She had attended a nutrition class earlier in the week, and now she held a sheet listing federally recommended foods in one hand while sorting through her fridge to take inventory with the other. “Fresh vegetables,” the sheet suggested, and Blanca found two rotting tomatoes, a package of frozen broccoli and two containers of instant vegetable soup. “Fruit,” the sheet read, and she saw grape-flavored popsicles and three apples in the crisper. “Dairy”: They had Cool Whip and Nesquik. “Whole grains”: three frozen pizzas and a package of corn dogs. “Healthy Snacks”: a 24-pack of hot Cheetos.

She had already exhausted her food-stamp account for the month, and she had nothing else to spend until the next deposit arrived in a few days. This time she would receive about $30 less, like everyone on food stamps, because of stimulus funding that expired in November. She looked again at the list of recommended foods: fat-free cottage cheese, quinoa, bok choy, chickpeas and dozens of other items. Some she had never heard of; most she had never encountered in the dollar stores of South Texas.

She had been born in the United States in the last years when being poor also usually meant being thin. Her parents had lied about her age when she was 11 so she could get a job picking with them in the fields. They ate what they picked, raised their own chickens and boiled rice by the pound. But the sprawl of McAllen edged into the farmland, and Blanca dropped out of school in 10th grade and took a job at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. She had her first baby at 19 and her second a few years later, with a man who soon disappeared to Mexico. She applied for public housing in a community that offered little space to grow her own food, near a commercial road lined with 17 fast-food restaurants. Now, each morning on the way to school, her children rode past signs that advertised “Dollar Menu,” “Ultimate Dollar Menu,” “Dollar Tacos,” and “Hot Cheetos, two for a dollar.” These were the treats they loved and the treats they could afford.