‘Let Them Steal Cake’

By Joni Halpern

When I was a kid
Know what I did?
I stole things.
Things like penny candy, cookies
cake and ice cream.

My mom would get angry.
My dad would yell and scream.
But I would get hungry.
So when I was a kid,
know what I did?
I stole things.

—Olen Purnell, 1976

When I was a kid, there were no food stamps.  My dad was a working man, a carpenter  who worked six days a week, but still could not buy enough food for his children.

Oh, he tried.  He shopped sales, bought off-brands, made deals with the local grocer to buy the rough outer lettuce leaves that were trimmed before the tender heads were set out for customers.  He bought moldy cheese removed days earlier from the dairy display.  He measured our milk by the mouthful so it would last longer, until by the third week of the month, it was sour.  We still drank it.  He scoured the rural areas outside our town to pick up lugs of damaged fruit and vegetables that couldn’t be sold at market.  Meat was scarce.

In spite of his best efforts, there were days and nights when we went hungry.  When I was in sixth grade, I was called to the nurse’s office with my little brother.  No explanation was given as we were stripped and examined from head to toe.  The doctor who conducted the examination gave me a form for my father to sign and return.  She didn’t bother putting it in an envelope. I read it on the way home. It said my brother and I were malnourished, and if something was not done to improve our condition, authorities could remove us from our home.

I was terrified to hand the note to my dad. When he read it, his face flushed red. His eyes flashed with anger.  He looked as if he were going to shout at me.  But he knew I was not responsible for the content of the message. He stood like a stone for an instant.  Then he sighed heavily, shook his head and asked, “What do they expect me to do?  I’m already working three jobs.”

He was a guy who never spent money on himself unless it was absolutely necessary.  He kept his work boots until the soles were like paper.  His socks had holes in the toes and heels.  His shirts were clean but frayed.  He had one suit, one tie, one dress shirt.  He never went out with the guys.  His two big indulgences were one package of chocolate cookies per month (which we pilfered from the upper cupboard in the kitchen) and a monthly bottle of port wine that fueled Saturday evening’s entertainment as he played Big Band favorites and old Italian tunes on his accordion.

My dad, the son of immigrants, had grappled with malnutrition during the Depression.  He was a guy stressed to the core by trying to keep our family together after my mother died, a man who took pride in paying his bills, whether by cash or by working out a way to trade his skill as a carpenter.

What was expected of him?  It was expected he would accept his failure as a breadwinner, work until he dropped, and take responsibility for having lodged himself in a low socio-economic level of society in a country that believed the sky was the limit for anyone willing to work hard.  If he could not feed his children, he could forfeit them to government, but government would not give him a dime for his food budget.

With that in mind, he periodically shipped us out to relatives, sometimes to institutions, other times to families who wanted a young teen to help with the laundry and dishes, make the beds, and babysit.  Think of it as the price of food.

It was not until I married a lovely man who had grown up a sharecropper but was now safely delivered to the middle class as a professional that I first felt what it meant to have food security.  As an initial task in the early days of my marriage, I decided to clean the kitchen cupboards in the house my husband had shared with his two little boys and his late wife.  I opened all the cupboard doors to get a look at just what the job would entail.  And there, I encountered a sight I had never seen in the houses in which I lived as a child.   The shelves were stocked to capacity with food.  Canned goods, packaged goods, seasonings, condiments, staples and sweets.  A feeling of unexpected warmth crept into my heart, and to my surprise, I felt tears on my cheeks.

It took years to find all the scars hunger had left on me.  I had habits that often accompany a malnourished child into adulthood.  I bought more groceries than our small family needed.  I served portions that were too large.  I ate too much.  I had a hard time dieting because hunger threw me back to the painful want of my youth.

Millions of Americans who grow up with hunger share these habits.  And yet, a majority of their countrymen cling to the notion that scarcity of food is always a matter of failed personal responsibility.  If people need help from time to time, there are always church pantries and food banks.  After all, we do not want to create dependencies by helping people on a regular basis.

When the federal Food Stamp Act passed in 1964, my siblings and I were already orphans, distributed among relatives and ultimately entering self-supporting young adulthood with our old friend hunger as our constant companion.  We were not eligible for food stamps.  But for the families who were eligible, the program was a godsend.  For the first time since the Great Depression, the government was willing to help struggling parents boost their food budget to a level that covered at least the basics.

