Follow an activist on her grocery run in a food desert.
Forty-seven dollars. That’s all the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has given Cheryl Rabe to spend on a month’s worth of groceries.
At Stop & Shop, Rabe must decide: strawberries are too expensive on their own, so she opts for the value container of mixed fruit; organic greens aren’t affordable and bagged salad will go bad too quickly, so she chooses a head of lettuce; alfredo sauce—which Rabe prefers—is too expensive, so she settles for tomato sauce; soda isn’t ideal, but it’s only one dollar, so it goes in the cart.
“I’ve been learning to eat like that—to not be picky,” Rabe says, looking downward at the cart. Today she wears an Obama t-shirt that reads “Have you missed me yet?”
Rabe is a member of the New Haven chapter of Witnesses to Hunger, a group that aims to “identify, address, and create positive solutions to food insecurity,” as their mission statement says.
What distinguishes Witnesses to Hunger from similar food-focused advocacy groups in New Haven is their members—many of them, like Rabe, have personally lived with food insecurity.
As we pass through Stop & Shops’ aisles, Rabe maps out New Haven’s food insecurity for me. The city has a tremendous lack of grocery options. This means that, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, parts of New Haven are classified as a food desert: an urban area where it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food.
As a result, 22 percent of New Haven residents are food insecure, double the national average as the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project (YHHAP) states.
Stop & Shop, located on Whalley Avenue, is the only full-service supermarket within walking distance from downtown New Haven, so price gouging is common.
“Milk you can get for $2.50 at Walmart, they’ll charge you $4.50 at Stop & Shop,” Rabe says.
Food insecurity, and price gouging, have only grown since the pandemic. Before the pandemic, Rabe said she received 260 dollars from SNAP. After the pandemic, that number dropped to sixty-seven dollars, and then to forty-seven dollars because of her part-time job.
Qualifying for SNAP depends on how much money an individual and their household makes monthly. In Connecticut, someone living in a household of one making no more than 2,510 dollars could receive up to 292 dollars in SNAP benefits. The sum is followed by an asterisk; track it to the bottom of the chart and it’s emphasized that this 292 dollars is “the most SNAP benefits someone could get.”
In other words, people like Rabe will probably get less.
“So now I’m finding myself at food pantries, food banks, soup kitchens,” Rabe says, “It’s been very hard.”
SNAP benefits are restrictive. Shoppers cannot use an Electronic Benefit Transfer card, the card that allows SNAP users to access their benefits, to purchase hot or prepared food, like rotisserie chicken.
However, SNAP gives more autonomy to its users than its alternatives: food pantries, food banks, and soup kitchens. Rabe explains that food pantries and the like tend to give primarily canned goods and other “pieces of meals.” They are also difficult if you have dietary restrictions and/or preferences, such as a gluten-free or Kosher diet.
Witnesses to Hunger sees the issue of food insecurity magnified among families with school-aged children. Their current mission is to raise money for children at risk of going hungry when meals are not available through New Haven Public Schools, which is usually during school breaks.
School breaks typically occur at the end of the month when money is short for many families and SNAP benefits have been exhausted. To combat this, Witnesses to Hunger has organized an initiative to provide groceries to families in need. In April, before spring break, families could pick up groceries at four different public schools for easy accessibility. Any leftover bags were given to local churches by United Way and required pre-registration to be picked up by families.
Some families, however, were either unable to register or unaware that the bags required registration. Anticipating this, volunteers were told to enforce the registration rule and only give out bags to those who had registered beforehand.
One of these volunteers was Mark Griffin, a Witnesses to Hunger member. He decided to give the groceries to families, even if they hadn’t pre-registered. “Our hearts don’t work that way,” Griffin said.
Griffin has been with Witnesses to Hunger since 2018, four years after the New Haven chapter started. When the organization began, Griffin would go door-to-door with Billy Bromage, a member of Witnesses to Hunger and the co-chair of the Food Access Working Group of the New Haven Food Policy Council, to let families know about the mobile vans Witnesses to Hunger was using to provide kids with meals over the summer.
With donations from a New Haven Public School Food Service donor, Witnesses to Hunger gave out one thousand two hundred bags of food during the April 2024 vacation. Their focus now is summer break, or the “August gap,” the longest of all school breaks.
“One thousand two hundred bags may sound like a lot,” said Susan Harris, another Witnesses to Hunger volunteer. “However, there are over nineteen thousand students in NHPS and all are eligible for free or reduced meals at school.”
In January 2024, Bromage began a petition with Witnesses to Hunger asking Yale to “commit one hundred thousand dollars per year to support existing free grocery programs at New Haven Public School locations that reach families when New Haven public schools are not in session.”
Witnesses to Hunger has received half of their one hundred thousand dollar request. Twelve thousand dollars comes from the New Haven Office of Affairs; the rest is from private donors.
Sitting together at Panera Bread, a couple of months after our grocery shopping trip, Rabe and Griffin—decked out in white and blue, since the Yankees played this weekend—enthusiastically update me on Witnesses to Hunger’s advocacy efforts. They tell me that Witnesses to Hunger is going strong and that they aren’t stopping at fifty thousand dollars. Furthermore, they want the one hundred thousand dollars to be an annual donation.
Griffin says the fight is worth it, and that it “won’t go away overnight.”
On the third Saturday of each month, Witnesses to Hunger will meet in Wilson Library to discuss new ways to get the word out, educate the community, acquire petition signatures, and plan future rallies.
– Chloe Edwards is a Junior in Branford College.
