Near my home in Akeley, the food shelf is open two hours a week. Tuesday mornings, nine to eleven. You mark what you need on a printed list, and a volunteer does the shopping. The man who runs it, Steve Greene, told a reporter he'd run out of eggs and milk the week before, something he doesn't usually do. In five years, that little pantry has gone from feeding around 1,200 people a year to more than 2,000.
I keep a full pantry myself. Dry beans, rice, flour, the staples that last. Some of that's just how I was raised, and some of it is a habit from a life where the next paycheck wasn't always a sure thing. In recent years, though, that pantry has taken on a new purpose. Like many of you, I've seen the warning signs around us, and I'd rather keep a few months of food in the house than learn the hard way that I should have. A few months ago, I sat in on a "cooking on commods" class up in Park Rapids, where folks learn to turn the commodity foods that come through food assistance into a real meal. People were sharing what they know and learning how to stretch what they have. What stuck with me afterward wasn't the recipes. It was how many more people need that class today than used to.
Drive around this part of the state, and you see it everywhere. In Park Rapids, Bob Hansen runs the Hubbard County Food Shelf and hands out almost 50 percent more food than he did before the pandemic. He's running the budget so tight he's dropped items he used to carry, and he's worried meat or milk could be next. They're planning a bigger building where people will grab a cart and pick their own groceries off the shelf, like a small store. Park Rapids isn't the only place. Up in Bemidji, the food shelf served more than 37,000 people in 2024, the most it has ever served, and the number of families coming through each month is roughly double what it was a few years ago. The food shelf's director at the time, Mike Olson, put the stakes about as plainly as anyone can: "We are all two weeks away from ending up someplace that we don't want to be." Meanwhile, out in Kelliher, a town of a few hundred, folks opened a pantry last summer in a former church behind the Village One Stop, stained-glass windows still in the walls, because the mobile food drop that used to come couldn't be sustained anymore.
Here's the part the state averages hide. Hunger runs deeper out here than it does for the state as a whole. In Cass County, Feeding America estimates that more than one in six children lacks reliable access to food, one of the highest rates in the state. These are not numbers about somebody else. That's the family ahead of you in the checkout line.
These are not folks who quit working either. They are working. Consider the resort housekeeper whose hours dry up after Labor Day when the lake empties out. There's also the home health aide in Staples, driving 30 miles between clients, who hasn't missed a shift in 2 years and is one busted transmission from losing the job. In Todd County, better than four in ten households can't cover the basics on what they bring home. A cashier in Wadena would need close to $35 an hour to cover the cost of living for herself and one kid. She's making fourteen. That gap isn't a personal failing. It's the distance between the wage her boss sets and the prices her landlord, her propane company, and her grocery store all get to charge. Every one of them has pricing power. She has none. This wage gap connects directly to why hunger is rising.
Part of why grocery stores charge what they do is that many towns have barely one left. When Sebeka lost its grocery store, a gas station and café called Hub 71 became the closest thing to a grocery store in town, and the state had to chip in 19,000 dollars to help it install coolers so it could stock fresh produce. In Longville, Tabaka's has been the only grocery store in town for sixty years. When the last store in a town goes dark, that town doesn't just lose a business. It loses a reason you could live there.
Here's why those stores close. A family store like Tabaka's buys the same national brands from its wholesaler at a price higher than what Walmart charges you on the shelf. That's not a figure of speech, it's the arithmetic. It comes down to a law most folks have never heard of. There used to be a federal law against suppliers giving the giant a better deal than the small store gets, and Washington quietly stopped enforcing it back in 1981. At that time, independent grocers had more than half the grocery market; now, they've got about a fifth of it.
So if groceries keep getting more expensive, you'd think the farmer would be getting ahead. He isn't. Out of every dollar you spend at the store, the person who actually grew the food takes home about fifteen cents. Generations ago, it was closer to forty. The rest gets skimmed off between the field and your cart, and most of it lands with a handful of enormous companies. In fact, just four of them (Cargill, Tyson, JBS, and National Beef) now slaughter eighty-five percent of the beef in this country, up from a third back in 1980. The biggest privately held company in America is one of them, and it isn't in New York or California. It's Cargill, right down the road in Wayzata. It took in $177 billion in 2023, and the family that owns it is worth around $60 billion. So, while the food system funnels more dollars to the top, the farmers filling those grain elevators are only seeing fifteen cents, leaving the ones in the middle to take a profit that the people doing the work never see.
