Best Food Writing 2014 (13 page)

The day after the Hunger Challenge ended, I went to Bi-Rite for groceries. I didn't know if I'd feel Veblenesque outrage at the Bay Area foodie lifestyle, but instead all I saw was community. Bi-Rite supports family farms and small local businesses, and it donates or sells food at low cost to charitable organizations like St. Anthony's. My week on the Challenge had made me feel stressed and alienated, but it also made me aware of all the ways, large and small, that we're
all taking care of each other instead of behaving as though we live in different worlds.

With that in mind, it was as hard to adjust to abundance as it had been to austerity. My first meal after it ended was a rich bowl of tonkotsu ramen at a hip Mission spot that cost more than half of my food budget for the week. I threw it up.

S
he believed you could be poor without appearing poor, so Raphael Richmond, 41, attached her eyelash extensions, straightened her auburn wig and sprayed her neck with perfume as she reached for another cigarette. “For my nerves,” she explained, even though doctors already had written eight prescriptions to help her combat the wears of stress. She blew smoke into the living room and waited until her eldest daughter, Tiara, 22, descended the stairs in new sneakers and a flat-brimmed baseball cap.

“I look okay?” Tiara asked.

“Fresh and proper,” Raphael said, and then they left to stand in line for boxes of donated food and day-old bread.

It was Thursday, which meant giveaways at a place called Bread for the City. Fridays were free medical care at the clinic in Southeast Washington. Saturdays were the food pantry at Ambassador Baptist
Church. The 1st of each month was a disability check, the 2nd was government cash assistance and the 8th was food stamps. “November FREEBIES,” read a flier attached to their fridge, a listing of daily handouts that looked the same as October's freebies, and September's freebies, and the schedule of dependency that had helped sustain Raphael's family for three generations and counting.

Except this month had introduced a historic shift. The nation's food stamp program had just undergone its biggest cut in 50 years, the beginning of an attempt by Congress to dramatically shrink the government's fastest-growing entitlement program, which had tripled in cost during the past decade to almost $80 billion each year. Starting in November, more than 47 million Americans had experienced decreases in their monthly benefit, averaging about 7 percent. For the Richmonds, it was more. Not far across the Anacostia River from their house, Congress was already busy debating the size and ramifications of the next cut, likely to be included in the farm bill early next year.

It was a debate not only about financial reform but also about cultural transformation. In a country where 7 million people had been receiving food assistance for a decade or longer, the challenge for some in government was how to wean the next generation from a cycle of long-term dependency.

Raphael's challenge was both more pressing and more basic: Her monthly allotment of $290 in food assistance had been reduced to $246. She already had spent the entire balance on two carts of groceries at Save a Lot. There were 22 days left until the 8th.

“Mama's version of the hunger games,” was how she sometimes explained the predicament to her six children, five of whom still lived with her, ranging in age from 11 to 22.

Feeding a family on zero income always had required ingenuity; she took the lights out of their refrigerator to save money on the electric bill and locked snack foods in a plastic tub in her bedroom to ration them throughout the month. In September, when she first heard rumors of an impending cut, she had taken Tiara to sign up for a food stamp card of her own, thereby increasing the family's take. Here was one surprising result of a government reduction: one new recipient added to the rolls. “A daughter looking out for her mother,” was how Raphael had explained it, bragging to friends, but Tiara was
less enthused. She chose not to carry the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card in her wallet, believing from personal experience that people who entered into the system tended to rely on it forever. “I'm not wanting to sign over my independence for good,” she said.

Now, as they walked together up Good Hope Road toward the food bank, they took turns using a cellphone and passed a cigarette back and forth. “I used to apply for jobs at all these places,” Tiara said, pointing out the convenience stores and check-cashing shops that lined the road. She also had tried to improve her job prospects by attending a health-care training program (“medical school,” she called it) and a seminar on Microsoft Word (“a computer diploma”), and yet her last paid work had come five months earlier for a temp agency that had yet to pay her the $170 she was owed.

“I'm grown, and I don't own nothing,” Tiara said, flicking away the cigarette. “It's pathetic.”

“Pathetic?” Raphael said, rolling the word out of her mouth, considering it. “How you figure that?”

“Us going around, getting things, relying on people who treat us like nothing. I mean, I'm having to ask you for money we don't have.”

“You ain't stealing. You ain't begging. We're just surviving, best we can.”

Tiara flipped up the hood of her sweatshirt and walked ahead.

“Sur-viv-ing. You hear me?” Raphael called after her. “We're getting it while we can.”

They walked into Bread for the City, where 40 people were crowded into the waiting room, and where the food line was a steady procession toward disappointment. “No more deer meat,” read one sign. “Pick a holiday bag OR a regular bag. You cannot receive both,” read the next. “Only one visit per month,” read another. “Food is intended to last for three days,” read the last notice, right by the counter, where Raphael handed over her number to a volunteer and waited for her bag of food.

“Thank you,” she said when the bag came back three minutes later, filled with turkey, applesauce, yams and five cans of greens. Raphael turned away from the counter, doing the math in her head.

“So that's three days,” she said to Tiara on their way out the door. “What are we supposed to do about the rest?”

