standard of living to meet his budget.

On this day of triple-digit heat in July, he went to his truck with a plastic bag of food in each hand. Asked if he had enough food for the month, he replied, “I squeeze by.”

Asked if he’s ever applied for federal food assistance, he said, “I really haven’t checked into it. I’m sure I qualify for what my income is.”

Fredrickson is among many older Iowans who are food insecure, a number that is projected to grow as newly approved cuts hit the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the population of seniors explodes in the coming decades. An estimated 83% of Iowans over age 65 — about 90,000 people — were eligible for SNAP but not enrolled, according to the most recent data from the National Council on Aging.

That puts Iowa behind only California in the percentage of eligible seniors who have not signed up for SNAP, the nation’s biggest food assistance program, despite being the country’s largest food-producing states.

Keeping track of the number of people who are food insecure is about to get harder, after the U.S. Agriculture Department announced in September that it will no longer compile Household Food Security reports, saying they are costly, redundant and historically used to increase SNAP enrollment. Also gone is funding for SNAP education programs, which have helped people stretch their SNAP benefits and eat healthy — SNAP-Ed money was cut in the federal spending bill this summer. More than 2 million Americans are expected to be kicked off SNAP as new rules gradually are put into place, but that number does not account for the many people — including seniors — who will remain food insecure because they haven’t applied for SNAP.

“Halting data collection and reporting on food insecurity will not make this growing problem disappear,” the Iowa Hunger Coalition, which monitors food insecurity, posted on its website. “With the impacts of the largest cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in history looming, now is the time to be paying more attention to the rate of hunger in our nation, not do away with one of the most significant reports the federal government compiles on food insecurity.”

Seniors see SNAP as charity

SNAP outreach specialist Sarah Francis leads the Wellness and Independence through Nutrition Program program aimed at increasing SNAP enrollment. In her 12 years with Iowa State University Extension, Francis has seen modest increases in the number of seniors reached. In their outreach efforts, Francis said she and her staff try to meet seniors where they are, in senior-living complexes, at senior lunches, through food pantries, hospitals and churches. Since 2012, WIN programs have reached 52,000 Iowans over the age of 50, increasing each year. But the number of seniors unenrolled in SNAP has remained persistently high.

It’s not clear if the Iowa Health and Human Services Department is trying to determine why people don’t apply. A department spokesperson said in a email, “We do not have specific data regarding the reasons eligible older adults are not enrolling in SNAP benefits.”

Data, however, does show that while Iowa is below the national average in percentage of food insecure seniors, more and more Iowans are becoming food insecure as they age. According to Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks and pantries, 6.7% of Iowa seniors were food insecure in 2023, compared to 9.2% nationally. But Iowa’s percentage has increased every year since 2021, when it was 4.3%.

Francis believes the gap due largely to the stigma that surrounds government assistance in the Heartland, saying, “Who’s going to go up to a booth that says ‘food assistance’ when they’re already embarrassed that they may be in need?” She has tried to reorient the programming to focus instead on the wellness that SNAP offers and less on the need it meets.

Behind the stigma may be deeper moral conflicts with accepting government help. Some see it as “a moral failure that needs to be addressed with charity,” said Patrick Brady, a food security researcher whose study of Iowa adults over age 60 was published in the journal Ecology of Food and Nutrition in 2023.

For others, the barriers are more concrete. The SNAP application is confusing and presents technological challenges. It’s tedious in that it requires verification on a recurring basis. And it takes weeks or months to process, prompting some to find more immediate solutions.

Alex Murphy, spokesperson for Iowa HHS, said in an email that the department is “working toward efficiencies like eliminating the interview at certification review for households in which all adults are over the age of 60 or disabled and have no earned income.”

Food banks feel the weight

In Creston, a community of roughly 7,500 people in Union County, Rushing is the food pantry treasurer as well as pastor at First United Methodist Church. During an outdoor service on a warm September Sunday, Rushing welcomed each of the two dozen or so congregants by name, and kept the service brief as the heat climbed. Afterward, Rushing headed straight to the pantry to begin the check-in process for the day’s distribution. The pantry services more than just Creston, and Rushing is seeing more people coming from outside the community.

“We’re trying to make it as much like a grocery store, for someone going through to have dignity,” she said. “We want them to feel like they’re not an imposition.”

In Polk County on a hot Saturday morning in July, Carolyn Bird, 68, picked out mostly fresh produce from the daily section, food donated by organizations and businesses that otherwise would have gone to waste.

The groceries supplement what Bird’s Social Security income allows her to purchase each month.

She hadn’t applied for SNAP. She said she’d never heard of the program.

Bird’s husband of 43 years had passed away in the spring. Years ago, they had a huge garden, Bird said, with apple trees her husband bought. They would make applesauce for their children from their abundant crop. But now Bird worries about stretching her monthly income to cover food and other household expenses.

“We still have the electricity, you still have the cable bill, you still have all of those bills, you know. So that’s the main thing I’m worried about navigating,” she said.

It’s a concern Patty Sneddon-Kisting, Urbandale Food Pantry CEO, hears often.

“Hunger is rarely about food and more about impossible decisions that families have to make,” she said. “It’s about figuring out, ‘What am I paying this month? What can I be flexible on?’ And I think for most people, it’s usually your food budget that can be the most flexible.”

Sneddon-Kisting has been at the pantry since 2018, and has seen the need steadily increase. In February 2022, the pantry served 847 families, she said. Two years later, it served more than double that number — over 1,900 families.

“I mean that’s just so many families,” she said. “The demand was real.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the state increased SNAP participants’ benefits to the maximum amount they qualified for based on their household size. In April 2022, almost all of those benefits returned to previous levels, leaving many to turn to food pantries.

Bird is among those who have come to rely on the pantry. But a reporter’s question about the SNAP program prompted her to ask a social worker about the federal food subsidy. She was told that she just missed the income threshold, but her query may have opened a door.

“There’s different things they said that I might be able to qualify for,” Bird said.

She was reflective about not qualifying for SNAP, though she knows she is food insecure. “People that really need it are the ones that need it more than me,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to take somebody else’s benefits away from them.”

SNAP problems and a fine

Iowa’s SNAP issues go beyond low enrollment. In 2019, the federal government fined the state $1.8 million for its excessive payment error rate, which, at 10%, was higher than the national average. It also has been reprimanded for taking too much time to process applications. States are required to process 90% of applications within 30 days, and while many states miss the mark, in 2023, Iowa had processed only 78% of its applications on time.

Through a correction action plan, Iowa HHS reduced the payment error rate to below the national average. That rate is becoming more significant because the federal government plans to use it to determine federal SNAP benefits to states, with the government withholding money to those with an error rate of more than 6%.

Hunger policy advocate Luke Elzinga, chair of the food pantry network DMARC, said the payment error rate doesn’t constitute waste or abuse. It measures the state’s accuracy in determining SNAP benefits for recipients.

“These are inadvertent errors, and there’s things that states can do to bring that payment error rate down and address it,” he said.

But those things, Elzinga added, would cost money — investing in IT infrastructure upgrades and more staff and training.

“When they’re already going to be at a deficit, selling those to legislatures are going to be that much harder,” he said. “But I think advocates and probably agencies too are going to be pitching this as an investment, an initial investment now to prevent future costs down the road.”

SNAP-Ed eliminated

Funding for nutrition education tied to the SNAP program is also set to expire in October. That includes nutrition classes at senior living communities, and nutrition experts who work with food pantries to for healthier offerings.

Kali Angerman, a regional supervisor with Iowa State University Extension, teaches a class of mostly seniors about healthy, affordable options at grocery stores and demonstrates simple recipes for them to follow. During a recent class at a senior center, she helped the group concoct “cowboy caviar” with corn, black beans, onion, green pepper, avocado, tomato, and a dressing of honey mustard, apple cider vinegar, oil, and lemon juice served with tortilla chips, no salt added.

Without SNAP-Ed funding for such classes, Angerman said she’s worried that seniors won’t get the support they need to make healthy food choices.

“They’re going to continue to fall through the cracks and not feel heard, not feel seen, not get the help they just might need,” she said.

(This article was updated to correct the name of the Wellness and Independence through Nutrition Program and to correct a misspelling.)

Matthew Busch is a reporter and photographer with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley. He reported this article through a grant from The SCAN Foundation.