Weathersbee: Trump plan to give food packages to poor is about shaming them, not sustaining them

Recently, as President Trump and his minions were eyeing embarrassment as a cure for hunger, a lot of people were already enduring that.

By 8 a.m. this past Friday at North Frayser Community Center, a line of vehicles on two blocks of the street leading up to it — as well as an adjacent one — was at a standstill.

Some had waited for nearly three hours as volunteers for the Mid-South Food Bank piled tables with frozen blueberries, iceberg lettuce, Alaskan pollock, chicken, beef, apple juice and other foods to donate to people who know the month will last longer than their paycheck or their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits.

Few wanted to talk to me. Many shooed me away before I even reached their vehicle. That’s likely because of the more than 200,000 people in this area who rely on food bank help, nearly half are in households where someone works.

That means they need free food — but they don’t want people they know they need it.

“One time, a lady was in line getting her food, and she looked up and saw all these red shirts coming,” recalled Estella Mayhue-Greer, president and CEO of the food bank.

“She said, ‘Oh Lord, these are my co-workers.’ The volunteers were from Walgreens, which was where this lady worked … she needed food because her kids were out of school for the summer, and she didn’t have enough for them.”

But those who did talk believed that Trump’s plans to replace some people’s SNAP benefits with a “Harvest Box,” dropped off at their door and filled with cheap peanut butter, cereals, pastas and staples, but no fresh foods, would deliver more shame than nutrition.

That’s easy to see — considering that if they can come to a mobile food site to pick up foods, they can simply take it home as if they just arrived from the supermarket, as they do after they’ve purchased food with their SNAP cards.

A box delivered to their door would let the world know they’re getting government food.

That is, if the boxes even reached them at all.

“Due to housing problems in our area, families move around quite a bit,” said Rhonda Ferguson-Williams, a family advocate counselor for Shelby County’s Relative Caregiver Program. She came to pick up food for two grandparents caring for their grandchildren.

“What if you’ve moved? What if your box is stolen off your porch? What if you’re in a rural area that’s tough to get to physically?”

“I just don’t see how it’s going to be beneficial for our families, putting a box out for them... I see a lot of shame in that. It reminds me of the soup lines.”

“Right now, I’m taking care of eight children,” said Chandra Jones, who is also looking after the children of a sister struggling with a drug addiction. “I’m doing what I have to do to feed the kids…

“But this (food boxes)? Oh, my God…no.”

As it turns out, there may not be much to worry about there.

Administration officials are already saying that the idea of replacing half of SNAP recipients' cash benefits with a staples box has virtually no chance of becoming reality.

Additionally, some lawmakers believe it is a distraction from the administration’s real purpose: To continue to slash billions from SNAP — which 67 percent of the food bank’s clients rely on — and make it harder for people to qualify for it.

That, in and of itself, would be a mistake.

A recent report by The Hamilton Project, which examines economic policy for the Brookings Institution, found that SNAP has, among other things, helped people avoid health problems later in life associated with poor nutrition, helped children perform better in school and helped families weather financial crises.

Yet instead of working to create policies to help people get the nutrition they need to be healthy enough to work, to get an education and to ultimately climb out of poverty and dependency, the Trump administration’s answer is to float untested ideas that are rooted in distraction and shaming.

And that’s bad.

It’s bad because the last thing that people like the ones who were waiting in their cars, in 40-degree weather, for food in Frayser need is to be pawns for people who are intent on adding a heaping helping of stigmatization to their struggles.