How SNAP recipients ate when the benefits ran out

Food-saving strategies from the field

Americans affected by the shutdown reported skipping meals, bypassing costly meat at the supermarket, using 1 pound of ground beef instead of 3 pounds to make a meal for a family of eight, and dumpster diving outside a local Walmart.

Lennox got eggs from friends, harvested tomatoes from her garden, sourced dog food for her pets from a nearby church. And, despite deep feelings of shame, she visited a local food pantry. In this she was not alone. Food banks, which act as distribution centers for food pantries, were already stretched thin due to rising grocery costs and income inequities, and they saw a massive spike in need during the shutdown. One food bank that serves parts of West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky, saw an 1800 percent rise in clients. It wasn’t only customary SNAP recipients who turned up for food. “There’s about 16,000 government employees that live in my 12 counties,” says Nicole Williams, CEO of the Community Food Bank of Central Alabama (CFBCA). In six weeks, CFBCA provided an additional 206,000 meals, many to TSA, air traffic control, Air National Guard, Army Reserve and Talladega National Forest employees. “The government employees, this is not a place that they normally are. A lot of those folks didn’t know how to find food or where to find food,” Williams says.

For Sheena*, a young mother of a kindergartner living in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, food pantries weren’t an option: “There was literally no food [left] in the food [pantries], no food in the blessing boxes” (streetside giveaways orchestrated by neighbors). When Sheena first signed up for SNAP three years ago after escaping an abusive relationship, $592 worth of benefits saw her through the month. Once she started working at a daycare facility, where she earns less than $400 a week, her benefits were reduced to $363, which lasted two and a half weeks; they were further reduced to $303 — with no explanation — after the government reopened.

For nearly five SNAP-less shutdown weeks, “I shopped whatever coupons I had first,” Sheena says, usually at Kroger, and she planned two weeks’ worth of meals at a time around those. She stocked up on 40-cent cans of vegetables from Aldi, tossed dried beans in a slow cooker while she was at work and carefully froze any leftovers. She bought (cheaper) fresh fruit in season for her “fruit-head” daughter and checked the meat sales at Jr’s Foodland. She’s not sure how she’s going to survive with her new, reduced benefits and not a single more hour in the day in which she can attempt to earn extra income — she already drives for DoorDash and Uber on evenings and weekends. And she no longer trusts that her SNAP benefits will come on time, if at all. “If I get my benefits next month, it’s a miracle,” she says.

In Nashville, Vickie Southern cares for her grandniece and two grandnephews, aged 10 to 14. When she got a text saying her monthly $600 in SNAP benefits would not arrive in October, “I’m like, Well, how’s that gonna work?” she says, especially with a football-playing teenager in the house. Southern plundered her two deep freezers, packed mostly with chicken she’d bought on sale, and the canned goods in her pantry, until everything was used up; her daughters occasionally came to make a meal, too. “We made it through, we survived it,” she says. However, like Sheena, when her benefits were replenished they were greatly reduced, by about half. And Southern isn’t sure how she’s going to manage through winter beyond abolishing all treats and breakfast cereal from her grocery list. Still, she says, “I just worry about those kids that’s out there in this world that really need more than what they’re getting.”

CFBCA’s Williams says that when the shutdown began, “We started identifying federal employees who we knew were not going to get paychecks, and we started making alliances and opportunities to provide food for those people.” That meant setting up targeted distribution sites, including at the Birmingham Airport. That way, “When people came off their shift, they could run through and pick up a box … with all their other colleagues. Feeding people with dignity is really important to us.”

A month later, when SNAP payments stopped being issued, “We went into disaster mode,” Williams says. Williams made detailed spreadsheets of when all 300 CFBCA partners were giving out food boxes and serving meals, which clients could access on their website. Volunteers — 80 percent of whom had never volunteered with CFBCA before — began assembling extra foodboxes for distribution. Williams fundraised constantly in order to ramp up food purchases. It can take two weeks for a bulk food order to arrive, “So our food sourcer was talking to brokers and saying, ‘What do you have that’s ready to ship? We can’t wait, how quick can it be here?’ And we made decisions based on how quickly we could get items,” Williams says. “We just incrementally bought and bought and bought, trying to keep up with what we knew was coming in, so that we weren’t in the hole.”

After all that additional labor and stress, Williams would love to take a breather and to revel in a difficult job well done. However, thanks to the OBBB, come January, “We are headed toward the biggest cut in SNAP history, and that is also going to present a lot of challenges for families and individuals,” she says. “That’s going to put a lot of pressure on the food-banking system.”

*A pseudonym to protect anonymity