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Rich Barlow is a freelance writer in Boston.
“For many, if not all, standing in line for food is a humiliating act.”
I can corroborate author Tracy Kidder’s recent observation of food-seekers in Western Massachusetts. For the better part of a year during the Great Recession, after the financial collapse vaporized my full-time freelancer’s work, I was a reluctant, initially embarrassed supplicant at the basement pantry of St. Paul’s Parish in Harvard Square. I sat Saturday mornings watching volunteers strew banquet tables with donated groceries. At the appointed start time, we would line up to collect the assorted produce, cereals, canned goods, and other staples.
So I share Kidder’s lament that feeding the hungry is on track to be a growth industry in Donald Trump’s America. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cuts federal food benefits. Signed on Independence Day, it will sever three million recipients from a lifeline against hunger. This assault on the safety net — the bill also shrinks Medicaid benefits for the needy — has roots in the myth of the undeserving poor. That nostrum is older than MAGA and phonier than Stop the Steal, as both my personal experience and the inconvenient truth of hard math confirm.
Experience first. Before 2009, as the son of a judge and the privileged middle class, I’d never been unemployed and in need of charity in three decades of working. I loved what I did, even though freelance writing is a constant scramble for income. I’ve always read a book before bed; as a freelancer, I chose only books for which I was earning a reviewer’s paycheck.
When the recession and its double-digit unemployment hit, the “subprime mortgages,” “mortgage-backed securities,” and unregulated “shadow banks” that underlay them — and that many Americans had never heard of — unleashed work-killing forces too devastating for individual initiative to counter. Even wealthy Harvard scrapped a lucrative project (by my bank account’s standards) that I’d done for four straight summers. My then-wife’s part-time job invaluably backstopped the family income. But after a year of little work and with no idea how long I’d be idle, I despaired of ever being employed again. Free groceries to stretch our household resources seemed the only responsible path, especially with a child to feed.
The other folks in St. Paul’s basement made for an interesting cross-section of people. Some were fellow baby boomers. The age and dress of others suggested they were students, presumably not destitute but nevertheless on a budget as they contended with Greater Boston’s formidable living costs. No one dressed in rags. (Neither did the recipients Kidder observed, which he attributes to their efforts “to ward off disgrace” from having to seek charity.)
My anxious heart beat fast during my first time at the pantry. Normally a chatterbox, I made little small talk with others. It took a number of weeks before the habitual visits and the saintly volunteers’ freedom from judgment thawed some of my embarrassment. I also found psychic balm in the relief of free food for my household’s budget. Not everyone adjusted as easily. At least one person at the pantry teared up at having to seek aid in public. I never saw her return.
The volunteers who set out and distributed food never questioned who we were or why we were there. Hard hearts will call that poor quality control. Those who know better, who relied on the kindness of these strangers, recognize it as mindfulness of recipients’ dignity. Today, those who do such work can’t fully backfill the Beautiful Bill’s shrinkage of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called food stamps). Kidder notes that the national food bank network Feeding America says SNAP supplied nine times as much food as its own agency’s food banks do.
That the bill’s backers had not just food support but the broader safety net in their sights is clear from the legislation’s attaching work requirements to Medicaid. Two years ago, perhaps anticipating this dark American moment, Republican Representative Steve Scalise justified that policy this way: “I don’t think many people think it’s right to be paying billions of dollars to allow people to sit at home.”
Yet most Medicaid (and SNAP) recipients do work. Work requirements disqualify needy people from help by imposing burdensome paperwork on them and the need for daunting enforcement bureaucracies on states. And anyway, Scalise was wrong. Here’s where hard math matters. The myth that armies of lazy bums are mooching off the public dime is just that — a myth. The year Scalise fretted about couch potatoes, US employment hit “the highest [level] in its history.” Last year, the percentage of prime-age Americans employed reached a 23-year high.
Perhaps if our leaders saw who goes to food pantries and why — perhaps if they spent a week or two living as pantry patrons — the mythic myopia would lift from their eyes. But there are none so blind as those who will not see.
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