“Are these red onions?”

The other day at the food bank, I was helping a lady load her groceries into her car, and she asked me to also help her identify the purplish papery vegetables trying to roll loose from their bag.

It was hard to tell. These were D-cup shallots, if they were shallots, so you’d be forgiven to think they were onions. But the way they grow in cloves or clusters is a giveaway. If you look shallots up, your top-level search result will inform you that while they are in the same family (allium cepa) as onions, they have “unique culinary value.”

“They look like shallots to me!” I told her, laying one of her bags–and I am not making this up to be cute, here–on top of the newspaper on her back seat, whose frontpage headline shouted, “We Already Can’t Afford The Food We Need.”

She was thrilled. “I make a soup,” she said, and pointed at the zucchini she had also scored on her round of the food bank shelves. She described it, and dropped her voice to share the secret ingredient. “Saffron,” she whispered. “It’s sooo expensive. But someone gave me a powdered one.”

I also like to make a zucchini soup that sometimes gets a secret little kick of saffron to make it special. Weeping felt like the next right step for me, but instead I loaded the rest of her things. She was a lady of a certain age, feeling chatty, and had come with a friend of similar vintage. I’d placed the friend’s bags around the walker in the trunk.

“It looks like a lot,” she said, waving at the bags, “but we have a friend who is ninety-two, and another neighbor who–”

As casually as I could, I reassured her she didn’t need to make the case for the food she was taking home.

“You have a good day, now, dear!” she said, and they motored off in their tan sedan.

I have so much to say about the food crisis, and one of the reasons it’s so hard to capture it all is that every five minutes, the story changes and gets worse. I’ve written this six times, and it keeps getting more diabolical by the moment and I have to start over. My local grocer posted a notice yesterday that they would offer SNAP cardholders a 10% discount, only to have to walk it back 24h later because the USDA declared that any retailer who tried to look after people in this way would forfeit being part of the SNAP program if it ever returns.*

IF.

The cruelty is the point.

Criminalizing kindness and community care is a level of evil that really threatens to unravel society and it will take all of us working together to resist. If you’re stuck or frozen, it’s a natural response. My hope is that this can help organize your thoughts about what to share with your neighbors, and get to work.

Wherever you are sharing, remember two things: dignity and agency. Food bank donations are not just an invitation to cull your cabinets. Give good things, selected from the breadth of choice you yourself enjoy. It’s a sliding scale, but a useful one. What are the staples that allow you to cook comfortably as yourself? Think about what you pack when heading to a new kitchen. Think about your comfort foods.

Where to share:

Your local pantry. Find one here or here. Beyond the list above, ask the people who work there what they need, or give straight-up cash. Food banks can often purchase wholesale, stretching your money further than you can take it at retail.
Your local free food fridge. These are a great outlet if you’re a stress baker or like to cook to blow off steam, since they are not limited to shelf-stable contributions. Find one here.
Community centers and free clinics.

How to grow your thinking:

Seek out a grocery buddy, someone who you can shop for when you do your own shopping.
Restaurants and coffee shops around the country are offering “SNAP meals,” fully comped. Contribute to one of these efforts in your community, or start one by contacting a business you trust and starting a kitty to enable them to share similarly. Win/win, since you also keep a small business solvent.
Pet food is often overlooked but is essential to keep companion animals with their people and out of the already-overwhelmed shelter system. Loading your local shelter up with food and gift cards for gas and groceries and supporting your nearest low-cost vet clinic could mean the difference between a pet staying home and being surrendered for costs.
On that note, fostering or walking dogs at your nearest shelter has never been more important. Bring donuts. Morale is low.
Normalize not knowing or caring much about who is accessing the support that’s shared. Trust people to define their needs and what will meet them. Outliers and bad actors are not as big of a problem as we are taught to fear.

Remember: whether or not you yourself carry an EBT card is irrelevant to the assessment of who’s on SNAP and who isn’t. SNAP isn’t government cheese left on the doorstep. It’s money we’ve paid into the system so those of us who need it can spend it at the store. When those 42 million people stop shopping, you yourself personally lose a very important subsidy you possibly never knew you had. The grocery store is a business, and when the customer base shrinks drastically and overnight, remaining customers will need to bear the increased costs. When that becomes (rapidly) unsustainable, stores will cut their costs: cue the next wave of job loss (market employees, delivery drivers, etc), who will have no safety net themselves.

While we are on the subsidy matter, let’s refresh awareness that the subsidies we should be extra spicy about are the corporate ones, which make it possible for CEOs to balloon their salaries and stock payouts while their workforce are compensated at “need SNAP to survive” rates. I heard someone say this week that big companies privatize their wins, and make their losses public. The government subsidy that is keeping people alive is not the one to be mad at, or to cut. Assazon laying off 30,000 people while reporting an increase in sales of THIRTY BILLION DOLLARS should make us madder than the idea that someone can’t make ends meet on $7.25 an hour without some intervention.

Here’s a last hot tip: You probably have a rewards card wherever you do the bulk of your shopping. Nerd out on that shit. I’ve been flashing mine at checkout for decades for the lil discounts and I was this week years old before I knew that I was accumulating points I could spend, or that I could amplify those points with little clicks here and there in the store app. Those points became bags of groceries I dropped off this week. Coupons are magic, and scissors are no longer required. Click, click, click.

We take care of us!

*****

I don’t know how to weave this in but in this riveting interview with Kate Bowler, Ai-Jen Poo says (among other things), “Other countries have systems of support for their people; America has women.” A really good listen.

*There’s growing pushback to this bit of fluckery, with stores joining forces to resist, so that seems like good news?