That gap isn't a line on a chart out here. It shows up in our communities, the neighbor who had to sell the whole herd. Minnesota lost 146 dairy farms in 2023 alone. The whole system is balanced on a knife's edge, too: down in Worthington, one plant kills twenty thousand hogs a day, eight of every ten of them raised on Minnesota farms, and in 2021, a single cyberattack shut the place down for days. When everything flows through one set of hands, one bad day can take it all out. And when it does, it's not the company that goes hungry. It's us.
That's what I want folks out here to see plain as day. The hunger showing up at our food shelves is not bad luck and it is not laziness. It's the same squeeze, just from the other end. The same handful of companies paying the farmer less for what he grows are the ones charging your family more for what's on the shelf, and they keep the difference. We're told there's no money for the things we need, but the money is right there, flowing to the people who do best when the rest of us are spread thin. Scarcity out here is not a law of nature. It's a choice somebody else is making, and they're making good money on it.
Some folks say the answer is just to let people keep more of their paycheck, so they don't need help in the first place. I get that. I want people to keep what they earn. But you cannot out-earn a price that somebody else sets. A bigger paycheck doesn't go far when one company decides what a gallon of milk costs in a town with one store. Until that changes, nothing else really will.
Some of our neighbors are already showing the way out. When the only grocery in Cass Lake came up for sale after seventy-nine years, the Leech Lake Band bought it themselves rather than let the town lose it. Their chairman called it a milestone in food sovereignty, and that's the right word for it. They're building their own wild rice plant now, so they stop paying outsiders about a hundred thousand dollars a year to process the rice their own people harvest, and so they can keep a reserve on hand that a bad year can't take from them. That's what it looks like when folks keep what feeds them close to home.
You don't have to be a tribe to do it, either. Mason Brothers has wholesaled groceries out of Wadena for a hundred years. They buy their beef from a packer in South Dakota instead of one of the big four, cut and pack the meat themselves, and keep 400 small-town stores stocked, many of them the only grocery left in town. When the grocery in Bagley needed a new owner, Mason bought it, kept the name and every employee, and kept the doors open. That's how you keep a town going.
None of that is new out here. We run our power through co-ops, and we raised our barns with our neighbors. It's the same instinct: keep what feeds us close, in hands that live here, so nobody is at the mercy of a far-off decision. Pooling what we have, so nobody gets crushed alone, is the oldest idea in this part of the country.
This is where we get to decide what kind of place we want to live in. Minnesota can step in and fill the gap, back up our food shelves, and make sure nobody in our towns goes hungry. I'm running for State Senate because I want to see us fund our food programs and back the local answers that keep our farmers strong. When we keep things close to home, we're not only feeding ourselves, we're making sure our towns can stand on their own. What happens next is up to us.
We've done good work on this before, so I know it can be done. Minnesota feeds every school kid now, no forms, no means test. When somebody tried to claw that back, we held the line. We help cover the cost for our own farmers to bring their extra harvest to food shelves. We created a tax credit to help new farmers get started, then expanded it in 2023 and set aside half for emerging farmers. Both Senator Utke and Representative Wiener voted no on the bill that did it. This year, the Legislature couldn't pass a farm bill at all. A ten-million-dollar plan to fund our regional food banks, written by a Republican from East Grand Forks, died right along with it. We were that close. The gridlock killed it.
So here's what I'd fight for. Some of it is keeping people fed right now: feed every kid, pass the food-bank and food-shelf money that already had both parties behind it, catch that federal cut before it lands on your property taxes. That part can't wait. But to pull this up by the root, you go after what let the squeeze take hold in the first place. Remember that law against the big suppliers playing favorites, the one Washington quit enforcing back in 1981? We don't have to wait for Washington to pick it back up. Minnesota can pass its own and enforce it ourselves, the way other states already do, a grocery pricing law that says the family store gets the same deal the giant chain does, so Main Street can compete again.