As someone whose family has specific food requirements due to both disability and cultural dietary requirements, who recently lost my temper on someone who told us to "just go to the food bank" while we were crowdfunding for groceries, let me just say the following:
This is going to kill people. Malnutrition and hunger destroy lives.
Whole wheat products are more expensive by a mile, especially in food desserts. A lot of canned meat products have more additives and sodium than fresh. American cheese is cheap and can be used in some of the easiest foods to prep. Cheese in general can be used to stretch and add more nutrients to other things, like meats or veggies or salads or soups. I have gotten through what I can only call starvation periods on a 98 cent loaf of white bread and a pack of cheese slices, which would be impossible under this new policy for anyone reliant on government grocery aid.
When you're not getting enough nutrients, your body starts to shut down. We started begging for grocery money after realizing that our fatigue, our irritability, our brain fog, and all our usual disability symptoms, were all being made worse by hunger.
I've been in severe hunger situations where the parents go hungry in order to feed the kids, where the unemployed adults go hungry in order to feed the ones who have to go to work, where school free lunches are the only reason anyone in the house ate that day. I have been homeless and reliant on foods that don't require kitchen prep. I have been so poor and so without resources that other people used their SNAP to buy me food. I have known people who took out payday loans just to buy groceries, and stayed in debt for years because of the grocery loans.
I have been in situations where a single serving had to stretch to feed four. I have been in situations where the only reason anyone ate was because everyone pooled the last of their food stamps to make a group meal. I have eaten food out of the trash. I have developed some rather severe food-based OCD traits in the past (at least, my research suggests that might be what they are--not 100% sure, really, because who can afford mental healthcare?), and it has been hell to try and manage them.
Cutting benefits like this is evil, in the truest sense of the word, and I hope there's a Hell just so the people behind shit like this can experience an eternity of starvation pains, and truly know how much of a physical agony it is to not get enough to eat.
titsay
germansingergirl
gummygunk
dededos
theartofmadeline
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
