If she was true to her word, Gwyneth Paltrow should be finishing up her food stamp challenge having spent a week trying to survive on $29 worth of food.

Alana Folsom, a twentysomething graduate student, knows something about trying to live on food stamps. One of the so-called millennials, Folsom took an unpaid internship fresh out of college in 2012 and had to rely on food stamps to help supplement her income.

Currently enrolled in graduate school at Oregon State University, Folsom is making do with $800 a month.

“Our stipend just prevents us from being able to apply for food stamps, which is something that a lot of people in my program are upset about because we are living on $800 a month, which is really untenable,” she said, adding that cost of living in Oregon is lower than that of Massachusetts, where she lived in 2012. “Even so, a lot of people are living off student loans, burying themselves in debt or getting money from their parents.”

Back in Boston, she was making about $600 a month working as a dishwasher and server on weekends. The pay barely covered her rent.

“I was following my dreams, which I realized really quickly I could not afford to do. I was working as an intern at the Boston Review [during the week] and was unpaid. I was eating through my savings and applied [for food stamps] because I realized that I was not going to be able to continue pay rent and be able to buy food at the same time,” she said. She said it was actually a Boston Review staff member that had suggested she apply. “I guess other interns they had in the past had done it,” she said. Boston Review staff disputed her recollection.

“At Boston Review, we do not suggest that interns rely on food stamps. I polled our staff about Alana’s case, and no one recalls having recommended it. As a small nonprofit organization, we are grateful for the time that interns volunteer and strive to ensure that the experience is meaningful for them and their career development. We also work with interns to develop schedules that allow them to do other part-time work while volunteering with us, though some choose to work full-time hours,” said Simon Waxman, Boston Review’s managing editor.

Back then, Folsom received $40 a week in food stamp benefits.

“I had never been that close to eviction. I had never been that cold in the winter,” she said. Food stamps helped reverse that. “It removed a lot of the struggle for me. All of a sudden I could take that money that I was allocating to food to being able to turn the heat on at my house. I really was living off of canned tomatoes, green beans and pasta, and it was great. And I felt lucky.”

She also felt conflicted as she “didn’t fit the stereotype of someone that was on food stamps”.

“I was a white, young, female wearing business work clothes, walking into my Stop & Shop after work,” she said. “It was a strange thing for me to grapple with in terms of me understanding my identity and place in society. It seems strange thinking of celebrities doing that, because Gwyneth Paltrow will never not be Gwyneth Paltrow.”

To this day, Folsom worries that her story is different from that of a typical food stamp recipient.

“I don’t know how true my story is to everyone else’s,” said Folsom, who described being on food stamps as a positive experience since it helped her make ends meet at the time.

Currently, food stamps – formally called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program, or Snap – cover one in seven Americans, and their stories are varied. They are stories of unemployed Americans, of older Americans who are retired and struggling to live off their social security, of little children, and often of employed Americans.

Even as the topic of income inequality has dominated US headlines and political discourse – with everyone from Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Warren weighing on the national’s low wages – food stamps have become somewhat of a taboo subject. It is not exactly a secret why politicians stray from the subject. The message that Democrats are trying to send to Americans is one of recovery, and talking about food stamps does not support that message. Meanwhile Republicans are largely responsible for the $8.6bn cut to the food stamp program, and bringing it up is not going to help them attract the voters they need.

Yet even as food stamp benefits shrink, they have become an essential source of supplemental income for Americans trying to patch together funds to make ends meet. Sure, the economy seems to be getting better and jobs are being created, but wages are stuck in a rut. About 7.26 million Americans have two jobs.

And college tuition is skyrocketing: the price of tuition has risen 1,120% between 1980 and 2010. Tuition at four-year public colleges has gone up 25% since 2007. Many students are forced to choose between low-wage jobs to help pay for tuition and unpaid internships for credit to build experience in their chosen field.

Colleges, aware of the financial troubles their students face, have begun opening food banks on their campuses. In Massachusetts, 12 of the state’s 29 public college campuses operate pantries, according to the Boston Globe, and about 200 colleges nationwide now operate pantries, reports the Wall Street Journal.

It’s no surprise then that on Wednesday, Fight for $15 campaign organizers expected students from 170 campuses to join in what was the largest US protest by low-wage workers.

“It’s important for students to be involved because even if we aren’t working for McDonald’s or Walmart, we are still on McDonald’s or Walmart type of wages,” Robert Ascherman, a student activist from NYU, told the Guardian on Wednesday. He says some students have to choose between buying food or buying textbooks.

From 2001 to 2010, the percentage of US students on food stamps has more than doubled to 12.6%, up from 5.4%, according to a 2013 analysis by Philip Trostel, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Maine.

Many more students are eligible. A 2010 report on food insecurity of City University of New York students revealed that while 6.4% received food stamps, three times as many were eligible and did not apply. Many attribute that to the stigma of being on food stamps.

While she was receiving food stamps, Folsom said that she didn’t tell many of her friends about it. She thought they would tell her she should be able to figure out how to make her limited budget work.

“But I actually just couldn’t. It really did feel like a last resort for me,” she said. At the same time, she too was judging herself and her own purchases. “I was walking around with this double stigma because I do need this, but there are people who do need it more than me.”