Throughout my childhood, the food system was small. It started at the grocery store, continued with my mom’s labor (eventually mine and my brothers’ too), and ended on the table. At times, my mom reminded my brothers and I that our dad was working to make money for the food, usually when he was traveling for weeks at a time. Food required sacrifice and effort, that part I got. We were Catholic, after all – a belief system where labor and suffering are infused with meaning.

I think it’s a parent’s dream for the food system to be largely invisible. This dovetails with the fact that the food system itself, run by a wide range of people with good to greedy motives, would rather be invisible. Food reliably shows up on the dinner table and everyone eats well. No need to see how the tofu gets made. 

Even with enough money, feeding ourselves is plenty of work. It’s no wonder that convenience foods and services aimed at simplifying dinner abound, but that is no way to ease the primary sources of difficulty: Unequal wealth distribution, marginalization, and dehumanization of poor people. As Julia Turshen wrote, “We live in a wealthy country with so much food insecurity not because of a lack of food, but because of a lack of financial security. There is hunger because there is systemic oppression.” 

Many children are introduced to a far vaster food system than I knew as their family traverses food support services, food pantries, SNAP, or WIC. After venturing out from my parent’s household, I relied on WIC for a time after my son was born. Navigating that system to access the food was tedious and at times overwhelming. Even though everyone at my local WIC office was kind, each time I visited and they measured my son’s growth and asked me about how we were doing I left the building uneasy and exhausted. And that was before I’d gone to the grocery store.

The work of accessing food is more difficult day after day as the U.S. government shutdown holds. Day 30. Day 36. In Arizona, 15% of people rely on SNAP: “...About 1 in every 10 adults and 1 in every 4 kids.” Information is scattered and contradictory. As I write, the headlines tell me that SNAP will be partially funded, but it will take months. Listening to a White House press conference, officials engage in organized gaslighting, decrying the Democrats for taking food from underserved families. The agriculture secretary said SNAP was "so bloated, so broken, so dysfunctional, so corrupt that it is astonishing when you dig in." 

For anyone who, like me, didn’t worry about where food was coming from as a child, it’s a good time to stare at the precarity of the U.S. food system. It’s ugly and it’s ours. Even on a good day, pre-shutdown, navigating SNAP, qualifying for benefits, showing up at the right place and time for a free meal, is difficult. The burden of jumping through hoops to receive food – a basic human right – falls on folks already struggling. Don’t turn away. Take a hard look. There’s no fix-all, but there is plenty of work to be done for each other.

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