Manna soup kitchen’s campus is bustling at 10 a.m. on a weekday. A group of women, each with a shock of orange hair that suggests familial relation, energetically loads groceries into bags at the community food market. The youngest among them – appearing around middle school age, judging by her height and soft, rounded features – expresses excitement about the snacks she’s placing in a bright pink backpack.
Outside, people eat breakfast. They’re congregated under trees, on the benches by the building and perched on the side of the parking lot. Some of them are unhoused. Most of them are not.
About this series
Thousands of La Plata County residents struggle to consistently access enough nutritious food. This series examines the impacts of the growing affordability crisis and looming cuts to many New Deal-era nutrition and social service programs on the county’s fragile food safety net, the widespread impact on the community and the local efforts working to build a more resilient food system.
In this series:
Today: A broad range of people experience food insecurity in a variety of ways.
July 24: A look at how the conditions and circumstances unique to the moment contribute to food insecurity and how communities are bracing for looming challenges.
July 31: There are more ways than one to keep people fed and healthy. We examine some of the solutions communities are undertaking, and some areas that still need improvement. Also, learn how Pine River Shares is executing a grassroots approach to address the root of the problem by producing food locally – and keeping it local.
“Everyone is struggling right now,” one volunteer stacking egg cartons said.
Food insecurity can impact anyone – the person sleeping at the bus stop, your middle-class neighbor with a big family or the farmer down the road, said Rachel Landis, director of the Good Food Collective, a Durango-based nonprofit that works to provide connection, resources, policy support and strategic leadership to build a more just and thriving food system across Southwest Colorado.
“This really is an issue affecting many of our friends and neighbors down here in this region, and this is not something that is limited to our folks who are within our kind of lowest socioeconomic status,” she said. “It is also really impacting the middle working class – (and) I think that’s the other thing, is understanding that this could be any of us, really.”
In La Plata County, recent estimates from the Durango Food Bank suggest around 7,000 people struggle with food insecurity and miss at least one meal a day. Other nonprofit leaders believe that number is likely much higher based on what they are seeing in their communities, although those estimates are difficult to quantify.
What is clear is the need. In the Pine River Valley, lines at the food bank have doubled in the past two years, and organizations across the county dedicated to helping families afford groceries or put fresh fruit and vegetables on the table remain as busy as ever amid an affordability crisis that hits rural areas particularly hard.
The conflict in Iran has driven up fuel and fertilizer costs, pushing grocery prices higher. Beef prices continue to climb as the U.S. cattle herd sits at its smallest size in more than half a century. Housing costs and expensive childcare add on, and looming above it all are next year’s changes to federal assistance programs.
Over the past five years, local food organizations have built an increasingly sophisticated network of support and begun focusing on a more community-driven approach to addressing food security – but the issue still persists, and its impacts can be diverse, far-reaching and long-term, Landis said.
These are some of the stories of the region’s food insecure residents.
Seventy-five-year-old Judy Rector, who lives near Ignacio with her 84-year-old husband, said the Pine River Shares free market in Bayfield is a main source of food for her household.
Rector’s husband has macular degeneration and dementia, and the pair live off of social security, she said. The two had a 401(k), but sustaining themselves after retirement in a difficult economy eventually drained their savings.
She sometimes buys groceries from stores like Walmart – but without the help of Pine River Shares, she and her husband would be unable to reliably feed themselves, she said.
“We normally get a pound of hamburger every two weeks, and then quite often the eggs – a dozen eggs – and they throw some of their own vegetables and things in there,” she said. “Sometimes we get potatoes or onions, or things like that too. ... It’s a big help.”
She said seeing all the different types of people who visit the market reminds her that anyone can end up food insecure.
“You don’t have to be living on the streets to use (the free market),” she said.
Doris, who asked to go by her first name because of negative perceptions associated with food insecurity, is 77 and “feeling it.”
Like many senior citizens in La Plata County, she lives on a fixed income and a small amount of money through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds.
“I get $24 a month in SNAP benefits. Except, you can’t even walk into the grocery store for $24,” she said.
She’d had a 30-year career as a social worker, a dual-income marriage with a savings account and a 401(k).
Her husband’s hospital bill was a million dollars, and they were responsible for $200,000 of it. It took all of their savings to pay off, and Doris had to come out of retirement for several years before Social Security kicked in.
“I never thought I would find myself in that position,” she said of being worried about affording groceries, before discovering Pine River Shares.
In her move from Seattle to the Pine River Valley to be near her son about four years ago, Doris said she accidentally left her entire spice rack behind.
“I remember just standing in my kitchen crying, going, ‘I can’t afford to buy all this again,’” she said.
In the following weeks, she said having such a tight budget for groceries chipped away at the sense of security she felt as a younger woman. She found herself making the choice between purchasing her medication or groceries. More specifically, nutritious, fresh food.
“That’s the hardest part – the nutritious things that you absolutely need,” she said. “Instead of having the protein that I needed, I’d probably have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
For a woman not immune to the regular ailments that accompany an aging body – Doris has arthritis – she can intimately feel the way fresh, whole foods make her feel compared to packaged, processed junk food.
Luckily, she connected with Pine River Shares shortly after the move. There, she found the resources to meet her nutritional needs while still being able to afford her medicine. And by becoming an active volunteer, her main focus is now helping others struggling with similar insecurity, providing an outlet for her to address the county and nationwide issue.
“Just being there on the food share days and helping people through the line, hearing their stories, it just makes all the difference in the world,” she said.
“I’m not sure I’d even still be here if I hadn’t gotten involved in this program because, you know, my situation was pretty desperate, and I was pretty depressed,” she said.
Instant oatmeal, packages of freeze dried dates, a box of cooked chicken, one package of frozen bacon and a breakfast burrito were some of the food items Brook, a 47-year-old Durango man, picked up at the Manna Food Market earlier this week.
Brook, who asked to go by only his first name, has a home, a part-time job and is working to finish his GED. Until about four years ago, he worked as a professional tradesman in the building industry. After suffering a mental health crisis, he ended up one of the thousands of Americans whose housing situation collapsed out from underneath them after a single life upset.
Much of what he picked up at Manna that day would not have been items he could have eaten while living out of a tent, he said, gesturing to his grocery haul.
“I wouldn’t even take it because you can’t have a (expletive) fire out there (in the wilderness),” he said. “You know, this would probably spoil by the time I ate it.”
Brook is doing well. He’s back on his medication, housed and working. But he still is not at the place where grocery money fits smoothly into his budget.
“This job is not full-time. It’s only 20 hours a week, and now I’m gonna probably lose my Medicaid,” he said, referring to the new Medicaid eligibility requirements that go into effect in January.
Under H.R.1 (the budget reconciliation bill that passed July 2025), Medicaid recipients must prove they are working, volunteering or in school for at least 80 hours a month, and instead of once a year, eligibility must be reviewed every six months.
“I’m just barely hanging on. … It’s going to cost me my meds, and I’m going to lose food stamps, and yeah, that’s going to (impact) my food security because, you know, rent is 1,000 bucks,” he said.
Mancos farmer and Good Food Collective Rural Access Manager Alix Midgley feels like she’s found stability now, but when she was first starting out as a farmer several years ago, being able to afford consistent meals was a struggle.
She experienced food insecurity as a master’s degree holder while working two jobs and living with a working partner.
Getting on her feet as a farmer wasn’t easy economically or logistically, Midgely said, and impacted her ability to reliably access meals, even as she was attempting to grow her own food to sell.
The stress and fear that came from not knowing where her next meal was coming from was significant, she said.
“Over the course of the first few years of being out here and starting the farm business and developing the land, my former partner and I hit some pretty hard times,” she said.
Midgley and her former partner eventually accepted that they needed help, she said, and the two applied for SNAP benefits. Remembering the relief she felt when she was told she had been accepted still makes her emotional, she said.
“I will absolutely never ever forget the experience – this is going to make me cry – of first getting the SNAP card and going to the grocery store for the first time,” she said. “… It wasn’t even very much money, but the weight that was lifted off of my shoulders in being able to walk into the grocery store and know that I could afford the basic things that we were going to need to be able to get through the month was massive.”
Food insecurity is often misunderstood or siloed into one non-encompassing definition, Landis said – but people’s experiences run the gamut.
People often perceive food insecurity to mean hunger, and an issue that doesn’t touch the United States, the Southwest or a next-door neighbor, she said – but it’s more complex and far-reaching than many people realize.
“It is insecurity,” she said. “It is, you don’t necessarily have consistent access to the food that you need to support your well-being.”
epond@durangoherald.com; jbowman@durangoherald.com
