Lived Experience: SNAP Support through Tough Times
When I was 18 years old, I moved to Portland, Oregon with my high school sweetheart, far from family and friends. Our teenage bond didn’t withstand the stress and excitement of early adulthood — we soon broke up, and I moved into my own studio apartment.
My food bill wasn’t high, but I could only find part-time work as a barista, and I had no roommates to help share the cost of living in a big city. I often took home bags of free bagels from the coffee shop where I worked, and I was fortunately able to participate in a food assistance program to help fill in the gaps.
I would ride my bike to my local co-op and stock up on groceries, riding home with canvas bags dangling from my handlebars, full of fresh fruit, greens, allium, squash, root vegetables, brassicas, hearty bread, tofu, dried fruits and nuts, herbs and spices, nut butters and jams, canned tomatoes and beans, and whatever snacks and sweets caught my attention. I taught myself to cook and to love food in my apartment, without fear about how I would pay for my next meal.
A little over a decade later, I was a new mom.
I was also a nontraditional college student, having gone back to college when my son was only six months old. The father of my kids was a server at a local restaurant. I had no income, other than student loans, and we were barely scraping by. While I did manage to keep a 4.0 GPA and graduate summa cum laude, I was unable to add paid work onto the heavy load I was already carrying.
Going to college with an infant at home was close to unmanageable. I was pumping breastmilk in the nursing room at the rec center between classes. When I was done with school, all I wanted to do was hold my kid and play with him and give him my attention while he was awake. I would put him to bed, and then I would stay up late doing homework. The next day, I would wake up and do it all over again. I’d suffered from PTSD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder for many years before having kids, and Postpartum Anxiety and Depression exacerbated an already unbearable mental load. Working on top of it all would likely have broken me.
My partner at the time was working in food service for tips that relied solely on the kindness and generosity of others, which didn’t always pan out. We often struggled with finances, and we worried that we would not be able to afford to buy groceries and pay bills with the added expense of prenatal vitamins, baby clothes, and diapers. Thankfully, the doctor’s office where I found out I was pregnant with my son also helped us sign up for Medicaid and directed us to Ohio’s SNAP agency for food assistance. That assistance got us through some of the hardest times.
At one point, we were participating in a nutrition incentive program that matched our SNAP purchases at the Countryside Conservancy farmers market dollar-for-dollar with produce vouchers. If I spent $25 on my EBT card, I would receive $25 worth of wooden coins that I could use to purchase fruits and vegetables at the market. Instead of purchasing expensive baby food when my son started to eat solid foods, I was able to purchase fresh produce from local farms and make his baby food at home.
Still, being a SNAP participant has a certain stigma, and I surely felt the sting. I still remember the looks I would get when I would occasionally shop at the local “gourmet” grocery store. At this store, you had to tell the cashier you were using EBT before swiping your card. My face would flush, and I’d mumble to the cashier, hoping the person behind me in line didn’t hear me. If only people could look past their judgment and see how an occasional treat soothed my heavy heart, easing my worries for just a moment. Everything was so hard — why did I have to feel guilty for the type of food that I chose at the grocery store?
My husband works a second job part-time at a brewery. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit home in 2020, the brewery shut down for an extended period. He lost half his income, but because he still worked a full-time day job — where he worked triple the hours to earn the same amount of money he earned at the brewery in two shifts — he didn’t qualify for unemployment. This was a huge blow that left us wondering how we would afford to make ends meet.
We used some of our pandemic stimulus funds to start a garden, but we are novice gardeners, so it was time consuming and didn’t produce much. Fortunately, since our kids go to a public school district that participates in the National School Lunch Program, we received Pandemic EBT funds to subsidize their meals while the schools were shut down and the kids were participating in remote learning. While it didn’t entirely fill the gap created by the loss of hours, every little bit helped us through that tough time.
***
Three very different phases of my life are represented here, but each one portrays a point on the vast spectrum of food insecurity that exists in the United States. I’m grateful for the lived experience that has instilled in me a deep empathy for people experiencing any level of food insecurity. As the Irish proverb goes, “The full man does not understand the wants of the hungry.”