Food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has never been a program of fancy foods. There are strict regulations about what you can buy.  No prepared or hot foods, alcohol, household or hygiene items, vitamins, medicines, and in some states, no candy or sugary drinks.  But the program, called CalFresh in California, has amplified household food budgets that otherwise would be low enough to cause “food insecurity.”  That’s a nice term for not knowing where your next meal is coming from.

Food stamps have brought a reliability to food supplies that eases tensions in low-income households.  Guarding a vastly inadequate food supply to ensure it lasts throughout the month makes parents the enemies of their children; it undermines parental authority and subjects parents to humiliation in front of their own kids.  Food is so much a part of rewarding accomplishments, effort, and hallmarks in a child’s life, and this kind of affirmation and celebration is absent from family life in hungry households.

Food stamps nourished the emotional and physical growth of millions of children.  But over the last 40 years, we as a country have systematically sought to reduce the number of households that get food stamps.  We have ratcheted up work requirements, created obstacles to eligibility even for the poorest among us, and made it easier to trip up the unsuspecting so their cases can be closed.  This is not the work of local welfare departments.  It is the will of a nation that has been taught a spiteful cynicism toward the poor, writ large by decades of Congressional legislation, and signed by presidents both Democratic and Republican.  Vocal champions for the poor have been scarce in Washington, D.C. for 50 years.

It is only when the middle class cries “Foul!” that Congress takes a step back and funds the temporary expansion of food stamp accessibility.  Congress is not stupid; they know how to feed a starving economy.  People spend all their food stamps every month, injecting cash directly into the heart of the economy, a surge of economic adrenalin that, when expanded, has an immediate effect on our efforts to recover from financial catastrophes, whether caused by a pandemic, war, or plunder of our treasury by those in power.  Almost 50 million Americans have been on the food stamp rolls at peak times.  But almost as quickly as the economy sputters into a recovery, hard-bitten politicos return to the old catechism.  “See?” they say smugly.  “The more tax dollars you give away, the more people become dependent.”

Hidden in that cynical view is the real story.  The middle and working classes of America have been losing ground for fifty years.  It started with the decline of real wages, as economic  policies began to prioritize the rich over everyone else.  The value of earnings declined even more as government wasted our tax dollars on reckless wars and tax incentives for the ultra-wealthy.  Now the economic outlook for every person who works for a living is clear:  no matter where you stand on the economic ladder, you are more likely than ever to slip off the rung on which you are standing, with very little hope of ever attaining your prior level of income.

For young people just starting out their working lives, the outlook is gloomy.  Many are giving up and going back home to their parents.  It’s better to flop in your old bedroom than to flop on the street.  Elderly people on fixed incomes are becoming one of the fastest growing segments of the homeless population.  And people working for low wages are threatened with eviction, utility shut-offs, or severe cuts to their food budget.

It is reported that today, there are about 37 million people receiving food stamps, reflecting a nationwide drop of over five million recipients year over year due to restrictive application and eligibility rules.  H.R. 1, the recently passed “Big Beautiful Bill,” is now speeding up the decline.  It is not the political cattle prod of “personal responsibility” that is reducing the food stamp caseload (and the caseloads of all other government assistance programs).  It is the hard-bitten, stingy, purposefully cruel legislation that has only one ultimate goal – to do away with all government assistance in order to free up tax dollars for the wealthy individuals and corporations who yawn in the face of their countrymen’s suffering, while they lie back on their form-fitting lounges calling for water from Himalayan springs untouched by other humans.

The saddest fact of all is that American voters who are not stricken with hunger have acquiesced in this outrageous theft of our children’s future.  For after all, the children of this country belong to all of us. They are the ones who will sculpt the end of our lives as they fashion their own life journeys.  And what have we done to millions of our children?  We have cut off the meager assistance to the people who love them most, the parents who in great majority, have feeding their children as their first priority.  We have allowed a spiteful and callous Congress to take food from the mouths of individuals and families in need.

What do we expect of these people? Of these children?

H.R. 1 and its predecessor legislation make the answer crystal clear:  Let them steal cake.