2 hours ago
5
When I was 13, a pair of foster siblings, Carla and Rodrigo, came to live with my family. For the two of them, the move brought a period of much-needed stability – and, for the very first time, reliable access to food.
Yet scarcity had already left its mark.
The day she arrived, Carla began hoarding. She stuffed bags of cookies beneath her clothes and hid cans of Chef Boyardee under the bed. I’d sometimes find her on the couch late at night, the faint glow of the television lighting her face as she ate the ravioli cold straight from the can. My mom, mindful of Carla’s past, filled our cupboards with the red-labeled cans – a small gesture of reassurance. Carla stockpiled them under her bed anyway.
Food scarcity, I learned, can haunt you.
This month, as millions across the US have seen their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits (Snap) benefits lapse or be significantly reduced, I’ve been reflecting on the experience of both Carla and the many food insecure families I spent time with while researching my book, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America. For most of these families, who lived extremely close to the bone, Snap was a lifeline. Far from supplemental, it was how they put food on the table, day after day, year after year.
Understandably, much attention has focused on the immediate impacts for families of these critical benefits not being disbursed in time, creating immense uncertainty and concern about how they will make ends meet.
But the longer-term consequences are just as devastating. Because even once benefits are restored, this experience will almost certainly leave trauma in its wake. The millions of parents and kids who get through this will, my research shows, never forget.
Mounting evidence supports this, revealing how even brief disruptions to food access cast long shadows. For pregnant women, food insecurity increases the risk of premature delivery and having a baby with low birth weight and developmental delays. Early hunger can alter how infants’ bodies regulate stress and store energy, raising the likelihood of chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension later in life.
For older children, the consequences are similarly physical and psychological. Kids who grow up with food insecurity are more likely to struggle in school and experience developmental delays, and they face higher rates of anxiety, depression, and behavioral challenges that can persist into adulthood.
And the toll doesn’t end with children. For parents, having to struggle to perform the most basic, primal act of care – feeding a child – is crushing. Caregivers facing hunger report sharply higher rates of depression and anxiety. And, in my research, I’ve seen first-hand how these experiences reshape families’ relationships with food for years to come. The mothers in my book who endured deprivation – whether in childhood or parenthood – never outran it.
Indeed, the experience of not having enough to feed themselves or their children shaped how mothers approached feeding even during periods of relative stability. The mothers I met hoarded cans of beans and soup into cupboards as deep as the eye could see and bought extra freezers to store pounds of frozen meat. That’s because they had learned, often the hard way, that food today never guaranteed food tomorrow.
These earlier experiences with scarcity also made mothers determined to never tuck their children into bed at night with growling stomachs. For these moms, their kids’ satiety became a key measure of maternal success.
But I saw how a focus on children’s fullness often came at the expense of their nutrition. To ensure children would eat enough, food-insecure moms often worked to feed their children the foods they liked and would reliably eat, which were generally comforting, familiar and less healthy. Within a context of such precarity, the ability to prioritize nutrition became a luxury these moms simply couldn’t afford. But this meant that compared with wealthier families, lower-income kids often consumed fewer fresh foods at home.
Reductions and delays in Snap benefits will not only exacerbate hunger at the bottom, but may also deepen these nutritional divides. If food-insecure families struggled to get healthy food on the table before, this crisis will make it even harder – both in the immediate term, as budgets shrink, and in the long term, as the experience of scarcity leaves lasting emotional and behavioral imprints.
That’s why restoring benefits is essential. Families need relief not in weeks or months, but now.
Yet reinstating Snap payments this time around isn’t enough. We must also ensure this never happens again. One way to do that is for Congress to set up an advance appropriation – like it does with many other entitlement programs, including Medicaid – to ensure that Snap is never again at risk during a shutdown. Doing so would protect the nation’s most effective anti-hunger program and ensure that no parent has to wonder how they’ll feed their child because lawmakers failed to act.
The sad truth is that for millions of families across the US, hunger will remain a daily reality even once Snap benefits are fully restored. But we must prevent this particular trauma from repeating itself. If we do, we might spare the next generation from learning, as my foster sibling Carla did, that food today doesn’t always mean food tomorrow.
-
Priya Fielding-Singh is the director of policy and programs at the Global Food Institute at the George Washington University and the author of How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America
