https://civileats.com/2025/11/
~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
SNAP reduces hunger, lifts children out of poverty, improves health outcomes, and supports local economies. It is one of the most effective anti-poverty tools this country has ever created.
November 11, 2025
The author (right) with her brother, Ryan, in 1987 or 1988. (Photo courtesy of Alexina Cather)
When I think about hunger in America, I don’t think first about statistics or policies. I think about my mother, a woman who worked multiple jobs, trying to support my brother and me. She worked primarily as a preschool teacher—brilliant, patient, endlessly devoted. She worked long hours, nurturing other people’s children, and then came home to do the same for us, and then at one point worked the graveyard shift at the front desk of a 24 Hour Fitness.
Still, every month, the numbers refused to add up. No matter how hard she worked, at the end of most months we found ourselves staring down impossible choices: keeping the lights on, the water running, or setting the table for more than just homework.
We rationed. We moved frequently. We worried about what the next week would bring. There were weeks when food pantries and food stamps filled the gaps, and others when they didn’t. I technically qualified for free lunch at school, but I rarely took it. At my school, students who received free lunch stood in a separate line. I remember the shame of standing in that line was more painful than hunger, so I sometimes skipped lunch.
The author with her mother, Carol, in 1984. (Photo courtesy of Alexina Cather)
Those early experiences shaped my understanding of hunger and food insecurity: not as abstract social problems, but as daily calculations of trade-offs and attempts to maintain some dignity, choosing between food and electricity, pride and need, nourishment and belonging. No child in the richest nation on earth should have to do that math.
That belief is what led me to a career in food policy, specifically at a nonprofit organization called Wellness in the Schools (WITS), which works with school districts to ensure that school meals are healthy and delicious. It’s a model of what’s possible when we refuse to accept hunger and poor nutrition as inevitable.
For me, this work is both personal and profoundly hopeful: proof that with care, creativity, and commitment, we can make the school cafeteria a place of dignity and nourishment for every child. I spend my days working to ensure that fewer families face the choices my mother did and that children have access to nutritious food at school, a critical lifeline more than ever for many children in this country.
Right now, I’m deeply concerned because the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP or food stamps, as most people know it, is being chipped away by new restrictions and rollbacks at the exact moment that families need it most.
Even more pressing, the Trump administration continues to defy court orders to issue full SNAP payments during the government shutdown and orders states to roll back attempts to fund benefits, even though approximately 42 million Americans rely on SNAP each month. As a result, states are scrambling, and benefits are being delayed and reduced, forcing the same kinds of choices my family faced—between food and heat, between dignity and desperation.
“States are scrambling, and benefits are being delayed and reduced, forcing the same kinds of choices my family faced—between food and heat, between dignity and desperation.”
SNAP isn’t an abstract line item in a federal budget. It’s a lifeline for approximately one in eight Americans, or roughly 41.7 million people, each month. Many of them are working parents who earn too little to cover rent, childcare, and groceries simultaneously.
In fact, most adults who receive SNAP—and are not on disability or retired—are employed, often on a full-time basis. They just aren’t paid enough to live. The average benefit, approximately $187 per person per month, barely covers the cost of groceries for a week, much less a month. The impossible choices continue.
Public debates about hunger often confuse or conflate very different parts of the food assistance system. Food banks, for instance, are large regional warehouses that collect and distribute food to local partners. Food pantries, which most people interact with directly, are community-based and often know their neighborhoods better than any outside organization.
Food banks and food pantries are indispensable, and they deserve our support, but they are not a substitute for SNAP. SNAP provides agency by allowing families to buy what they need, when they need it, while circulating dollars back into local economies. SNAP is not charity. SNAP is a tool for maintaining stability, dignity, and self-determination. SNAP is about not having to choose between darkness and dinner.
Understanding hunger also means understanding the role that the environment plays. The USDA defines a “food desert” as a low-income area where residents live far from a supermarket—more than a mile in cities, 10 miles in rural communities. But that term places the onus on the individual and implies they made a bad choice (or had the bad luck) to live in a place with no access to fresh food, when the fact is that many families and individuals are not able to choose proximity to fresh food.
“SNAP is not charity. SNAP is a tool for maintaining stability, dignity, and self-determination.”
The absence of nutritious food in many neighborhoods is the product of deliberate policy decisions such as segregation, disinvestment, redlining, and structural racism. A more accurate term is “food apartheid,” which was coined by farmer and food justice leader Karen Washington as an acknowledgment that these inequities are not natural phenomena but are purposefully designed and sustained by systems of power.
In communities living under food apartheid, grocery stores are scarce, transportation is limited, and healthy options are often unaffordable or unavailable. These are also the same neighborhoods most affected by SNAP cuts. Weakening the program reinforces inequality.We know what works.
SNAP reduces hunger, lifts children out of poverty, improves health outcomes, and supports local economies. It is one of the most effective anti-poverty tools this country has ever created. But it can do its job only if we let it—if we strengthen, not sabotage, the safety net families rely on.
As someone who once watched her mother do that math, I can tell you that when we invest in SNAP, we invest in people’s ability to live with stability and self-respect. That’s not just good policy. It’s an investment in humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment