The People's Pantry Relief Center

Why aren’t food stamps an issue in midterm elections?

Paul Ryan and the right want to cut welfare programs. The only problem: they actually work.

"A few weeks before my trip to the United States someone came to our house by night and said, "There is a Hindu family with eight children, and they have gone several days without eating."

I took a bit of rice and went immediately to their assistance. The mother took the rice from my hands, distributed it into two equal servings, and went out immediately.

When she came back I asked, “Where have you been? What have you been doing?”

"They are hungry too," she answered.

Right next to them lived a Muslim family with the same number of children. The Hindu mother knew they had been out of food for several days. She did what Jesus does: she broke the bread. She broke her love and shared it with her neighbors. […]

What impressed me most in that instance was that the woman knew. Do we know our poor people? Do we know the poor in our house, our family?”

The $8 billion cut will impact more than 850,000 low-income families in the next decade. These families will see their food assistance reduced by an average of $90 per month. That’s on top of a $5 billion cut that hit the program in November.

The National Council of La Raza says the $8 billion cut to the food stamps program will “exacerbate hunger” for many Latino families. It estimates that 17 percent of the more than 47 million Americans who benefit from food stamps are Latinos.

Last night, House Republicans passed a bill that cuts $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, one of the few safety nets available to the 47 million Americans living below the poverty line.

Nevertheless, a majority of our elected representatives seem to view food as a luxury that the poor are unworthy of, which is stunning considering that nearly half of food stamp recipients are children and another 26 percent are adults living with children.

On top of that, over a quarter of SNAP recipients live in households with seniors or people with disabilities.

It’s unbelievable that in the so-called richest nation on earth, where over 16 million children are living in food insecure households, one of the first things on the GOP chopping block is food aid.

Poverty Is Literally Making People Sick Because They Can’t Afford Food

Income inequality is making us sick.

Well, it’s not making all of us sick. Only the poorest of us. That’s what a new paper in Health Affairs by Hilary Seligman, Ann Bolger, David Guzman, Andrea López, and Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo found they looked at when people go to the hospital for hypoglycemia (low blood sugar).

The basic idea is that people struggling to make it paycheck-to-paycheck (or benefits-to-benefits) might run out of money at the end of the month—and have to cut back on food. If they have diabetes, this hunger could turn into an even more severe health problem: low blood sugar. So we should expect a surge of hypoglycemia cases at the end of each month for low-income people, but not for anybody else.

POVERTY IS HUNGER