In a nation that claims to value life, dignity, and opportunity, we sure have a really funny way of showing it.
Congress is once again playing political football with SNAP benefits, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that helps low-income individuals and families afford food. In Michigan alone, 1.4 million people will lose their food assistance on November 1, 2025. This week, House democrats scrambled to come up with a plan in the event the shutdown continued.
It’s become a political hot potato. And the people arguing that only lazy people will be impacted (as if that ever makes starving people ok) are being intellectually dishonest. Why?
Because most people who receive SNAP are already working. They’re not mooching. They’re making minimum wage in our schools, our warehouses, our grocery stores while they are barely able to feed their own children.
It’s not laziness that drives food insecurity in America. It’s low wages, rising costs, and legislative cruelty.
And in Michigan, that cruelty has already made itself painfully clear.
Michigan Politicians Nearly Axed Free School Lunches
Not long ago, lawmakers in Michigan seriously debated cutting funding for free school lunches, a program that offers the only consistent meal many children get each day. We’re talking about kids whose school lunch trays are the last defense between hunger and survival. Kids who go home to empty cupboards and return to class hoping to eat.
So what would have happened if they had stripped those lunches away? A compound, nightmare where children would literally have nothing in their cupboards.
How did we get here? How did the wealthiest country in the world decide that feeding people is a privilege, not a right? Maybe it’s because it’s the same reason we incarcerate more than any country in the world.
Hunger Isn’t an Accident. It’s a Weapon.
There is truly nothing new under the sun. Because throughout history, food has been used as a tool of control and compliance during moments of political unrest:
- Ancient Rome kept its citizens in check with “bread and circuses,” distributing grain while distracting with games.
- The Irish Potato Famine was made catastrophic by colonial policy that prioritized exports over feeding the starving.
- During slavery and Jim Crow, food access was deliberately withheld or rationed to dehumanize Black communities.
- The Soviet Union manipulated food distribution to reward loyalty and punish dissent, with the most notable example being that of the Holomodor, a horrific act of Ukranian genocide.
And according to CIA intelligence, it wasn’t because they didn’t have it:
In 1981, grain imports and other agricultural products reached almost $12 billion, or about 40% of the U.S.S.R.’s total hard currency purchases. Despite the large‐scale expansion in agricultural imports though, the Soviet Union remains basically self‐sufficient with respect to food. These imports are intended primarily to prevent a decline in meat consumption and are not essential to maintaining an adequate quantity of food consumption. At 3,300 calories, average daily food intake equals that in developed Western countries. Grain production is more than sufficient to meet consumer demand for bread and other cereal products. To summarize, when we say that the U.S.S.R. is self‐sufficient, we do not mean that the Soviets neither need nor benefit from trade. Imports, particularly from the West, can play an important rôle in relieving critical deficiencies, spurring technologic progress, and generally improving Soviet economic performance. What we mean is that the Soviet economy’s ability to remain viable in the absence of imports is much greater than that of most, possibly all, other industrialized economies. Consequently the susceptibility of the Soviet Union to economic leverage tends to be limited.
The Soviet Polity in the Modern Era
And in 2025 America? We’re still playing the same damn game that only politicians having pissing contests win.
Hunger keeps people too tired to protest. Too desperate to organize. Too focused on survival to challenge our fucked up and broken American system. When you’re in a constant state of survival, it is hard to concentrate on much else, let alone organizing against your politicians and the dark money funding them.
So yeah. Cutting SNAP and school meals isn’t just callous; it’s calculated.
Collective Trauma in the Hunger Game
When SNAP benefits are cut or delayed, it’s not just a handful of families making hard choices; it’s creating a society under stress. What looks like individual hardship is part of a collective trauma that touches millions of households, communities, and our shared moral fabric.
- Millions faced with uncertainty: When 1.4 million Michigan residents rely on SNAP, threats of cuts trigger a widespread sense of instability. Hunger becomes a threat to dignity—not only for the recipients, but for every neighbor watching the system break.
- Shock ripples beyond the dinner table: Food insecurity doesn’t just affect nutrition; it spills into anxiety, sleep disruption, mental‑health strain, and the erosion of community trust. These aren’t isolated stories; they form a larger web of trauma.
- When we’re told our survival is optional: When public policy treats feeding people as negotiable, it sends a signal: Your life isn’t worth the same protection as mine. That message reverberates, creating mistrust and fear across socioeconomic lines.
- Healing requires community, not isolation: Recovery from collective trauma happens not through individual resilience alone, but through shared support, policy accountability, and systems that ensure no one is left scrambling.
We must stop treating hunger as a personal burden and start seeing it as public trauma. One that we have no problem inflicting on the innocent, elderly, and disabled.
We Claim to Care About Life—But Only Until It’s Born
Let’s be brutally honest: in America, we fetishize birth and forget everything that comes after. Politicians rush to protect unborn lives as a means of virtue signaling, but where’s that same big energy when a single mother is working two jobs and still can’t afford groceries? When she’s terrified that she can’t keep the lights on?
Where’s the support when a fourth-grader’s only meal comes from a lunch tray?
If you’re poor, undocumented, disabled, or formerly incarcerated, you’re officially on your own in America, because no one cares, least of all your elected officials.
Poverty Is a Policy Choice. Hunger Is a Political Decision.
SNAP cuts are not accidents. Neither was the attempt to gut Michigan’s school lunch program. These are intentional budget decisions that say everything about who we value and who we’re willing to let starve. Who we deem worthy.
This can only be described as quiet eugenics.
Politicians never “run out of money” for tax breaks, pet projects, or militarized policing. But when it comes to school lunches or food stamps? Suddenly, the budget’s just too tight. When it comes to taking care of the people they take hostage to incarcerate, to get their much needed pound of flesh, paying for fixes to infrastructure that would keep the people in their care safe? Forget it. They don’t matter.
And it will never matter because the politicians aren’t going to be the ones going hungry, so they don’t give a single fuck.
It’s not a coincidence. It’s a conscientious choice.
What We Can—and Must—Do
- Call it what it is: These are not just “budget proposals.” They’re attacks on the working poor.
- Track your legislators: Who voted to defund lunches? Who supports SNAP cuts? Name them. Scream them in the streets. Remember them at the ballot box and vote them out because lives depend on it.
- Support food justice orgs: Mutual aid, community fridges, and local nonprofits are doing the work our government won’t.
- Build coalitions: If they can target food, they can and WILL target housing, healthcare, education. We’re all in this fight. And we won’t make it out alive if we don’t take care of one another.
- Vote. Organize. Feed each other. Because our safety net is being shredded and the hunger is deliberate.
