Food and Hunger

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  Corner Store

  Mother: Crystal R
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  Breakfast

  Mother: Ashley O
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  Walking

  Mother: Whitney H

  "I have a job and I’m barely making it, so imagine how many people walking around hungry, with a smile, trying to fake it." 
  

• 
  Can i have something to eat?

  Mother: Imani S

  “He was asking the case worker for something to eat.  I don’t have child care, so I have to take him to my appointments.  If he was in day care I wouldn’t have to have lugged him early in the morning to an appointment to the welfare office to try to get food stamps and medical coverage.  I can’t help it if my baby’s hungry.  I was thinking ‘I’m not going to lie to you miss, he’s hungry.’”

• 
  City Hall at Night

  Mother: Imani S

  "I was on my way to the overtime job that I was doing when I got my food stamps cut off.  They had called me to work there for one day.  So, I was thinking to myself, “Well, if I go down here this one day, are they going cut my food stamps off?  I really didn’t know what to do.  At the time I was walking through there, it made me think, “Was I going to get cut off again?” What kind of programs can the City do to help us stay on the food stamp program when we do extra work?  I don’t think it’s fair for us to get reprimanded for doing something positive.  That’s why I chose that picture."

• 
  High Gas Prices

  Mother: Tianna G

  "I don’t have a car, I don’t own a car, I don’t know how to drive, but diesel gas is $4.87. We need diesel gas. How are we gonna get our produce from the farms to get to the market? How are we gonna get our Pampers? How are we gonna get our water? So if diesel fuel keeps going up what are our trucks gonna do?"  

• 
  Groceries

  Mother: Tianna G

  This was somebody else's cart.  I was looking at how much their cart was loaded.  There is so much food out there!

• 
  Street Corner

  Mother: Tianna G
• 
  My neighbor's kitchen

  Mother: Barbie I

  You never know what goes on behind closed doors.  Some people need to know exactly how we’re living being single moms, being that we’re on our own and we don’t have that many opportunities.  When something breaks, we may not be able to fix it because we have limited income.  It’s really hard to try to get everything fixed. […] How would my neighbor actually try to work with something like that?  Being in a situation like that, your kids can stay hungry.

• 
  Make with these hands money

  Mother: Shelly G

  Let’s say Welfare is giving me this money… every two weeks I get a check but I still have to make with these hands money. Because my kids still need to eat for those two weeks. So they say food banks… the food banks give you canned food. Who’s gonna eat cans of tomato sauce? Nobody. I may do someone’s hair and be able to get noodles with that tomato sauce to feed the kids, to feed myself.

• 
  Nyima drinking juice

  Mother: Tamika H

  She’s a very picky eater and she eats when and what she wants to eat. I buy what she likes but when I make what she likes she doesn't want to eat it. 

• 
  Making it through the month

  Mother: Crystal S

  They give me $376 in Food Stamps. To try to make it through a month you have to put cash to it; there’s no way Food Stamps are gonna make it alone, it’s not gonna work.

• 
  Breakfast

  Mother: Crystal S

  With the money food stamps provide, I was able to feed her breakfast that morning.  Without it what would she have eaten? I wanted to show that with the help she was able to eat breakfast that morning.  She had cereal. She had milk. She didn’t have to go without. 

   

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  Oodles of noodles

  Mother: Melissa H

  And the kids know my food stamps got cut off. Because when they came home from school today, they didn’t have their snacks. So they know that I didn’t go to the market. I really didn’t tell them why or anything like that, because I don’t think they understand. But it affected them. 

• 
  Failure to thrive

  Mother: Melissa H

  My son, he’s already on the small side and he needs every bit of food that he can get to make him healthy, keep him healthy. He has failure to thrive. He has a bone deficiency that doesn’t allow him to grow. He’s only thirty pounds. He has acid reflux. He had RSV, failure to thrive, chronic asthma.

• 
  Oodles of noodles

  Mother: Melissa H
• 
  Snack time

  Mother: Melissa H
• 
  A healthy meal

  Mother: Janelle R

  We get the Welfare and that’s what feeds us, the Welfare. The food… it gets smaller but it never… it never runs out because right now my mom lets me keep my Food Stamps so I’m able to make it last.

• 
  Food cupboard

  Mother: Janelle R

  That’s just some of the canned goods. Usually it's filled up more than that. Eggs and bread go fast, so after all the bread and milk is gone it does look kind of different in the kitchen.

• 
  Hiding food

  Mother: Janelle R

  Certain food I have to leave in the room because if I don’t [people in the house will] eat it… they’ll go into stuff and they’ll eat stuff. Like my mom’s boyfriend’s friend, he lives here. And he also gets food stamps but I get more than him so when his food is gone he eats my food. And when somebody comes and asks you, “could I have some food?” and you have it, you wanna give it to them. But then you wanna say no, because what if my kids don’t have food to eat the next day? I hate [hiding my food], I really do. But I have to do it because I want to make sure they have something to eat.