Everyone's Got a Story

The folks heading up the Illinois hunger challenge sent out a message today quoting from an e-mail they received saying this of the SNAP challenge:

"Poverty is not the result of a lack of morality or moral clarity; it is about economic inequity. And no writer who can spend her day running about from farmer's market to Whole Foods to work to home to cook for 2 hours is going to change that. We need real change; this will only come from Americans seeing that it is necessary. The SNAP Hunger Challenge denigrates the poor, and the challenges some folks have to deal with JUST to eat. Anything."

Wow, there's some serious rage here. And poverty will definitely bring out the rage in you when you are living with it, ask the folks who attempted to live on $1 a day how it affected their moods and their marriage. Like many of you I am sure, I would know, because I lived a decent number of my adult years under or not far above the poverty line.

Today, the poverty line for a family of two in the U.S. is a little over $14K. When I was 20, it was more like $12K. My first husband and I got married at 19 and 20 and we didn't know a damned thing about how to make a budget, what food and rent really cost, or what the adult world was truly like. We found out real quick, though, when we moved out on our own just before our wedding and suddenly our full time retail job paychecks weren't spending money, they were all we had to live on. Things got quickly further complicated by illness. I live with an immune system disorder called endometriosis that is linked with the female reproductive system and hormones. It has different symptoms for different women. For some it leads to infertility. For some it leads to pain and illness so intense they can hardly ever function out of bed. I was somewhere in between at that age. I had no health insurance at all so could afford none of the expensive treatments that were available in the early 1990s (which often did not work anyway) but was blessedly symptom free for all but 5-6 days of the month. When those 5-6 days came, always all in a row at an almost-regular point in the roller coaster ride that was my 20-some day hormone cycle, I would be in so much pain that if you touched my bed I would cry, when my cats jumped on my bed I felt it as an anguishing pain in my gut. Sometimes I'd get so nauseous with the pain I would vomit or faint. I could barely move enough to care for myself and my poor young husband would have to leave me home, alone, often softly crying and writhing with the pain. Because of this, despite being a hard worker who was great with customers and had an ability for managing people, I lost job after job as boss after boss gave up dealing with the chaos my absences caused in their schedule. They would ask me to go see a doctor because I was missing too much work. But how? They offered no health benefits to me and most treatments, as I said, were expensive and a crap shoot at best. I was full of hopelessness and rage and both my partner and I were depressed. What were we going to do? Who was going to help us?

The answer to the later questions was "no one." No one at all. The answer to the first question became accepting that I could not work, moving in with friends to share a small apartment, and learning to budget every penny. I didn't know anything about food stamps back then and, again, no one was offering to educate or help us in any way, so I didn't apply for them. My husband's income for 1994, working full time, was a little over $11K. And he was struggling to keep that job, because of how often I was unable to care for myself and there was no one else to help, so he'd have to come home from work to clean up puke, or get me my pain pills, or just keep his terrified young wife company while she talked about wishing she could die. During the good times, when I wasn't in pain, I started to teach myself how to budget. I'd go to Aldi and take copious notes about what each and every item cost and plan how to get enough food to get through the week and pay the rent. I felt guilty budgeting $1.54 a week for 7 cans of generic orange soda but I would do it, because it was my husband's favorite and he was working so hard for both of us. I felt guilty at age 20 for spending $1.54 a week so my partner could come home to a single can of soda each day? Yes, because we had so little and when you are poor, you are told day in and day out by the media, society, and the societal imprint in your brain that it is your fault, that you are doing something wrong. That you never deserve a treat no matter how small, you should be doing something responsible with every penny.

I didn't know a think about cooking back then nor about nutrition, but I'd checkout cookbooks from the library with titles like "cheap and easy meals" and I learned to cook a few basic things, like vegetarian chili and lentil soup. Of course, it was cheaper to get the Chunky-Soup-esque Aldi knock off for $0.50 a can filled with whatever D grade horse meat they put in it than to cook even a basic chili, and we often went for that cheaper choice. The "whole wheat" bread we could get from Aldi's was smooshy and tinted brown, tasted just like white bread, and probably was white bread with a browning agent in it. I was trying to get healthy food for us, but hadn't a clue nor any resources. It was a hellish time in our lives in many, many ways. We didn't know how to get out of our poverty, had no more than high school educations, and a crippling health issue that was getting worse that we had no health insurance for. Round and round it went, for many years.

