The federal SNAP program became a sort of political football during the gamesmanship of the government shutdown. And that’s in addition to coming federal cuts in food benefits.
But what actually happens to the more than one in ten people in America who, according to the USDA, can’t afford enough to eat?
UMass Amherst public health professor Mariana Chilton has spent decades studying food insecurity, trauma, and human rights.
Chilton thinks the term “food insecurity” can be confusing. Yes, it refers to people who don’t earn enough money to buy the food they need.
“Or it means you're going to run out of food before you get money to get more. So there's an anxiety piece also associated with that,” she said. “But the second part is for an active and healthy life. You need consistent access all of the time to a very good, nutritionally healthy diet.”
And when that access stops, even for a short period of time, Chilton said the body can change. In children, that impacts brain development.
“Young children, before the age of three, they're growing so many neurons, they are growing 700 neurons a second. And really, any interruption in good nutrition is going to affect the way that they interact with their world,” she said. “If they don't have enough food, their body starts to slow down, to try to conserve energy… Even just one or two days of reduced intake is going to affect their cognitive, social and emotional development.”
"They'll pretend to eat."
And it can have a spiraling effect on the whole family. Parents may skip meals to feed their kids.
“So they'll pretend to eat, because they know that their kids are watching,” she said.
Those parents are then more likely to get sick and to be depressed.
“That type of depression or deep concern can have an effect on whether a mom is interacting with her kid as much as she ought to,” she said, “because she's so consumed with worrying about where she's going to get money for food.”
Chilton, who wrote the book, “The Painful Truth About Hunger in America,” has testified before congress and run several anti-hunger and poverty organizations. People who have never worried about food, she said, may have only a stereotypical image of what it means to be hungry.
“They think, ‘Oh, they couldn't possibly be hungry in America, because the way that we know that that exists is because children have distended bellies and flies in their eyes and look visibly malnourished.’ But that couldn't be further from the truth,” she said.
“The way that hunger often manifests in school age kids, for instance, is in their behavior. They may be more agitated. They can't focus, um, they may be more likely to get in fights with their peers or not be able to listen.”
Nor does hunger correlate with body size. In fact, obesity and malnutrition often go hand and hand, she said.
“People will rely on lower cost food and lower quality food. That could be something as simple to understand as white bread or pasta every night. And that's not very good for your health and well-being. And it causes a lot of inflammation.”
"Losing a sense of meaning"
Chilton worries about older kids, especially teenagers, who often feel responsible for their family’s food anxiety. Plus eating poorly also affects their hormone balance.
“There's a lot of interaction with the gut microbiome. So if you're eating very low quality food or skipping meals, you're going to be not only more physically sick, but it's going to affect your mental health and your wellbeing,” she said.
“So physically, teenagers don't feel well, may not be able to perform as well on the basketball court, or can't perform well in school or start not getting along with their peers. Start losing a sense of hopefulness. Start losing a sense of joy. Start losing a sense of meaning and a sense of belonging.”
And as an expert on childhood trauma, she said the psychological effects of even temporary hunger – or the threat of hunger – can last decades.
“When people remember that they didn't have enough money for food, and they remembered that experience, the humiliation and the physical sensation and the mental health problems, they will sometimes start to hoard food because they don't want that to ever happen again,” she said. “Many of the women I worked with would talk about overeating, stuffing themselves, because they remember that trauma of having nothing.”
"It's caught up in their political battles"
So why, Chilton asks, wouldn’t the government want to prevent this among their own people? The SNAP program — once known as food stamps — has always been a popular bipartisan solution to hunger. Until now. Even before the shutdown, the Republican-passed budget bill cut back on SNAP benefits and tightened eligibility, adding work requirements that many say are unfair and unrealistic.
“Policymakers don't understand what food stamps actually do and what the dynamics of it are. And I think they don't care. And that's because I think they haven't had enough exposure to the experience of hunger, and they haven't had enough exposure to people who are poor,” she said.
“Food insecurity never happens in a vacuum. It's always happening when a family is struggling to meet their basic needs. The cost of housing, the cost of transportation, the cost of childcare, and of course, the cost of food.”
She specifically calls out employers like Walmart, which she says pay wages low enough that many of their own workers still need SNAP benefits. Meanwhile, its grocery department makes money off those same SNAP benefits.
Chilton said Massachusetts does a good job offering low-income families food support, from SNAP to subsidized fruits and vegetables through its Healthy Incentives Program (HIP), although she’d still like to see the right to food added to the state’s constitution.
A moment to turn things around?
But Chilton does not mince words around the Trump administration’s vigorous efforts to stop SNAP benefits during the government shutdown. That included appealing to the Supreme Court and threatening to punish governors who continued to distribute food. She considers the federal government’s insensitivity a collective trauma.
“Twenty years from now, we'll be talking about this time when the Trump administration refused to release Snap benefits and actively sought to harm the American public by making them go hungry,” she said.
“It's caught up in their political battles, and they're forgetting that it actually has a real impact on people's everyday lives. It affects families, young children. It affects our seniors. It affects our veterans. It affects people who have disabilities.”
Then she added, “Are they forgetting or are they using it as a form of harm, as a form of, um, putting their knee on our necks in order to get what they want?”
Chilton said she can’t predict how the collective scar will manifest in twenty years.
“But this is a moment where we can turn things around, where we can maybe look back on it and say, that's never going to happen again,” she said. “That's the hope.”
