Thoughtful Food
On the Loss of SNAP Money + How That Shapes the Food We Choose to Eat
Emilie and Chantal have been together for five years.
They have two kids, *Marley and David, both young-ish teens who live between their house and Emilie’s first wife, in California. Emilie and Chantal live with Emilie’s grandma in a trailer park in North Vegas.
I met them during the pandemic. They kept their family fed by working Doordash and UberEats and making Target deliveries. Everyday that we operated a food pantry in our front yard during the pandemic, I’d see their beat up Suburban pulling up out front, kids clamoring out. Chantal with a sweet smile and Emilie, loud, hilarious and carrying boxes of food to give to the pantry.
They picked up food for other people when they picked up food for themselves.
This month, Chantal will lose over $100 of SNAP money that went to feed them, grandma and their kids. Chantal works in the bakery department of a Smith’s grocery store. Her hours are sporadic and unpredictable. Emilie is the main breadwinner. She makes $20 working 40 hours a week managing data at a cancer non-profit and picks up extra shifts at Smiths for $16.85 an hour, as they become available. Emilie’s work puts them above the poverty line.
They aren’t destitute.
They are managing.
“With eggs at $7 a dozen and food so high right now, “Emilie explains. “It’s cheaper to eat fast food than cook at home.”
SNAP money plays a critical role in their food choices.
In March, many families in 32 states across the country will lose the increase in food stamps that came with the pandemic. Some of them will face serious challenges feeding their families. Others, like Chantal and Emilie will have to make hard choices about what kinds of food they eat.
“If we eat fast food,” Chantal tells me, “we get one meal for like 10 bucks and split it between the two of us to save money.”
Emilie is aware how crushing this is for her family. She has serious digestive issues and is trying to keep her weight down. She knows she won't be able to do that eating fast food. She knows she feels better when they cook at home. She knows it’s better for her kids that they eat at home, from food they make, where they control the ingredients and the choices and the preparations.
“You eat more,” she says. “I could make a salad with veg and protein, and feel full for hours, but eat a McDonald’s burger and you want another one an hour later.”
Of course, research backs this up. Fast food is mostly salt, sugar, fat and chemicals. Although not technically addictive, the food is engineered to metabolize quickly in the body. When it does, your brain reads that as needing more food.
Big Fast Food wants you to eat more.
Buy more.
They want that food to run through you like water so you have to feel the satisfaction of having another and another. You line their pockets. You feed their coffers. They hand you garbage to put in your body.
(I’m no different than anyone else. I do love some shit food from time to time. And I’ve written about how fast food places like McDonalds are critical to the community for social reasons, but no one should have their main diet be fast food).
“Look,” Emilie tells me, her voice serious now, “With the money we make from work, what we get from SNAP, and considering the price of the food we buy, we can’t eat healthy.”
This gets her going.
“You can’t, Kim. It’s friggin’ impossible.”
+++++
Emilie and Chantal live in the area around Nellis air force base. The median income there is right around $22,000. This is an area that is rife with convenient stores, liquor stores, dollar stores and gas stations. Many of the people living there will also be severely impacted by the loss of their extra SNAP funds.
Convenience shops and dollar stores ward off any interest from major supermarket chains. They can’t compete. Grocery chains, like Kroger who have 40 or so Smiths in Nevada, run at such high margins they only make money by selling large quantities, with lots of product turnover. They simply can’t make the numbers work for profitability when they are competing with 7-11’s, which charge more per product.
This means that for some people, the nearest real grocery store might be miles away. If you don’t have a car, you are fucked and your food is gas station food. Gas station food is significantly more expensive. And the options are limited. Never fresh.
The other day I was at the Circle K near my house - we have a similar issue with gas station food and dollar stores in our economically diverse neighborhood - and watched a young woman with two small kids eat up $20 on boxed mac and cheese, yogurt cups and drinks. She impulse buys a bag of powdered donuts as the cashier rings up her food.
We got into a conversation outside the store.
“I want their bellies full,” she tells me after some small talk and the conversation turns to dinner. “That’s my job as their mom.”
The idea of using that $20 to cobble together a meal her kids may or may not eat is not even a thought in her head.
“I grew up hungry,” she says. ‘I won’t let them go hungry no matter what I have to do.” She tells me this while lovingly watching her kids covered in powdered sugar, hands reaching in the bag for donuts.
For this woman and many others, the objective for meals is to prevent the feeling of hunger, to love on her kids with something she knows will makes them happy. Even if the immediate cost is whether it’s healthy for their bodies.
The loss of SNAP puts the pressure on. It means people will have trouble eating.
And they will have trouble eating food that is good for them.
+++++
Is food a right in the US?
Is food choice a right?
We don’t seem to think so.
After running a food pantry during the pandemic, the concept of “choosing your own food” has become a big issue for me.
I saw a lot of people having to cook with food boxes they were given, whether they liked the food or not. I saw people who cooked without the extra money to buy spices, condiments, oils, salt, and products that really help food taste good and develop flavor. I met people who never eat any fresh foods, and kids who never had home-cooked food because their residences didn’t have working kitchens. Or there were too many roaches and vermin to cook. Some of those kids didn’t want to eat home-cooked food anyway, because their palates had adjusted to fast food. And they liked it. It comforted them.
In the US, we kinda still believe in top-down economics. We definitely believe in top-down food. Where people at the top can get the best, the freshest, the most valuable. The people below them will get the run-off.
But who the hell wants run-off?
Who wants their next meal to be from a box that someone else curated?
Who wants to make their dinner from run-off vegetables, wilting at the edges, that markets were going to throw out anyway?
Why is it normative and okay to feed people complete crap and have that be good-enough while another sector of the population - people like me - wax poetic about their food and about freshness and the soil its grown in and the provenance of the ingredient, and post all the lovely photos of how pretty it all is, when a significant portion of people, our neighbors, are trying to not perish under the weight of their poverty?
And why is the solution charity?
Charity is designed to be temporary. Food banks were set up for emergencies. They aren’t World Central Kitchen, where chefs pull up after a typhoon and dole out delicious, scratch-made, thoughtful, culturally-specific cuisine for citizens attempting to rebuild. No, this is pre-prepared meatballs. Cooked hamburger. Boxes of potato flakes. Canned pork. Beans that have been sitting in a warehouse for years leaching out their nutritional quality.
The opposite of thoughtful.
Pantries (and for what it’s worth, school districts) are dependent on corporations for food. Big food: Pepsi, Coke, Archer Daniels Midland, Tyson, Foster Farms, Kellogg, Nestle, General Mills, they want to make sure we buy. They give their food to food banks. (In their defense, sometimes packaged food is required for people who have no kitchens to cook in). To schools. They give so that we will get the taste for their products. It’s not charity. It’s marketing.
We buy. And our kids buy.
And our children’s children buy. They are setting the taste preferences of the next generation, and the next, so that everyone will be hooked on fast and heavily chemicalized and processed food.
We have to really step back and wonder why things are set up the way they are set up.
There is enough food in the system: Why are kids hungry?
Why do we allow poor families to stay poor?
Why do we expect that our run-off is just fine for other people?
+++++
Snap is an essential program.
It is one of the most successful of our food programs for many reasons, but also because it allows choice. People cook and eat what they want to cook and eat. SNAP moves people out of poverty and hunger, and these benefits show up long term, providing better health outcomes and a better foundation for being economically independent down the road.
People tend to not stay in poverty, as much as we like to believe. Folks tend to spend their younger years making less, raising babies, getting their education, working low-paying jobs. But later, many SNAP recipients settle into careers and get off the program.
Emilie has not re-upped her SNAP benefits because she is working two jobs. She and Chantal are doing much better than when I first met them. But they will feel the loss of this extra $100+
Charity, food banks and pantries should never be a permanent solution for hunger. Just as shelter beds are not solutions for homelessness.
I know we want to band-aid these problems because the solutions are much more complicated and tricky to pull off. Humans are involved after all and some of us are cantankerous assholes and hard to manage. But because we need food to survive, it should always have dignity. Freshness. Choice. We should have respite from the onslaught of marketing of fast food and processed food to our kids. We should be able to cook if we want to. And half-ass it with a bag of chicken strips when we need to. We should never have to choose between who gets to eat and who goes hungry and who has to eat shit food to live.
+++++
Emilie has found her own solution.
People are so adaptable and clever. Humans are built to survive.
Emilie found a post-pandemic brigade of home cooks who left the traditional workforce and are cooking and selling food under new cottage laws. These people make birria, oxtails stew, and seafood boils in their own home kitchens. They buy in bulk and set their prices low enough so the food is affordable and without the overhead of a restaurant, they can take in more of the profit.
“This really helps,” Emilie says, “the food tastes good, it’s healthier and it’s cheaper than buying all the groceries to make it.”
“If you see someone in the store with heaps of chicken thighs or oxtails you might think they have a big family. But no,” Emilie says, “they also might have a neighborhood food business where they are selling to their community.”
This reminds me of the taco house on the historic westside that pumps out birria to lines of people around the block. Cottage food serves an important purpose for community. Patrons feel joy and excitement for the food they eat. It’s fresh, lovingly prepared and wholesome. Affordable. It is a marker of culture and lifestyle. Familiar and filling. Chosen.
Thoughtful.
I’m sure many people in the community are served for free or very little when they need it.
It is not lost on me that it isn’t congress and our law makers who will save us.
It’s the community. The village.
We will have to save ourselves.
And each other.
It’s a shame our government does not have the power that we do.
