Meals on Wheels delivers more than food to Alameda County’s growing senior population. Will the state starve support?

After Lloyd Potter lost his sight a year ago, the 70-year-old former Denny’s dishwasher was stuck at home and unable to venture much farther than his front door. He couldn’t shop for himself, let alone cook his own meals, and a lack of proper nutrition left him vitamin-deficient and anemic. After several months, he was able to get an in-home support caregiver and was enrolled in his local Meals on Wheels program, which delivers 12 meals a week to his apartment in Oakland near Lake Merritt. Those meals are his main source of nutrition.  On a recent Monday, Potter received a delivery of five meals, which he placed in his otherwise bare freezer. After each delivery, his in-home caregiver reads the labels to him, and he puts the meals in the order he wants to eat them. Come mealtime, he uses the sensor button on his microwave to defrost and heat the food.  Lloyd Potter puts the food he just recieved from Meals on Wheels into his freezer inside his Oakland home on Sept. 21, 2026. Credit: Richard H. Grant for East Bay Nosh “Since I’ve been eating Meals on Wheels, I got over my deficiency and my anemia,” said Potter. “I’m  deeply glad to get it because I’m blind and can’t cook, and I was worried about how I’d get food in the future. And it’s helped me as far as being able to put things toward necessities like rent, phone, PG&E, drug co-pays, and other needs.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nosh (@eastbaynosh) Potter is one of 3,000 seniors served each year by SOS Meals on Wheels, the 60-year-old organization that delivers more than 520,000 meals a year to homebound seniors living in communities along the Interstate 880 corridor, including Oakland, San Leandro, Hayward, Union City, Newark, Fremont and unincorporated areas across Alameda County. It is one of more than 5,000 independently run Meals on Wheels programs across the country. Last month, SOS Meals on Wheels delivered its 10 millionth meal.  The program is available to any adult who is homebound and age 60 or older. While there is no income requirement, many of the seniors served by SOS Meals on Wheels have experienced food insecurity, meaning they don’t have enough to eat or know where their next meal will come from.  Food insecurity is a rising concern among older Californians, as programs and funding for senior services are on the chopping block at both federal and state levels. Some 886,000 California seniors were considered food insecure in 2024, according to Feeding America. That number has likely gone up as food prices have increased and SNAP benefits have been slashed, but more current figures don’t exist after the U.S. Department of Agriculture canceled its collection of food security data last year, claiming that the “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear-monger.” Critics of the USDA’s decision suspect it was a way to cover up the likely wave of food insecurity to come after the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and the resulting loss of SNAP benefits for millions of people. At the same time, the state, facing a growing population of older residents, is reconsidering its senior services funding formula in a way that could lead to deep cuts for more urban areas, such as Alameda County.  Cooks with Meals on Wheels prepare food into trays inside the Meals on Wheels building in San Leandro, Calif. on Sept. 21, 2026. Credit: Richard H. Grant for East Bay Nosh “I think the only reason why you wouldn’t measure it is if you were planning to cut food assistance, because it basically allows you to pretend like we don’t have this food insecurity problem,” Lindsey Smith Taillie, a professor in the nutrition department at the University of North Carolina, told the Wall Street Journal last year. Delivering more than a meal Many organizations across Alameda County are tackling food insecurity among older adults. Other Meals on Wheels programs across the county deliver meals to areas not covered by SOS Meals on Wheels, including in Berkeley, which delivers meals to seniors three days a week, and Meals on Wheels of Alameda County, which serves 2,700 meals a day. Many communities partner with the Mercy Brown Bag Program, offering bags of groceries twice a month to qualifying seniors. Senior centers in Dublin, Livermore, Pleasanton, Albany, Emeryville and Berkeley all have free meal programs.  Berkeley Food Network, a food bank founded in 2016, recently partnered with Community Kitchens in Oakland to provide 16,800 prepared meals to local seniors. The collaboration was born out of the Alameda County Food Sovereignty Roundtable, a group convened by the office of Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas consisting of more than 40 organizations and county agencies that meet monthly to help strengthen the county food system. An SOS Meals on Wheels driver loads his van with meals to deliver on his route for the day on Sept. 21, 2026. Credit: Richard H. Grant for East Bay Nosh “Our seniors face different barriers to accessing or preparing food on their own,” said Fortunato Bas at a recent event hosted by Berkeley Food Network and Community Kitchens. “This partnership crucially expands access to nutritious, culturally responsive meals in North County, and it empowers our elders.” Programs like these are expected to become more important in the decades to come as the population of older adults grows across the country. Roughly 380,000 adults 60 or older live in Alameda County, according to the California Department of Aging. That figure is expected to rise to nearly 500,000 by 2035, amounting to 29% of the population. Currently, 13% of Alameda County seniors live in poverty. Overall, nearly 1 in 4 county residents are experiencing food insecurity. Meanwhile, the state is reconsidering how it allocates senior services, proposing a new formula that would hit Alameda County with a 17% reduction, resulting in the loss of more than $1.4 million and thousands of