Months after Helene, WNC’s food insecurity crisis persists

Though much of Western North Carolina was without water, power and cell service in the days after Tropical Storm Helene, staff at many area nonprofits and restaurants were hard at work finding ways to get food out to the community. 

In the midst of the disaster, the need was clear and urgent. But food insecurity was at crisis levels in WNC even before Helene, say local hunger-fighting organizations. In the months following the storm’s destruction, widespread economic hardship has exacerbated an already pressing issue. 

Xpress talked with four local groups to find out how they’re continuing to feed a community in need. 

Starting over  

While Helene raged, Claire Neal, CEO of MANNA FoodBank, WNC’s primary food distribution organization, frantically monitored security cameras at the nonprofit’s Swannanoa River Road facility. On the morning of Sept. 27, with the river filling the building, MANNA’s server went down, then the power went out, cutting off video access. 

By the following day, the only way to get to the building was by boat.   

MANNA’s warehouse was destroyed with damage totaling $28 million. But like other nonprofits in the region addressing food insecurity, the organization’s team mobilized into action immediately to feed a devastated community.

MANNA quickly set up a temporary distribution station at the WNC Farmers Market, which served over 8,000 families in the first two weeks after the storm. Micah Chrisman, director of marketing and communications, saw people from all walks of life come through the distribution site — families with children, senior citizens, people whose only belongings were packed into their cars.

MANNA’s board of directors had raised concerns about flooding as early as 2018, and, fortuitously, leadership had secured a new warehouse in Mills River just days before the storm. The plan had been to transition to the new location by 2026, but Helene hastened the move. By mid-October, MANNA had relocated, filling the 84,000-square-foot space to capacity thanks to generous donations that poured in from all over the country.

While the organization doesn’t yet have a poststorm count of people served, Chrisman notes that in December 2023, with operations functioning normally, MANNA distributed 1.7 million pounds of food across 16 counties. This past December, despite having just lost its entire headquarters, it distributed nearly 1.2 million pounds from its new site while also collecting, storing and distributing nonfood items, including clothing, heaters and camping gear.  

“We had limited storage and no food racking available, so we were only able to utilize floor space for pallets of food donations,” Chrisman explains. “We also had fewer refrigerated units, so we weren’t able to take as much produce and milk as we normally do.” 

MANNA also coordinated the distribution of countless pounds of food in the first weeks of the crisis that went untallied because they were sent directly to its 220 partner agencies.

Feeding the people

A surplus of donations and volunteers was common among WNC groups addressing food needs in the weeks after Helene — a good problem to have, according to Shelly Baker, communications and outreach coordinator for Asheville Poverty Initiative (API). The nonprofit runs 12 Baskets Café, an inclusive site offering free, sit-down meals in West Asheville. 

The program rescues high-quality food from grocery stores, caterers, restaurants and institutional dining rooms — items that would otherwise be sent to landfills. The poststorm surge in donations meant the café’s refrigerators were full at a time when need was skyrocketing. Since the storm, 12 Baskets has expanded to serve meals six days a week, up from two days per week in 2023.        

The dining room accommodates 155 people a day in the winter and more during warm weather with outdoor seating. The program also supplies free groceries to about 65-75 people a day. “Even during Hurricane Helene we were here with no power, serving people,” says Baker. “Storm or no storm, we will be here serving food — hot food if the power doesn’t go out.”

Equal Plates Project (EPP) was also committed to feeding the community in the wake of the storm. The Asheville-based nonprofit had serendipitously opened a second kitchen two weeks before Tropical Storm Helene hit, allowing it to scale up production at a time when more residents than ever were in need.

Executive Director Madi Holtzman says that on the Sunday after Helene, despite the communication blackout, her whole team just showed up to one of the kitchens, even though they typically don’t work on Sundays. 

“I think we all just felt this instinct to, first of all, see if our fridges were still powered, and then they were,” she says. “So we were all just kind of like, ‘All right, let’s get the food we already have prepared out this afternoon.’”

The brainchild of Gaining Ground Farm’s Aaron Grier, EPP emerged in April 2020 when restaurants were forced to close due to COVID-19, leaving many local farmers with no market for their crops. The nonprofit dedicates 50%-70% of its food budget to buying ingredients from local farmers, says Holtzman. It employs local professional chefs to prepare nutritious meals, which are distributed across Buncombe County through community-based organizations.         

After Helene, EPP’s food distribution mushroomed from about 1,000 meals a week to 1,000 meals a day. Holtzman attributes the growth in need to a number of intersecting factors, including displacement due to storm damage and a spike in unemployment. 

In December, Buncombe County reported that over 9,200 homes were damaged in the storm, with almost 1,000 of those claiming major damage or destruction. According to the N.C. Department of Commerce, unemployment in Buncombe County spiked to 10.4% in October before dropping to 7.2% in November, compared with 2.6% for the same period in 2023. November unemployment rates for surrounding counties vary from 4% to nearly 9%.  

From restaurant to relief agency

While the EPP team was convening downtown after the storm, so too were the chefs at Bear’s Smokehouse BBQ. They showed up the afternoon after Helene passed, setting up generators to keep the restaurant refrigerators running. 

Just before the cellphone outage, Bear’s co-owner Cheryl Antoncic Suess says her business partner and co-founder Jamie McDonald texted with news that international nonprofit World Central Kitchen (WCK) was trying to get supplies into Asheville. McDonald had previously helped distribute meals with WCK during crises in Florida and Morocco and to Ukrainian refugees in Poland.

Before the end of the next day, WCK had landed a helicopter in the Keller-Williams parking lot behind Bear’s downtown location. A few days later, the team had water tanks set up, and the restaurant was pumping out food.

Bear’s distributed 35,000 to 40,000 meals a day during October with the help of an army of volunteers. Antoncic drove across WNC, stopping at fire departments, community centers, churches and residences to find out where food was most needed. With box trucks rented by WCK and volunteers’ personal vehicles, Bear’s distributed prepared food directly to some of the hardest-hit areas of the region, including Burnsville, Swannanoa and Black Mountain.

As of early January, with the financial investment of WCK, Bear’s was still cooking and delivering over 4,000 free meals a day to sites across the region, including to individuals living in hotels through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Transitional Sheltering Assistance program.  

Though Bear’s small outpost at Sweeten Creek Brewing has reopened fully, the downtown location is still operating on limited hours and with an abbreviated menu. Though WCK had originally planned to leave WNC in mid-December, it’s now committed to partnering with Bear’s on food relief efforts through the winter. 

Antoncic is hopeful that in spring tourists will return, and Bear’s downtown location can resume regular hours. But for now, community outreach by Bear’s staff shows that food insecurity remains strong enough to continue producing 4,000 community meals per day. 

“I don’t think that number is going down anytime soon, especially in the winter,” says Antoncic. “The disaster and the emergency are not over.”

Shining a light

Though EPP received an outpouring of support after the storm, Holtzman says volunteer numbers have dropped in the months since, despite the “heightened needs” of local communities experiencing severe economic pressures. “The truth is, there was rampant food insecurity and need for support even prehurricane,” she says. “But I think that the hurricane, kind of like COVID, shined a light on the scale of need.”       

MANNA’s Chrisman says demand for the nonprofit’s services has risen steadily since the pandemic. “Our numbers have only increased every month, year over year,” he says. “That definitely speaks to some systemic issues with our economic solutions and everything that is going on in our communities.”

Baker at AIP believes WNC’s post-Helene weeks without running water, electricity and internet helped increase understanding about the daily struggles people in poverty face on an ongoing basis. It also underscored how much can be done when the community rallies together.

“Poverty was a disaster, if you will, before we had the natural disaster of Helene,” she says. “There’s no reason that we shouldn’t always be there for our neighbors.”      

Chrisman acknowledges that now, months after the storm has passed and much outside aid has moved on, survivors may experience a sense of disillusionment or hopelessness over loss of support — part of a postdisaster behavioral cycle researched by the National Center for PTSD.

“At MANNA, our goal is to make sure folks understand that even when everybody else is feeling that low point, we have to help be that caring resource,” he says. “We’re not going anywhere. We’re there for you.” 

For a list of MANNA’s partner food distribution organizations, visit avl.mx/eho.