Eventually, we found a way out of the situation. I found a doctor willing to give me the heavy pain pills necessary to cut my bed ridden days down to three a month and an employer who saw my worth even though I was missing three days a month and a zombie on three others. I didn't make much, but it was enough to pull us up and out into the category of "lower middle class." We still had no insurance and struggled to get by at times, but I didn't cringe while buying my husband's soda pop anymore, I even bought him the name brand occasionally. I finally got a job with health insurance in my late 20s and found a nurse practitioner that worked with me to find an affordable and effective treatment for my illness. My life was transformed from that day forward, I give thanks for that nurse and the job that made going to her possible.

Today is the first day of my SNAP challenge and rationing and planning each bite I eat is taking me viscerally back to those early years of my marriage. What I remember most is the hopelessness and the rage. The weight of so much judgement on my back while I struggled with terrifying pain and a sense that no one in the world thought my partner and I worthy of help or of even taking up space on the planet at times was crushing and I wanted to lash out. I said nasty, snarky things about "rich" people all the time and the self centered things they spent their money on. It was a way to try to feel better about myself and to try to vent all the fear and shame. I saw middle class families as wildly well off and was bewildered and angry that they could live in such safety and comfort while I suffered and my partner and I floundered on the endless shores of the barely-making-it. The rage wasn't unfounded, and I wasn't anywhere near wrong about the inequities between the rich and the poor. And I think my rage served a purpose in keeping me sane, kept me from 100% believing the messages that I deserved to be judged for every little thing I did and that it was all my own fault that I was poor.

Does the SNAP Challenge denigrate the poor? I think I see the author of that comment's fear, that by middle class folks working their tails off for one week and finding a way to eat fabulously or at least well on $4.50 a day they will actually strengthen the chorus of voices that say, "see, the amount of food stamps is generous!" or "see, obesity and poor health isn't caused by poverty, poverty is caused by laziness and bad choices, they could be eating this great food too!" I hear that, as well as the author's rage that feels honest and personal. That said, I do not think that is what the SNAP Challenge is doing. Sure, a few people are going to use it to "prove" their pet theories that are some version of the "its their own fault for being poor." Those people would find a way to believe that and "prove" it regardless. But hundreds more are taking this challenge out of sincere curiosity, concern, and desire to understand. Some of us have never been poor and some of us haven't been poor in quite a while and have forgotten what it is like. The experience of just trying to eat on a food stamp budget brings home the types of challenges those that are poor are facing. The experience of eating on a food stamp budget brings home how very hard it is to eat nutritiously when you are struggling financially and how it is that people end up feeding their kids off-brand sugar-laden cheerios for dinner. People are taking the challenge for all different reasons and from all different perspectives, and it is stimulating conversation that is powerful. Its going to take talking about difficult things and thinking together to address hunger and poverty. And we need everyone doing it - we need the working class folks just holding themselves above poverty from paycheck to paycheck, we need the comfortably middle class, we need the very rich, and we need the poor thinking and talking about this problem.

I understand the rage and sympathize, but cannot agree about with their views about this Challenge. Anything that gets people considering what it is like to walk in another's shoes humanizes and stimulates a desire to make a difference. That is something very, very worth doing and if it comes with a little privilege attached or provides fuel for the hateful theories of a few misguided minds, so what? Are we worse off than when the Challenge began, would that be a new state of affairs? No. But what might be new is that your neighbors are talking about what it is like to be hungry, your temple is reinvigorated to do more to help in their community, a few young adults just entering into the work world think about how they can put their working lives toward addressing poverty or nutrition or workers rights. And if the best that comes of it is that a handful of people learn to budget for food better and cook a few more healthy meals, even that is a worthy thing that makes the world a little better than it was yesterday.