The Acceptable Face of Need
When charity is celebrated but assistance is scrutinized.
Three years ago, I drafted an ode to my local farmer’s market. I envisioned it landing in a major publication, hopefully bringing publicity and recognition to a place that has been near and dear to my heart for over a decade. I pitched it around and tested out different angles, but no bites. I shelved it and focused on other projects.
Then, last summer as I was trading my SNAP-funded Market Bucks for a half peck of peaches, a customer in line behind me started peppering me with questions about the cardstock “money” I was using to make my purchase. When I finally got through to him that it was the market’s version of SNAP, he started to lose it; SNAP recipients, as he saw it, should not have the privilege of shopping at the farmer’s market.
I dug out my piece about the farmer’s market and re-worked it to focus on the integration of SNAP programs with farmer’s markets, a relatively recent but exciting move that I sensed most people — including SNAP recipients — aren’t aware of. I had my angle, and a few weeks ago I sent a draft to my editor.
Meanwhile, the government shutdown brought conversations to a simmer, and then a boil. I couldn’t very well write a piece extolling the virtues of farmers market shopping and matching grant programs when most people would be struggling to shop at Dollar General. It became clear I’d need to shift focus again; while politicians argue in Washington, the food budget of 20 million families is currently tied up and being used as a bargaining chip. My family is part of that 20 million. I can’t control what’s happening in Washington, but I can yap on the internet, so that’s what I did. The piece became an analysis of ethics and expectations around SNAP funding and individual spending.
At one point during my rounds of edits, the question was raised: “if someone can afford to shop at the farmer’s market, do they even need assistance?” To which I replied….y e s…… There was so much I wanted to say, but could not say (literally, I had a word count limit I was beholden to.)
The question of “what privileges should someone receiving assistance be permitted to enjoy” grates on me for obvious reasons, but something else stuck in my mind: the weekly newsletter for my son’s high school, which I’d scrolled through between rounds of edits on Monday afternoon.
There were the usual announcements: football games, informational meetings, reminders for the upcoming holidays and days off, information on medication exchanges and e-recycling. And at the bottom, a long progression of colorful graphics, each promoting a different fundraiser or donation event. There was a candy drive for troops overseas, a pizza night for a local youth choir, a Fall Fest event to benefit a wrestling club, a bike donation event, a canned food drive, a fundraiser for Shop With A Cop, a call for toy donations for a local hospital, and a reminder for families to apply for free and reduced price school lunches.
Seeing so many calls for aid and support in one place while SNAP recipients are being villainized put a bug in my ear that I could not shake. Mutual aid is community care. We see this on a hyper-local level, but somewhere along the way to broadening our scope, it gets lost.
Why do we enthusiastically support select forms of mutual aid while resenting people who rely on programs like SNAP? Why do we pull angel-shaped tags off of Christmas trees at the local post office or library and shop and wrap gifts for kids we’ve never met, but then scrutinize another family’s grocery cart and question whether they really need help? We vote for politicians who hold public aid programs hostage during budget negotiations and then we turn around and organize another charity dinner for our neighbors.
The difference is control and proximity. Community fundraisers let us choose who deserves help. We can evaluate their story, assess their level of gratitude, and decide if their need seems legitimate. There’s a comfortable transaction: they perform need and humility, we perform generosity. Everyone has a role.
Government assistance doesn’t offer that narrative of control. SNAP benefits arrive on a card that looks like any debit card, housing vouchers work behind the scenes, state health coverage is, to anyone in the waiting room, indistinguishable from private pay.
We’ve convinced ourselves that GoFundMe is noble while SNAP enables dependency; that buying Christmas presents through Shop with a Cop is generous but year-round food assistance is suspicious; that meal trains show community values, but school lunch programs are government overreach.
But community fundraisers can’t offer reliability. They require people to publicly bare their struggles, they depend on having social networks with disposable income, and they come with no longevity and no guarantees. They’re unpredictable and often insufficient.
Government assistance programs, for all their bureaucratic frustrations, provide consistent support, allowing recipients to access support without having to repeatedly prove their worthiness to strangers. They run on the idea that support shouldn’t hinge on your neighbors’ discretionary income that month or your ability to craft a compelling narrative around your struggles.
It’s not lost on me that I’ve made up the SNAP funds that will be withheld by writing about SNAP funds being withheld. It’s an incredible privilege to be able to do that— and I am privileged, I know, in countless ways beyond. Most people on SNAP don’t have an escape hatch for what’s ahead; they’ll just go hungry while their neighbors debate whether they deserve to eat.
Next week, there will be another newsletter from my son’s school with another five fundraisers. Someone will share them on the community Facebook pages and other people will ‘care’ and ‘heart’ react. Many of those same people will click ‘donate’ and then sit down to the evening news and nod along with heated criticisms decrying SNAP as “government waste.”
I don’t know how to make them see that the family at the cancer spaghetti dinner and the family with the EBT card are the same family, just on different days. The only difference is which one they’re taught to feel good about helping.
“The difference is control and proximity.” Bingo. Thank you for writing it and for sharing it. I’ll be thinking about it long after reading it!
"The only difference is which one they’re taught to feel good about helping." Ugh. Yes.
I was so excited to see you in the NYT again — though I am also so angry that, like you said, your piece needed to be written at all. Thank you for sharing it and continuing to show up in this space with such transparency / compassion / all of it.