“What do you do when you’re hungry?” we asked Maylee, a 6-year-old girl. “I go to bed and think about eating,” she said.

We first met Maylee’s family in 2012, when we began a five-year study about food and poverty in North Carolina. Over the course of the project, we conducted multiple interviews with more than 100 poor and working-class mothers of young children, including Maylee’s mother, Ashley Taylor. We also made ethnographic observations of 12 families: accompanying them on trips to grocery stores and food pantries, tagging along during school lunches and doctor’s visits, and spending time in their homes as they cooked and ate. And in 2017, we interviewed the kids in each family.

Four months before we interviewed Maylee, her family’s food stamps had been cut off because of an administrative error. Ashley still hadn’t been able to get it straightened out. “It’s been tough,” said Ashley. She regularly went to food pantries, and Maylee and her younger sister received backpacks filled with food from their school. Ashley was always looking for sales and recipes that she could make on a budget, and she had cut back on the size of her own meals. But even with all her efforts, there just wasn’t enough. “The kids don’t eat the way that I’d like,” Ashley said.

In 2016, children in 3.1 million households experienced food insecurity at some point during the year. Whether temporary or chronic, food insecurity is devastating for kids. As a nation, we have historically tried to align our policies with the belief that we should do what we can to prevent children from being hungry. When he signed the National School Lunch Act in 1946, President Truman said, “In the long view, no nation is any healthier than its children.” Almost 20 years later, President Johnson argued that the food stamp program represented a way of “apply[ing] the power of America’s new abundance to the task of building a better life for every American.”