When the government shutdown froze SNAP benefits this month, the impact on the North Fork was immediate and visceral. Lines at local food pantries swelled. Families on federal assistance suddenly found themselves without a safety net.
It’s not the first government shutdown, but this time the North Fork had something it didn’t have just a few years ago: a growing, locally built infrastructure designed to catch food before it’s wasted and redirect it to the people who need it most.
Those new networks were the focus of a Cutchogue Civic Association forum Wednesday night at the Cutchogue New Suffolk Library — where farmers, town officials, nonprofit leaders and chefs laid out the ways the community is reshaping how food moves through the East End.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency estimate that 30% to 40% of the U.S. food supply is wasted.
“That’s about 550 pounds, per person, per year,” said Food Rescue US – North Fork co-director Anne Howard. “That is a lot of food. And it’s not just the food waste. It’s the cost of getting rid of the food waste: the water, the transportation, the processing, the storage.”
CCA Chair Barbara Butterworth pointed out that when the group chose food waste as a forum topic months ago, they had no idea a government shutdown was coming. Local agencies had already been strained by rising grocery costs and the long tail of pandemic-era need, but the SNAP freeze amplified all of it.
The shutdown also showcased what’s changed. Wednesday night’s forum centered on solutions taking root on the North Fork: composting programs, farm partnerships, restaurant collaborations and a growing food rescue network that collects surplus food daily and moves it swiftly into the hands of families who might otherwise go without.
(Pictured above, from left: Francesca Greco; Kelly Brennan; Maria Fedele and Sammy Sabil)
Municipal composting
One of the most visible successes is municipal composting. For decades, residents who wanted to compost had to do it in their own backyards — in tumblers, homemade bins or simple piles covered with autumn leaves. The Long Island Organics Council devised a plan that changed that.
LIOC partnered with the towns of Riverhead and Southold to launch Long Island’s first municipal food-scrap drop-off sites. The Cutchogue transfer station pilot program, capped at 100 households, proved residents were ready (there’s already a waiting list.) LIOC Director Francesca Greco said that in just nine months, those families diverted six tons of food scraps.
That material now gets mixed with leaves and yard waste, turned by town crews into long windrows and transformed into a fine, dark compost that’s given to residents or sold to farms and landscapers. Compost is now a functioning, circular system on the North Fork: residents bring in their food waste, and months later, the town hands back bags of nutrient-rich soil.
Greco said that by expanding the program, there is potential to divert 30% of Southold’s residential waste stream.
“In Riverhead, we were able to compost over 12,000 pounds of food scraps, which is equivalent to 40,000 pounds of [carbon dioxide] not released into the atmosphere.”
All of this puts Southold and Riverhead in a strong position as New York’s food donation and recycling law ramps up. The 2019 law mandated that businesses that generate two tons or more of food waste a week must donate excess food and recycle food scraps if they are located within 25 miles of an organic recycler.
In 2027, that threshold falls to one ton a week, and in 2029 it drops to a half ton a week. Over the next few years, hundreds more institutions across the state will be required to donate edible food and recycle the rest.
Food Rescue US – North Fork
The other half of the progress story unfolds in the back of vans and hatchbacks that now fan out across the East End every day as part of Food Rescue North Fork.
Howard noted that the group has now topped 50,000 pounds of food rescued since its inception just a few years ago. Their system is simple: volunteers pick up surplus food from farms, bakeries, restaurants and institutional kitchens and deliver it within an hour to food pantries, churches and the small 24/7 community cabinet pantries scattered around the North Fork.
This rapid-turnaround model solves two of the biggest barriers small towns face: transportation and food-safety compliance. A restaurant might only have a tray or two of extra meals at the end of a night. A hospital kitchen might end the day with unserved trays of prepared food. Those things spoil quickly, but the new system catches them and moves them swiftly to those in need.
Instead of discarding unserved meals, Eastern Long Island Hospital now packages them at the end of each day and hands them off to Food Rescue volunteers. Much of that food goes straight to C.A.S.T. North Fork, the Southold nonprofit that feeds roughly 1,500 families. Hospital staff estimate that at least half of that food once went to landfills.
Local farms, early adopters
Farmers have been early adopters, and often drivers, of the North Fork’s new food-waste ethos.
Kelly Brennan, whose family runs Golden Acres Organic Farm in South Jamesport, described what donation used to look like: unpredictable hours, staff shortages, mismatched timing with pantry openings and the heartbreak of watching beautiful food spoil just because it couldn’t be moved quickly enough.
Now, a Food Rescue volunteer comes twice a week to collect unsold but still pristine produce. Whatever can’t be donated goes into a neighborhood composting partnership she runs with ReWild North Fork — or straight to the chickens and guinea hens of customers who now stop by expressly to pick up farm scraps.
“As a farmer, we work hard,” Brennan said. “We don’t want to see waste.” Her farm now sends almost nothing to the dump.
Other farms have joined in. When Southold Town Supervisor and farmer Al Krupski found himself with a barn full of winter squash, Food Rescue volunteers arrived in the rain and lined up cars to haul it all away to agencies that could use it.
No ‘leftovers’
North Fork Shack owner and chef Sammy Sabil has turned his frustration with waste into a weekly ritual. On Sundays and Mondays, he and his staff come in during their off hours, survey what’s left in the pantry and walk-in, and cook full meals — complete plates with a protein, starch and vegetable. They go directly to agencies serving families in need.
Sabil insisted early on that the meals not be treated as “leftovers,” but as thoughtful dishes created with care. His staff quickly bought in. Within two weeks, he said, they were calling him early Sunday morning asking, “What are we making now?” Sabil said he hopes to expand from feeding 30 people a week to hundreds within the next year.
Parish outreach
All of this innovation feeds into a network of local pantries that have been seeing need spike even before the SNAP freeze.
Greenport’s North Fork Parish Outreach at St. Agnes, which receives no government funding, has seen demand climb 64% in five years, said volunteer Maria Fedele, giving examples of the local people the organization serves: a mother caring full-time for a daughter with a brain tumor, a federal worker blindsided by the shutdown, a woman living in her car after her husband emptied their bank account and hit the road.
“She contacted outreach, hysterically crying, as she was unable to pay her car insurance, and her car is now her home,” Fedele said. “As it turned out, her husband hadn’t paid the insurance on the other vehicle, so she had been penalized for that as well.”
The parish outreach group was able to help pay off the insurance and supply the woman with food.
Southold’s composting program is expanding in step with a broader regional push toward waste reduction. Nick Krupski, Southold’s solid waste coordinator, said on Friday that residents are encouraged to use whichever drop-off site is closest to them because “the goal is to reduce what ends up in the [municipal solid waste] stream — but also not to have people drive 20 minutes if they can compost at home or closer to home.”
To make backyard composting easier, the town partners with a company that offers low-cost, recycled-plastic composters at twice-yearly pickup events. “To me, the goal is to get as many people composting at home as possible,” Krupski said, “and then everyone else who doesn’t have the space or the wherewithal can drop off to me.”
Krupski said East Hampton and Southampton now have similar programs and Shelter Island is developing one, too. Long Island’s lack of landfills and high shipping costs make disposal uniquely challenging, he said, but towns are beginning to see composting as a shared solution. “Everybody’s making a run at it now, which is awesome,” Krupski said. “And we all try to work together.”