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Trump’s Cuts Kill a LA Youth Garden

SNAP-Ed helped children in food-insecure Los Angeles neighborhoods grow fresh produce. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cuts have ended the program that made those gardens possible.

SNAP-Ed funded programs that helped children living in LA food deserts grow fresh produce. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cuts have ended the program that made those gardens possible.

The children were clear from the beginning that they did not like tomatoes. They were excited to be outside, happy enough to kneel in the dirt and plant them—but few had any intention of actually eating one. They were students at a Los Angeles elementary school and had spent their lives in neighborhoods where fresh produce was scarce, and canned fruits and vegetables were not. Still, the children knelt down in the garden and planted the tomatoes anyway.

One of the students, puzzled by the curious act, asked, “Why are we even growing these?”

Despite protestations, Anton van Schaik, 25, kept at it anyway. Van Schaik, an urban agriculture assistant with the CalFresh Healthy Living program at Catholic Charities of Los Angeles, had driven from his apartment in Los Angeles that morning to teach those children how to grow fresh vegetables. Van Schaik had learned, over three years of this work across a sprawling geography of the most under-resourced LA neighborhoods, that the students’ resistance was part of what he had signed up for. The purpose of the program was to soften skepticism about nutritional foods held by students living in under-resourced neighborhoods from Highland Park to the food deserts of South Central, Inglewood, and West Athens.

South LA has long had one of the poorest food-resource environments in the county. A report by the nonprofit Community Health Councils found that the area’s roughly 60 full-service grocery stores each served an average of more than 22,000 residents—twice the load carried by grocery stores in wealthier West LA—and that, according to the LA County Department of Public Health, just 12.7 percent of adults in South LA consumed the recommended daily amount of fruits and vegetables, compared to 22.7 percent in West LA and 14.7 percent countywide. The neighborhoods where van Schaik worked are not places where children grow up eating tomatoes from a vine.

The students were doubtful, and for good reason. Van Schaik, hoping to change that, knelt in the dirt with them.

Weeks passed, the tomatoes grew, and when it came time to try them, many of the kids asked for seconds. “To watch the kids confront not only their own prejudices against fruits and vegetables,” van Schaik told me, “but to be able to facilitate them interacting with produce that they personally grew for the first time ever in their lives—that was a real privilege.”

That moment, the garden where it happened, and the program that made both possible are now over. This week, Catholic Charities of Los Angeles formally ended its urban gardening and nutrition education program. The garden project began in 2018 with a single school site and grew to operate across school sites, food........

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