“Lady Can Cook”

For all of her life, Raphael had been counting down to the 8th. It was her most reliable event, a monthly promise that she would have enough to eat when her parents spent their cash on heroin, or when asbestos and carbon monoxide forced her family to move houses three times in a year, or when a series of five “gone again” men fathered her six children and provided a total of $20 in monthly child support. Her life had been a swinging pendulum of uncertainty-of bad health, eviction and the sudden deaths of loved ones. But the 8th had always come, and the federal money had always been deposited on time into her account. “The golden date,” she called it.

Only once, when she was in her early 30s, had she lived without government assistance. She had moved her children into a two-bedroom apartment near the Southwest waterfront and signed a lease for $925, working as a home health aide during the day and as a prep cook at RFK Stadium at night. “Climbing the ladder,” she said, but then came the reality of what that meant. The increase in her income disqualified her from food stamps, and buying food with cash left nothing to pay the gas bill, and cutting off the heat made the winter seem endless, and the combination of the cold house and the 60-hour workweeks aggravated her arthritis, damaged her heart and compelled her to quit work and apply for disability.

After nine months, she packed three duffel bags and took a bus to the homeless shelter. Her family spent two months in the shelter and two years in transitional housing and then received a voucher for a four-bedroom house in Anacostia with a leaky ceiling and a front-porch view of a highway underpass. The subsidized rent was $139 a month. She covered the shag carpeting with plastic mats and decorated the living-room walls with Japanese characters for peace, tranquility and good health.

“I feel like I'm having a heart attack,” she said now, sitting in that living room, 17 days before the 8th arrived again.

“A real one or a stress one?” Tiara asked, her eyes still glued to a rap video on the cellphone. In the past two years, she had taken her mother to the emergency room for stress, panic attacks, leg numbness and anxiety.

“Maybe I'm just depressed,” Raphael said. “If I could just have a good day. One day with no stresses.”

“Why don't you cook?” Tiara suggested.

It was the activity that made Raphael happiest. Her grandmother had worked as a cook for President Jimmy Carter in the White House, and her mother had used most of her monthly food stamps to make Sunday dinners for her 14 children. One of Raphael's most vivid memories was of her only trip to a sushi restaurant, in downtown Washington, where the colors of the fish seemed “more like art than food.” Now she opened her freezer and grabbed a 32-pack of quarter-pound hamburgers, bought at Save a Lot for $7.99.

Raphael obsessed over the future of the food stamp program in part because she herself had become a neighborhood safety net, regularly feeding a group of castoffs who called her “mom.” There were her own children at home: ages 11, 13, 15, 17 and 22, plus a 25-year-old living in Maryland. Then there were the twin 2-year-olds whose mother—Raphael's sister—disappeared for such long stretches Raphael had started potty training; and one of her children's friends who was always avoiding her foster parents; and the cousin who stayed a week in the living room in exchange for the last $27 on her EBT card. “No judgment, just love,” was Raphael's motto. She believed people who had the least were also the most likely to give. “We know what it's like to suffer,” she said. “That's the problem with this craziness going on right now. How many of those people cutting stamps are using stamps to eat? They're trying to make their budget, and I'm trying to make mine, but I'm the one who has to keep stretching noodles and apologizing to my family.”

She watched the burgers sizzle on the electric stove. The smell of meat filled the house. She put on an apron as Tiara turned up some music.

“Hey, Ma, let me take a video of you cooking,” Tiara said, taking out the cellphone, hitting record.

“We're eating good,” Raphael said, dicing an onion and tossing it in with the burgers.

“Mm-hmmm. Lady can cook,” Tiara said.

“You know it, baby,” Raphael said, smiling at the camera. “We're in the fat part of the month.”

Options

A week later, all 32 burgers gone, Tiara grabbed a package of instant
noodles to make as her lunch for the third consecutive day. “I'm so bored of this,” she said, mixing in vinegar, butter and black pepper. She sat down to eat and opened a newspaper to the job listings, compelled more by habit than ambition.

The ads made it sound so easy to get a job in the budding economic recovery of 2013—“Hiring now!” one read; “Start tomorrow!” promised another—but recent experience made Tiara believe she had better odds “playing lotto,” she said. The unemployment rate in Ward 8 was 24 percent, triple the national average, and there were an estimated 13 job seekers for every open position. She had been offered a security job, but first the company wanted $500 to train her. Marriott had openings at a new hotel, but the application required her to submit a background check online. So she had gone to the police station and paid $9 for a form showing that she had no criminal record. And then enrolled with a nonprofit group that gave out free computers and scanners, since the ones at the nearby library always seemed to be broken. And then learned that she could only pick up the computer in Rockville, four bus transfers and a Metro ride away.

The latest advice from a caseworker assigned to help with her job search was to “make a list of options” and “stay prayerful,” but lately Tiara sounded more like resigned in the songs she wrote under the rap moniker Madame T. “This is the life I was dealt with,” she wrote in one.

“I'm sick of these job counselors,” she said, pushing aside the classifieds. “What do they know? They have a job. They go home. They go on vacation.”