On Saturday mornings in North Philadelphia, hundreds of people can be found lining up along the sidewalks of West LeHigh Avenue and Sixth Street, near the basement entrance of a local public library. They aren’t looking for books, they are looking to be fed, by a large community food center housed in the library’s basement. Until recently, the fire-gutted, stone-and-brick shell of a huge high school down the street from the center dominated the landscape, looking more like a ruined medieval monastery than a modern-day American urban academy. The school ruins have now been torn down, but the side streets are still lined with boarded-up houses.

North Philadelphia is one of America’s poorest urban neighborhoods. In 2011, researchers with Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that Philadelphia’s poverty rate stood at twenty-five per cent. But that number hid huge disparities. Some suburbs were as leafy and affluent as Westchester, New York. Meanwhile, in the eastern part of North Philadelphia, the city’s poorest district, the poverty rate stood at about fifty-six per cent. In 2010, the median home price for a house in the area was ten thousand dollars.

I met Vicenta Delgado in the fall of 2011, while she was sitting on the curb waiting for the pantry on LeHigh Avenue to open. It was a chilly morning, and she was bundled up against the cold, her walker resting on the sidewalk beside her, wearing a dark headscarf over her bald head.

Delgado, a sixty-one-year-old immigrant from Puerto Rico, told me that she had been undergoing chemotherapy to treat a brain tumor. She also had diabetes and high blood pressure, and had suffered from depression ever since her oldest son was killed. The health problems had taken a financial toll on her: she paid a three-dollar co-pay each time she filled a prescription; Medicaid didn’t cover the nutritional supplement shakes that she needed because of her cancer, so she bought them herself; she had to pay a neighbor to drive her to the hospital for her treatments. And it was out of the question to stop paying her electricity bill: if her electricity got cut off, the machine that helped her breathe at night—she suffered from sleep apnea—wouldn’t work.

Each month, Delgado said, she and her husband together received a little more than a thousand dollars from Social Security and thirty-four dollars in food stamps. She also received disability benefits. But this income was not nearly enough to fill her fridge and pay the bills. “You go to the store with thirty-four dollars, you can’t buy nothing,” she told me.

So she spent each Saturday morning waiting in line for several hours until the pantry opened its doors; get there too late, and they’d be out of food. It was a demoralizing ritual, but at least it kept her fed. (I tried to reach Delgado this week to see how she was doing, but wasn’t able to track her down. A worker at the food pantry told me that, after being a regular attendee for years, she had not come to the LeHigh Avenue site since the end of December, 2011.)

House Republicans last week pushed through a bill that would cut forty billion dollars from the food-stamp program over ten years, limiting how long able-bodied adults could access the assistance and linking that aid to their ability to get a job or enroll in a job-training program. The measure isn’t likely to get traction in the Senate, but it has ignited a heated debate over the value of food stamps and the significance of the program’s growth.

Last year, the food-stamp program cost the federal government eighty-one billion dollars. More than forty-seven million Americans rely on food stamps; for America’s poor, it is the most successful and comprehensive part of the modern safety net, expanding automatically as need expands. Food stamps also help sustain the economies of low-income neighborhoods, since the money is often spent in those areas’ local stores.

Those who believe food-stamp spending is too high sometimes argue that, if the government were to spend less on the program, people would simply work harder so they could buy their own food, or else they would get food from food pantries and other charities. That’s not true in many cases. Delgado probably can’t work, and millions of others are trying to find work without success—or have jobs but are paid such low wages that they still qualify for public assistance.

And while many who receive food stamps also fall back on the country’s network of food pantries, the organizations behind the pantries have been massively overstretched in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. They function as a supplemental source of food when people’s food stamps run out—but they’re far from having enough resources to make up for a big cut to the food-stamp program. Already, some pantries routinely run out of food; others have had to cut back on what they can offer.

For the past several years, I have reported on poverty in America, interviewing hundreds of people in dozens of states. On the day that I met Delgado, I also met Bill Clark, the executive director of a huge nonprofit food-distribution organization named PhilAbundance, who oversaw four hundred and fifty pantries that helped support six hundred and fifty thousand families per week. Some of the communities PhilAbundance served were among the very poorest in the country.

Clark explained that, after the economic collapse of 2008, PhilAbundance received less surplus food from the U.S.D.A. and less salvaged foods. Dented cans, for example, which in the recent past had been donated by food producers to the pantries, started winding up in dollar stores, where they were sold at a discount. The amount of salvaged food in PhilAbundance pantries plunged eighty-five per cent from 2008 to 2011. At the same time, the number of people attending the centers each Saturday morning skyrocketed, leaving pantry administrators scrambling to plug the gap—canvassing the community for food donations and launching frantic fund-raising drives to generate money that they could spend to buy food.

North Philadelphia in 2011 was hardly alone in its desolation. Areas of Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and many other cities also suffered from poverty and hunger crises. Suburbs, too, saw explosions in hunger, especially in communities wrecked by the bursting of the housing bubble. Nor were rural areas, or smaller cities in the American heartland, immune.

In Des Moines, Iowa, I met a fifty-nine-year-old woman named Sandy Struznick, whose husband lost his job during the recession. They ate lunch regularly at a senior citizens’ center—their main meal of the day, Struznick told me. “I can’t buy for our grandkids, I can’t buy them any gifts,” she confided. “I can’t go to see them. We’re living in a crunch, feel like we don’t have any hope some days. For dinner, we eat cereal or something cheap. We have meat just if they have it at the seniors’ center. No fresh vegetables, no fresh fruit.”

Adapted from “The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives,” by Sasha Abramsky. Available from Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2013.

Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty