OXFORD, Miss.—Brian Smith woke up on Dec. 4, 2025, to the first rain Oxford had seen in weeks, just days after the region decided to finally settle into winter weather. Even with the bitter chill, he started his Thursday the same as any other: a trip to the local Kroger.
Waiting for him there was a bakery employee, ready with two shopping carts loaded full of boxes, donations for the local food pantry. After pushing the carts out through the rain and cramming the boxes of bread and pantry treats into his car, Smith cranked up his Toyota RAV4 Hybrid and drove the three miles between the grocer and The Oxford Food Pantry on Molly Barr Road
The Lafayette County native made this trip Thursday and Friday for the past 10 years. Before him, his late father, Robert H. Smith, did the same for “at least 20 years,” he said.
“My dad was one of the first people with First Baptist that started this food pantry,” Smith, a retired auditor for the Mississippi Division of Medicaid, told the Mississippi Free Press. “It’s grown from, I think, four churches; now we’ve got 14 churches that participate and volunteer.”
Once he pulled into the Oxford Food Pantry, Smith opened the back door to the building. Inside, volunteers were already racing around the storage area in preparation so that they could open by the top of the hour. Shelves and boxes lined nearly every wall, while piles of canned food stood stacked high enough to almost reach the ceiling. All the volunteers chatted like old friends as they set the shelves and took stock of new donations; not a trace of doom and gloom hung in the air after a year of cuts and disruptions for food providers.
From looks alone, one wouldn’t be able to tell that just a few weeks prior, those running the pantry didn’t know whether it would have enough to provide for everyone in need through the holidays.
“We’ve had times this year where there was nothing,” Katherine Wachter, another volunteer at Oxford Food Pantry, told the Mississippi Free Press. “There were maybe a couple cans of beans, but everything else was gone.”
Challenges in Food Acquisition
Many food charity organizations across north Mississippi have had an even tougher time meeting the demand that arose last fall following federal cuts to food-assistance services like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Because of rising costs and dwindling donations, some have had to dig into their reserve funds, and others even had to shut down.
Data from Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap study show that, as of 2023, 19.4% of Mississippi residents are food-insecure, higher than the national average of 14.3%. Throughout many of the more rural counties, it isn’t uncommon to see those numbers rise to more than 20%.
Pantries nationwide had seen surges in demand from residents due to the disruption of SNAP funds during the October government shutdown. What’s more, that disruption came at the start of the holiday season, a time when pantries already see increased demand relative to the rest of the year.
While the Oxford Food Pantry usually sees around 30 new families seeking help each month, it helped around 50 new families in November, Executive Director John Kohne said. Since the new year, he’s said the numbers have fallen back in line to the regular rate of about 30 per month.
November wasn’t the only month that proved a challenge for food providers this year. The Trump administration cut a total of $1 billion from the Local Food Purchase Assistance and The Emergency Food Assistance Program, programs that helped foodbanks source quality, locally grown food.
The Oxford pantry also noted a disruption in shipments from Mid-South Food Bank, a regional organization that provides food at a heavily discounted cost to pantries and other food providers. Kohne compared the discount to effectively being charged only the cost of transporting the food.
Those shipments hadn’t come through for around three months leading up to November. When they resumed, it was only at a fraction of the volume of food the pantry previously received.
‘A Wonderful Situation to Be In’
Amidst these challenges, Kohne decided to lean in harder on the pantry’s role as a hub for the Oxford and larger Lafayette County community. After reaching out to sympathetic parties, the pantry received a flood of support, with donations coming in every day leading up to Thanksgiving.
One day, the organization received as much as 30 cartloads of food. Another day, a husband and wife donated $7,000 for Thanksgiving turkeys. Two former University of Mississippi football players donated 400 chickens.
Community support still hasn’t stalled, with another instance surprising Brian Smith during his run to Chicory Market on a Thursday morning run. As he came to collect the weekly fruit and vegetable donation, one of the store’s managers approached Smith with an extra donation. The grocery store had collected some $6,200, which Smith noted is enough to pay for about a week’s worth of food for the pantry.
“The biggest stress I have is what do I do with all the food?” Kohne said. “Now, isn’t that a wonderful situation to be in?”
Looking toward the future, Kohne said he wants to continue to deepen ties with the community, relying less on public funds and contributions from regional organizations. He’s worked to partner with community members and bring the pantry’s reach beyond the small building it inhabits.
On the pantry’s Facebook page, Kohne announced one of his first steps in realizing that goal would be stocking local Little Free Pantries that Stronger Together Oxford sets up. He is working to develop more ideas with Oxford youth groups and 14 local churches.
“My biggest payback for doing what I do is sharing the feeling (volunteers) have when they walk away after helping plug a hole,” Kohne said.
‘Tomorrow, It Could Be You’
A mile and a half from the Oxford Food Pantry, students man a food bank serving the other half of Oxford’s population. Grove Grocery is open to students and staff at the University of Mississippi, which has enjoyed record-breaking enrollment the past three years. When more than 25,000 students stream into Oxford each semester, the population of Oxford roughly doubles.
College students face their own challenges with securing food. The 2019-2020 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study indicated around 23% of undergraduate students in the United States experience food insecurity. The Committee of National Statistics defines food insecurity as the “household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”
Many students may not be able to work enough hours while studying and taking classes full time. Many must make what money they have stretch to cover rent, tuition and keeping gas in the tank. At UM, students can get help from the Grove Grocery pantry to sustain them when they are between jobs or without stable income.
“If it’s not you and it’s not the person to your right, it’s the person to your left,” Capri Lobotski, student director of the Grove Grocery, told the Mississippi Free Press. “Like, tomorrow, it could be you, depending on how your job is going and just how many resources you have access to.”
Despite the disruption of SNAP funds, Lebowski said she hadn’t noticed any difference in demand among students making use of Grove Grocery. Likewise, Kohne said the SNAP disruption had little effect on Oxford residents and called the fears around a recurring or longer-lasting drop “apprehension and nervousness, but it wasn’t a reality.”
Stop-Gaps for Long-Term Problems
Other areas of north Mississippi, however, have been hit harder over the past year.
St. Luke’s Food Pantry in Lee County served 2,505 people in November. Jason Martin, executive director of both the pantry and the Hunger Coalition of Northeast Mississippi, said demand has risen so high, the pantry had to close down for a week due to lack of stock.
Losing SNAP benefits was the main story Martin heard from new faces showing up to the pantry. Martin expected the spike in need to continue into December, and he had to weigh his choices given what had appeared to be a one-time dip into the rainy day fund may have become a “new normal” for the pantry.
“We’re asking our legislators to give some consideration to what the fallout is of cuts that have been made and how detrimental they are to organizations like us that are just trying to keep food on the table for people,” Martin said.
When contacted by Mississippi Free Press after the start of the year, Martin said people continued to give enough during the holiday season that the pantry did not need to pull from its rainy-day fund. Moving further into the new year, Martin said he is aiming to foster a stronger consolidated effort among Northeast Mississippi food pantries. While St. Luke’s suffered brief shutdowns, other pantries in the area are weighing the possibility of having to close for good, he said.
“The downstream health impact could be catastrophic,” Martin said. “You can see people that are trying to stretch a 30-day supply of food over 60 days. You can make the case there’s opportunity for crime because people are going to do whatever it takes to feed their family.”
It’s a danger that has already been seen in other rural parts of the state, including areas under the service of the Mid-South Food Bank. The organization, which is based in Memphis, partners with pantries and other food providers in 18 counties across north Mississippi.
DeSoto County, the most populous county in north Mississippi, is in Mid-South Food Bank’s service range. Other serviced counties include part of the Mississippi Delta, a region that has seen continuous issues with economic mobility and food security.
It is areas like these, highly rural counties with little access to infrastructure, where around 20 to 30 partner agencies have had to shut down in the past year, Mid-South Food Bank Communications and Volunteer Services Manager Nicole Willis told the Mississippi Free Press
Much like Oxford, the Hunger Coalition of Northeast Mississippi and the Mid-South Food Bank point out how local communities showed up and plugged the gap in times of need.
“Anytime we have a tragic situation, whatever it looks like, our community steps up and steps into the gap.” Martin said. “But that is often a short-term resolution to a much longer term problem.”
Willis said that due to significant cuts at Mid-South Food Bank, the organization had to rely much more on monthly donors and local community partnerships to stay afloat. Still, it seems that those at the food bank have kept their spirits high by focusing on serving the community, with the rush of the giving season in November and December leaving little time for rumination.
“Our biggest thing was ‘How can we feed everybody?’” Willis said. “That sometimes meant some of us worked overtime to make sure people got what they needed. … Most people were happy to just help.”
Most local hunger-relief organizations note that while donations rise during the holiday season, January brings a sharp fall in donations each year.
Leaders at each food provider encourage community members to continue to donate food, money and their time as volunteers to help tide local food providers through the yearly dry season for charities.
“Oftentimes, what people don’t realize is that it might be the neighbor down the street or someone sitting next to them at their church or workplace that’s having a difficult time feeding their families,” Martin said.
Even if leaders among food charity organizations may have had differing perspectives on what the future may hold, they seem to share similar plans for their immediate actions: It’s time to roll up their sleeves and get back to work feeding their communities.
For more information on local food assistance, visit the Hunger Coalition of Northeast Mississippi or Mid-South Food Bank.