Food Scarcity + the American Diet: Part II
SNAP/EBT is a lifeline for so many American families today. During the current Covid-19 crisis there was an overall increase in participation in the program by 17% just from February to May. If so many people need this lifeline to live why are recipients so heavily criticized? There is a stigma for using the supplemental nutrition program. The stigma holds the notion that people who utilize SNAP do not work and live off of government handouts when in reality most working-age SNAP participants do work and will rely on the program if their job situation is unstable. Also, about 92% of SNAP benefits go to participants whose households are at the poverty line or just below it*.
Another stigma that recipients may face is the judgment of the food choices that they make with the aforementioned benefits. Just recently actress Keke Palmer tweeted “Imagine if your EBT card only worked on healthy items...”.
Ms. Palmer is making the gross + inaccurate assumption that low-income individuals who receive government assistance make unhealthy choices when food shopping. She made this assumption probably based on two things: #1) lower-income people usually are disproportionately affected by health issues so they must eat unhealthy + #2) that lower-income individuals tend to hold less formal education so they aren’t educated enough to make smart food choices for themselves. Unfortunately, she’s not the only one who holds this train of thought.
I have met A LOT of people who believe poor marginalized people just can’t make healthy choices for themselves so food policymakers + the government should intervene in what choices they do make. Most people who go into the field of public health/food policy are normally not from these communities and come from privileged backgrounds. From personal experience, I have attended many a food policy conference where I am 1 of 5 people of color in a room full of White people who are discussing issues and making decisions that greatly affect people of color.
As I previously discussed in Part I of this article series most underserved communities have little to no healthy food options and barely any resources to provide residents with help finding healthy choices. As someone who has worked for the betterment of the underserved and has seen the repercussions of that kind of flippant thinking, my question is how do we make sure this kind of thinking disappears? How do we ensure that people who need government assistance are treated like humans? How do we educate people to step back and evaluate a situation before mislabeling it as something that it isn’t? How do we make sure there is equity in communities, food systems + policies? In 2021 I’m hoping I can dig further into these questions + propose possible answers here to my Substack community.
*Stat from Policy Basics: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
This is officially the last newsletter of the year! I will be back sometime in January with more recipes, pictures, stories, + some new exciting things! Have a fabulous New Year + please do subscribe/share my Substack. Small bitty Substacks like mine need more love in the form of subs + shares. Mucho Amor <3 NLC