In 2025, the longest government shutdown in history put nearly 42 million Americans at risk of losing federal food assistance. It was an unsettling time for people who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, with significant legal, political, and frontline implications.
Through Civil Eats’ Food Policy Tracker, our real-time, James Beard Foundation-nominated tool launched in January 2025, we covered every move, often beating larger, mainstream publications, to help readers make sense of a turbulent time. Through more than a dozen stories and updates in roughly 19 days, we also offered context and big-picture analysis of how the shutdown intersected with changes to SNAP.
In a prime example of the tumultuous changes transforming the U.S. food system, Civil Eats met the moment. Civil Eats has deeply covered food insecurity and SNAP for more than 17 years. In the last year, we meaningfully expanded our reach through a mix of editorial, digital, and social tools to serve our audience critical information in response to unprecedented impacts on food policy.
We launched Food Policy Tracker as-it-happens and weekly newsletters (April 2025) to send readers fast-moving federal food and agriculture news directly to their inboxes; these newsletters now reach nearly 8,200 subscribers.
We developed a four-part email educational series, the Crash Course (September 2025), to help readers understand how the federal government shapes what we eat and how that is changing, reaching more than 400 subscribers and generating nearly $8,000 in revenue. We hired a staff reporter in Washington, D.C. (August 2025) and a video reporter (January 2026) to boost our food policy coverage and reach new audiences.
We introduced article summaries across our coverage, a UI addition designed to help readers quickly understand the news, and created new subcategories for topics such as mutual aid and MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) in response to reader interest. We also increased our service journalism, with listicles heavy on resources for accessing food, shopping affordably, and supporting organizations doing meaningful food system work.
We also created deeper connections between our newsroom and our readers. Launched in February 2025, we hosted five online Civil Eats Book Club meetings during the consideration period, providing curated discussions and opportunities to meet the author.
We held more than a half-dozen onsite and virtual meetups with Civil Eats members to engage with our team around food justice, climate change, and food policy. We also hosted salons attended by hundreds of people and a member Slack community with 150 participants.
Our social strategy focuses on bringing new readers into our work. Just between January and March, we produced nine videos, generating thousands of views and widening the aperture on what can be a complex beat.
Between April 2025 and March 2026, Civil Eats was nominated and received multiple awards, including a James Beard Award for coverage of a grassroots effort to implement heat protections for Florida farmworkers. Civil Eats was also a finalist for General Excellence (micro newsroom) in the Online Journalism Awards for three years running.
