Every Wednesday afternoon in the heart of Swannanoa, volunteers hand out seasonal produce while community members flow through the produce market in an old church building that nonprofit Bounty and Soul hosts. Last week, it was summer squash, fresh tomatoes and watermelon for the summer season. Swannanoa is an unincorporated rural community in eastern Buncombe County between Asheville and Black Mountain. Ingles, the area’s only grocery store, was destroyed during Tropical Storm Helene, leaving residents with a 10-mile commute either east or west to get to access groceries. That makes the community one of the regions food deserts.
Ali Casparian is the executive director of Bounty and Soul. She founded the organization after experiencing food insecurity when she moved to the area after a traumatic situation. When she would give back by volunteering at local food banks, she was disappointed that people usually received processed, canned food.
One day, she went to MANNA, a food bank that serves 16 counties and the Qualla Boundary. The organization is a central point for regional food banks in Western North Carolina to pick up food, especially crops that farmers give away. Casparian saw walls of produce that were going to waste because no one had picked it up yet. She took some of the produce home and with other community volunteers, they had a small, free farmers market.
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From there, Bounty and Soul was born. They now have a community market each weekday across different parts of Buncombe County. But the Wednesday market inside Beacon Community Center in Swannanoa is their ground-zero.
“If you ask people what they want instead of what they need, it looks different.” she said “People need food, but if you ask them, ‘What kind of food do you want to eat?’ It’s fresh food.”
About 50 miles north in Mitchell County, TRACTOR Food and Farms is addressing the food crises in another one of the region’s food deserts in a different way. It’s a community supported agriculture hub, where a group buys a direct share of produce from local farmers and sells produce to community members or gives it to other markets. They also have a small grocery store attached to their warehouse. They’re looking to hit the ground running with it in the fall.
“We’re looking around; … there’s no grocery store,” said Dru Zucchino, TRACTOR’s executive director. “We’re gonna do that, and we’re gonna do it the way that we feel the community needs it done.”
The nonprofit’s mission simply has been to fill the gaps in the local food system, he said. Since Helene hit, there have been many gaps. Spruce Pine, where TRACTOR is headquartered, also lost its Ingles Market during Helene.
‘Emergency button you press all the time’
Both Spruce Pine and Swannanoa have both become food deserts since Tropical Storm Helene hit the area with flooding and destruction. Both local organizations, and more across the region have had to find new ways to step in and provide for residents who are in need of healthy food.
Food deserts are defined by the US Department of Agriculture as rural areas where a significant share of residents live more that 10 miles away from a large supermarket. In urban areas, residents of food deserts live more than a mile away from a supermarket.
North Carolina has one of the highest populations of people living in rural areas in the country — second only to Texas.
COVID-19 made food access particularly hard for rural communities. People who were elderly or had disabilities had difficulty leaving the house to accessing food in ways that they had before. According to a study from the NIH, individuals in rural Appalachia had to oftentimes choose between medication, food and utilities. In some areas in Western North Carolina, Helene compounded the long-term effects of this.
“You have this emergency button and you press it all the time,” Zucchino said.
CSAs and food organizations in the region often work directly with farmers, and Zucchino said it’s like TRACTOR sometimes does customer service for farms. They work with 70 local farmers to get a variety of produce.
Farmers in rural Western North Carolina were also devastated by Helene. Many have land that is unusable because of damage that was weathered during the storm, some have expensive equipment that is still under repair and others just had to move elsewhere so their business could survive after the storm. There’s no figure for how much donated food was lost during Helene, but a report from the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project said that 86% of small farms in Western NC sustained damage during Helene.
Very few farms in Western North Carolina have scaled corporate buyers, Zucchino said. CSAs often act as a bridge between small farmers and consumers, so he said TRACTOR created a farmer’s task force for farmers that needed work after Helene. They repaired farmland in ways that most volunteers could not.
“Maybe in small rural communities, socialist agriculture makes sense, but like capitalist mining also makes sense, and those two can coexist, and they can adapt to each other, and they can adapt their models and live peacefully,” Zucchino said.
