One of the smaller ironies of my life is that during the lean year I spent reporting my book The American Way of Eating, I never tried applying for food stamps. There were a number of reasons for this, but the primary one was that it felt suspiciously close to cheating. The goal of my undercover reporting was to work my way through the food system: I aimed to live and eat off my wages as a farmworker ($2 an hour), a produce clerk at Walmart ($8.50), and a kitchen wretch at Applebee’s ($8) for two months at a stretch. Claiming to have achieved this while getting “free” food from the government—had I even qualified for it—seemed dubious at best.
One of the bigger ironies of my life is that, six months after I finished the reporting, I did apply for food stamps. You know, for real—out of sheer necessity.
Ending up on government assistance was never in my plans. I’d pitched a book because the magazine and newspaper industries had tanked, taking steady journalism jobs with them. By the time I signed a book contract, the economy had followed suit, and my advance was half what I’d been expecting. A smarter businessperson would have ditched the book project altogether, but I stubbornly clung to mine. I’ll figure it out later, I thought, when the numbers looked tiny.
Truthfully, I didn’t hit upon SNAP on my own; the credit for that belongs to a bartender. I had gone out with friends in Detroit, a city where I’d found free housing and office space and thus had taken up temporary residence while I worked on the manuscript. I had no income, and I typically worked 70 or 80 hours a week on my book. At the bar, I asked for a glass of water, and made up for my drink’s lack of intoxicants by tasting everyone else’s. The bartender, watching me pilfer a gulp of beer here, a sip of whiskey there, told me to buy my own.
“Dude, my cupboards are down to bare bones. I got no business buying a drink,” I said.
“Dude,” he said mockingly, “food stamps.”
“Oh, no, not me,” I said. Food stamps were for people who could prove their neediness to government officials thumbing through their bank accounts. Food stamps were for people without any other choice. Food stamps, I declared, were for people who needed help.
The bartender rolled his eyes in a way that made me stop for a moment to consider the contents of my cupboards and refrigerator: a handful of spices, some oil, rice, beans, cabbage, and onions. Oatmeal and peanut butter. A bowl of bread dough in the fridge. A couple of sticks of butter. I thought about how I’d spent 15 minutes the other day hunting for loose change at my donated office, trying to cobble together 85 cents for a candy bar from the vending machine because I had forgotten my lunch—but couldn’t bring myself to spend $4 on a BLT, the cheapest not-really-junk-food option near the office. I thought about how I’d begun strategizing about free food in all its incarnations, from corporate lunches at the office to the predatory, after-hours “liberation” of abandoned leftovers from the work kitchen.
I applied for the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a.k.a. SNAP—today’s term for food stamps—in the bleak early days of January 2011. First I filled out a form online, and then amassed a stack of documents proving my income—or lack thereof—to the state. There was a paperwork mix-up, then a round of voice mail tag before a phone interview. In the end, I received a plastic card bearing my name and, on the back, a magnetic strip swipeable for the small-yet-helpful sum of $16 a month—the federal minimum benefit. With this, I reintroduced a modest amount of meat and leafy vegetables to my diet. By summer, my caseworker had found an error: I was actually entitled, by dint of my own poverty, to $200 a month for food. What’s more, I was entitled to this retroactively.
I have never won the lottery, but I doubt it can improve on the experience of learning, after a long winter with a monochromatic diet, that you have $1,000 to spend on summer produce. It was the dietary equivalent of opening a gray, dusty door and stepping, Dorothy-style, into Technicolor Oz.
As if by magic, I no longer had to worry about whether choosing a salad for dinner might leave me too short of funds to pay my phone bill; I now had a budget—a lavish one—explicitly dedicated to food. I bought spinach with stems that still snapped, cherries and berries that bled juice, melons that perfumed the backseat of my Ford Escort, fleshy Michigan peaches, whole chickens grown without antibiotics. I split Persian cucumbers in half, sliced lush tomatoes into wedges, and topped them both with smears of creamy feta—what I’ve since come to think of as government cheese. For possibly the first time in my life, I ate my recommended daily allowance of fruits and vegetables nearly every day.
But not many food stamp recipients have had my experience of reveling in a sudden abundance of fresh, “free” food. Most Americans fed by the program are children and their parents, or disabled, or elderly; I am none of those. On average, SNAP clients deal with per-meal budgets of roughly $1.49; mine was $2.22. And while it’s increasingly common to find well-educated Americans, including myself, on the rolls, I’ve had the luck to see my time on SNAP turn out to be what nearly everyone wants it to be: a temporary fix (in my case, a year), not a long-term supplement for too-low wages or unemployment checks. About the only “typical” trait I had as a food stamp client was the fact that I was working: Roughly one third of SNAP recipients have jobs, while only 8 percent receive cash welfare.
I’ve heard conservatives say that food stamps lull the people who receive them into complacency and dependency. It’s a critique that tends to be used to argue for cuts to the program, or for limiting its use by, for example, disqualifying people with savings—a policy that’s become stringent enough that it would have excluded me. I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but getting food stamps just made me work harder. All that “free” food made me feel as though I must be doing something important, and I’d better have something to show for it. And a little over a year later, I do: a best-selling book, and a taste for government cheese.
Tracie McMillan is the author of The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table. A Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, she has been recognized by the James Beard Awards, the James Aronson Awards, and WhyHunger. McMillan, who speaks widely on food and class, appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show and other programs this spring to rebut Rush Limbaugh’s denouncement of her work.