One of the positives that has come out of COVID-19 is the P-EBT cards through the W.Va. State Department of Education. For every West Virginian public education student who received free or reduced breakfast or who attended a Community Eligible School where all the students ate for free, an EBT card was provided to help with the cost of food during the school shutdown.
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve qualified for SNAP, and, although I often talk about the way SNAP recipients are judged and treated, it had been awhile since I had been on the receiving end. Yesterday, we went on a P-EBT shopping trip. Menu for two weeks in hand, calculators out (I haven’t shopped for two weeks without a calculator in years because of budgeting), we headed into the store. Our menu was a little bougie for us. We made plans for things like Zuppa Toscana soup, beef and broccoli, and spaghetti sauce from scratch.
I know my kids weren’t paying attention, but I noticed that the staples in our house, such as Ramen noodles, went into the cart with a flippant, “Hey, mama, I got some ramen,” while I was asked, “Hey, mama? Can I have some Goldfish?” for things not on our usual shopping list. We didn’t completely lose our heads. I mean, we still purchased off brand everything. And even though it was two weeks of actually preparing food, we did buy some boxed beef stroganoff and noodles. Old habits die hard.
We were almost strutting through the aisles. Fresh kale? Check. Tart apple? Check. Red potatoes? Check. We even bought a small container of organic yogurt for smoothies. Bougie, we were. We didn’t have a care in the world. One half of my family took half the list and the other two took the other. Divide and conquer.
When it was time to head to the checkout, we had two buggies (remember, we divided up the list). The store, which was quite busy, only had two regular registers open, and we weren’t about to struggle with the self-checkout. It wasn’t until we were standing at the checkout, third in line, when I noticed the cashier’s facial expressions as she rang out a large food order that belonged to a young couple that it hit me: I was once again an EBT user.
I was trying to keep my facial expressions in check because, for once, my daughters weren’t talking about how embarrassed they were to use the card. I didn’t want them to see that I had to take a couple deep breaths to control my anxiety. And see, here’s the thing: I wasn’t embarrassed about using the card. I had NEVER been embarrassed to use the card at the checkout, but it was the look on that cashier’s face and her curt replies to the young couple that had me on edge.
As I stood there, looking at our two buggies of groceries, I could feel the heat in my face. I silently second-guessed my food choices. Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the $7.54 pack of sliced stir fry meat; I could’ve bought cheap steaks at SavALot instead and chopped it myself. Why didn’t I just go there in the first place? Maybe I shouldn’t have bought a cake mix or allowed the kids to have potato chips. And that 2-liter bottle of root beer! Was that food stamp necessary?
The trauma one endures from being poor is real, y’all, and it has long-term effects. It’s not enough that you’re stuck in a seemingly no-win situation, but you have to deal with stereotypes and biases everywhere. I wish the stress and strain of trying to raise your family above that line could be adequately expressed in words, but the experience of poverty can’t be learned from a textbook or a webinar.
I skimmed past a news article the other day about the president wanting to make drug testing for SNAP recipients a law. The fact that so many Americans believe that poverty is synonymous with wrongdoing is heartbreaking to me. States which have chosen to require drug tests have proven that it’s a waste of money; welfare recipients have recorded lower incidents of drug use than non-welfare recipients, but read the comment section on social media and you’ll see that almost everyone not on SNAP knows someone who “sells them for drugs,” yet they won’t put a name to the claim.
We’d rather our government throw money away on drug testing than allow the opportunity to eat higher quality foods. Our bias and prejudice against the poor needs to stop.
Especially now when our world’s topsy-turvy, we need to have empathy. Any of us could find ourselves in need of assistance in a SNAP.
Onward,
Amy Jo
