Food and Hunger

Food Insecurity and Hunger

• 
  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."

• 
  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!

• 
  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. 

   

• 
  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.

• 
  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.

• 
  Feeding others

  Mother: Angela S

  [This family], they don’t have any food. I had to go over and I even took pictures of the food, the bag of food. I'd go around there a couple times, I'd just take canned goods and stuff. I tried to keep canned goods and stuff and I just kept feeding them because the kids were hungry.

• 
  Receiving a bag of food

  Mother: Angela S
• 
  Expired yogurt

  Mother: Angelica R

  She was asking me for that yogurt. I felt so bad because it was outdated. It was old so I couldn’t give it to her. She was asking me for it, I said, ‘I don’t have it. It’s no good’… She was actually crying because I took it off of her and dumped it. And I didn’t have like anything else to give her.

• 
  Empty freezer

  Mother: Pauline S
• 
  2 Tokens for One Week

  Mother: Joanna C

  "I take the bus to work. That’s why I had the picture of the two bus tokens. My sad, little tokens, because it was these two tokens that I had left for three more days of getting to work. Welfare said they couldn’t give me any more bus fare money because they already gave it to me. But of course, my priority is to feed my kids. I know that going to the job is going to pay me eventually, but I can’t let them starve all week long. So, I’m going to use that money to feed them first."

• 
  Refrigerator

  Mother: Sherry R
• 
  Freezer

  Mother: Sherry R
• 
  Freezer

  Mother: Pauline S
• 
  Refrigerator

  Mother: Pauline S
• 
  Cabinet

  Mother: Pauline S
• 
  Packaged Goods

  Mother: Sharelle  F
• 
  Food Shelf

  Mother: Quiana  H