SNAP Shutdown Will Leave Texas Students like Me Hungry

The announcement on the Your Texas Benefits app reads SNAP benefits for November will not be issued if the federal administration shutdown continues past October I logged in to see a mere left in my account It wouldn t last the week even if I was careful The message was cold and clinical like every other notice However it wasn t a plan update this time it was a countdown The notice was sent to every Texan receiving SNAP Your food is about to stop coming Like a multitude of social work students I ve been watching the headlines gather like dark clouds over our classrooms each warning about the shutdown felt less like politics and more like a hunger forecast Texas A M University Central Texas TAMUCT is labeled a non-traditional university in reality this means multiple of my classmates are working mothers and in recent months discharged veterans with limited incomes The Campus Cupboard a student-run food bank serves to reduce the staggering percent of students who are labeled food insecure when they transfer from a area college to the university However materials are limited and sometimes lack variety On October the university received a donation of pounds of locally grown gold potatoes Students like me use food bank items to supplement the caloric and nutritional value of our meals but they are not a primary stock It isn t easy to achieve a nutritionally balanced diet when every meal must consist of potatoes and whatever protein can be scrounged from the canned goods shelves Those of us who qualify for benefits use SNAP to ensure we have access to fresh meat and produce However on November SNAP benefits will no longer be distributed About percent nearly million of Texans will lose access to healthy nutritionally complete meals I will no longer be able to buy meat or fresh vegetables I will lose the only reliable way I have to eat lunch every day I worry about how well I will be able to survive on snacks from the scholar union how much of a burden I will become to my family when I eventually have to ask for help and how my classmates focus on academics will decline as they concentrate on approaches to keep themselves and their children healthy Dr Claudia Rappaport a social work professor with years at TAMUCT describes her fresh conversations with food bank participants about the SNAP lapse When people can t get their SNAP they re going to go to the food banks There isn t enough food in the food pantries to handle this need I mean they re all saying we re going to run out of food There s no way we can replace everybody s SNAP benefits She described seeing multiple families in line at food banks in recent times as October SNAP balances have decreased Multiple are single mothers with children of all ages sometimes even babies in strollers A few of these single mothers are my classmates working hard to further their learning A limited have expressed concern about how they will obtain formula breastfeeding is only an option when mothers are fed Modern folktales about welfare recipients scamming honest hard-working taxpayers to buy luxury items have damaged the reputation of honest hard-working people who happen to be poor On November we will go hungry This is not a fearmongering tactic used for likes and views this is reality Students on SNAP like myself will be forced to think about where our next meal is coming from rather than what s coming up on our next test My teachers and working peers are donating to family income pools so that their relatives won t starve Politicians thousands of miles away are arguing over a bigger more beautiful future while depriving students who are desperately trying to prepare for their own Those of us who reach graduation have no guarantee of a livable income at the finish line It makes me so angry when people say You should have prepared better revealed Nicolette Bergdahl a veteran studying at TAMUCT My uncle was an exigency surgeon Smartest man anyone would ever meet He had a stroke five years ago he thinks like a -year-old now His wife is a stay-at-home mom and they re on SNAP Now we are all having to chip in as a family to make sure that they can get grocery money You can do everything right and life still happens I don t know when this shutdown will end or when my benefits will be reinstated But I do know this the people in our classrooms our food banks and our families are worth more than the petty arguments of political powerhouses Washington may not care that our society is going hungry but we should The post SNAP Shutdown Will Leave Texas Students like Me Hungry appeared first on The Texas Observer