Future of Ingles
Both Spruce Pine and Swannanoa previously relied for groceries on Ingles Markets that were destroyed during the storm and have yet to reopen, nearly two years later. Another Ingles store in Morganton in Burke County has also not been rebuilt since the storm, but the town has other national options. Ingles is a regional grocery chain that operates throughout Southern Appalachia.
In North Carolina, about 11% of residents experience food insecurity according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. And, about 16% of census tracts across the western part of the state are considered food deserts, a data set from Feeding America, a nationwide food security organization which MANNA Food Bank is a regional partner with.
In Swannanoa, food insecurity was a problem long before Helene, and it has worsened because many residents just can’t afford to drive to the closest grocery stores, and because many families depend on just one car and at the end of long work days, driving a half hour just isn’t on the table, Casparian said.
After the storm, both Bounty and Soul became ground zero for Swannanoa residents seeking food and a little bit down the line, they consolidated their markets in town to twice a week to provide for more residents who are food insecure.
Many Spruce Pine residents grocery shop at the Walmart Supercenter in town, or travel to Marion in McDowell County or to Johnston City in Tennessee, according to Bill Slagle, the executive director for the Mitchell County Chamber of Commerce.
“It’s also had an impact on local sales tax in Spruce Pine, which has had impacts outside of just the lack of an available option for people to shop,”he said
Ingles recently told the local government in Spruce Pine that they closed on a new location for a store, and will presumably demolish their old one. The Mitchell News-Journal recently reported that Food Lion has broken ground on bringing its store in Spruce Pine back in the next 18 months.
Last October, the Buncombe County Adjustment Board approved an expansive rebuild of the dilapidated Ingles in Swannanoa, but it has not yet broken ground on the project.
The parking lot remains bare and the sign says the store in Black Mountain, which is about 10 miles away, is open. Bounty and Soul operates a farmer’s market truck out of the Black Mountain store, which they were grandfathered into because they worked with the previous property owner. Ingles does not donate to the market.
Ingles did not respond to inquiries for this article prior to publication.
Food deserts face D-SNAP cuts
One of the short-term solutions to food insecurity is SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which has lost 4 million enrolled members following the passage of the national One Big Beautiful Bill last July. After Helene, D-SNAP, or Disaster SNAP, was administered in the region briefly.
Francisco Chavez, who is the community engagement manager for Bounty and Soul, said he’s seen an increase in produce market attendees since the news of SNAP cuts hit. Last fall, during the government shutdown, the state government released partial payments to SNAP recipients, while people who received SNAP waited to hear about the future of the program.
But since, in the budget that passed earlier this month, about $52 million in SNAP funds are left to counties to administrate.
According to the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, this budget requires counties to cumulatively pay that amount this fiscal year for the federally required administrative cost shift from last year’s national bill, which will rise to $69 million in the 2027 budget.
“Paired with separate legislation that will limit counties’ ability to grow property tax revenue, these additional expenses will strain counties’ ability to adequately fund their workforces responsible for SNAP timeliness and payment error rates,” NCCACC wrote in an email statement to Carolina Public Press.
Finding creative solutions to food deserts
Access to nutritious food is just one of the social determinants of health, which are nonmedical factors that can determine someone’s health outcome. Some of the other determinants are economic stability, education and housing.
Many individuals living below the poverty line, regardless of natural disasters, are unable to consider health at the grocery store. Kari Brayman, the communications director for TRACTOR, said that sometimes food that sits on shelves in grocery stores can be about three months old.
During the last two years, nonprofits in Western North Carolina have risen to the occasion to address gaps in food access and community health. Some of these organizations also address other determinants of health. TRACTOR has a program called Food is Medicine, where they “fill” prescriptions for healthy food, which has been a bridge for some community members in the interim of SNAP access. Bounty and Soul provides health and wellness education as well.
“Nonprofits, churches, other you know neighborhood organizations, they’ve carried the weight of recovery in this area,” Casparian said. “I’ve seen the best of humanity express itself throughout the whole recovery.”
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