We recently got an old, hand-me-down deep freezer.

And at the same time, the federal government shutdown and Pennsylvania state budget impasse have complicated SNAP benefits for families who have them.

I heard on the news that 1-in-8 Americans have SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition or “food stamps”). I heard one story this morning about an unemployed widow with a 15-year-old son whose soundbite suggested she sent him to school so he could eat breakfast and lunch.

I hope she’s sending him to school for an education, first and foremost.

I consider myself a fiscally-conservative Democrat who believes that education and healthcare should be attainable and fair. I would love to have a Ph.D., but I can’t afford to finish my masters and I refuse to go into debt for it. I also have a disability, and even when I am well-employed I often have to make choices about my medical care.

Right now, I have my own small business. I work a part-time job in the food service industry to provide some reliable income on a steady timeline. I am an adjunct instructor at my local community college, and if you break it down to an hourly rate, I probably make a similar wage at my fast food job (because of the fact that I did not have the money to finish my degrees). And I have freelance writing and editing jobs and a mini author’s assistant job.

And I’m always on the look out for more. Applied for another this morning.

I started my career in public relations, and ended up in print journalism, which led to a long career of lay-offs as newspapers died. I worked in non-profit communications and development, where I learned a massive amount of useful skills like grant writing but also experienced a ridiculous amount of toxic managerial behavior. Some people work in the non-profit sector because they want to make the world a better place, but at the same time, many of those people have either childhood trauma and/or personal insecurities that create some challenging environments in an already difficult field.

I mention all of this because I have experience with unemployment. I have experience with being the single mom with maybe enough resources to survive a month. I was a single mom raising a teenager who lost her job during the pandemic and did not find out if she qualified for unemployment until the weekend after she accepted a new job. I was unemployed for four months and had opened my home to one of my daughter’s friends who didn’t feel safe in her own home.

I applied for public assistance because I was volunteering at a non-profit that provides services for people exiting human trafficking situations and my “boss” suggested it. Because I had no income and I had an official dependent, I received more than $700/month in food stamps. And Medicaid. Which was a great help. Even though I only received food stamps for four months, I rationed them so they lasted almost a year.

I had accepted a job in the warehouse at Stitch Fix. I loved that job, and the company, but after three years they decided to close our warehouse. After three years at a wage where my take-home pay was the same as what I had made as the development manager for a small non-profit with a two-million-dollar annual budget (thanks to the fact that Stitch Fix offered their employees free medical benefits), I found myself laid off again.

And when my unemployment ran out, I once again applied for food stamps. I had gone on multiple interviews, built up my small business, but still struggled with the cost of my medical care– my estranged husband put me on his benefits but my medicine was $50-$100 a month and all my doctor’s appointments I had to pay out of pocket because of the high deductible. So I really hoped I would qualify for Medicaid again. And I did.

I also qualified for $525 in food stamps.

Around this same time, Trump got re-elected and the cheap refrigerator I bought started freezing the food in the refrigerator and not freezing the food in the freezer. But I couldn’t afford a new fridge– and I still can’t– so we started buying only what we could eat in a few days, or foods that could safely thaw and refreeze.

Lettuce is not one of them, if you were curious.

The point of all this is to ask: Regardless of how you feel about who uses food stamps or how the government distributes them or whether or not people try hard enough or work hard enough, why is no one asking why we have a system where 1-in-eight Americans qualifies for food stamps?

I have seen and heard so many things about the system, and I have known people who work in the branches of government that distribute these types of assistance and they are all people who want to help. I have met people afraid to work because they might lose assistance, and I have seen people who need the help lose it because they made too much money. (And, like me, it’s usually people who need medical care.)

I have about $2,300 left on my deductible this year, and I have spent almost an equal amount if you read my EOBs from the insurance company. I’m losing my hearing in one ear and I need a hearing test and a visit with the audiologist. The muscles in my one leg have been spasming 24-hours-a-day for almost a year now and I just blamed it on my cerebral palsy but my neurologist has concerns that previously noted damage to my spine (from all these years of walking crooked) may have caused nerve damage in my lower back. And my one finger has been doing crazy things for about a year.

That’s probably at least $6,000 worth of tests. Do I just try to schedule it all before the end of the year and finance the $2,000+ remaining of the deductible on a credit card? Or Able Pay? or do I wait until I am better off financially?

Back to the deep freezer. A friend of the family was hoping to get a decade-plus year old freezer out of his house. We took it. We took all the stuff from our cheap refrigerator that needed better freezer conditions and piled it in. And I thought– when Trump was elected an I was worried about the future of food stamps, I didn’t have a freezer to fill. I did however invest in every non-perishable food item I could tolerate.

Dried Beans. Plain-old Rice. Canned Fruit. Canned Vegs. Nutritional Yeast. Some condiments. Canned Tuna. Spam. Canned Chicken.

My childhood traumas leave me to ruminate frequently about food scarcity, financial security and general stability. I will probably always behave as if every trip to the grocery store is the last one I can afford. And I have done my grocery shopping at the Dollar Tree and the Grocery Outlet because I only had $20 left to feed us for the week.

The Office of Vocational Rehab considers me the most severely tier of worker, whereas the federal government says I do not qualify for disability because I work so much and at so many jobs. But the federal government doesn’t take into consideration that I have to work that hard to make ends meet. And I don’t always succeed and I often hurt myself doing it. And I just work past it.

But how do you determine an equitable way to decide who deserves help? And I ask a third time: Why does 1-in-eight Americans receive food stamps? What is wrong with our society if 1-in-eight people cannot afford to feed themselves according to the criteria the government sets forth?

Food for thought.