When getting food isn’t easy

Jennifer Ditlevson Haglund

One of my older brothers still gets uncomfortable when someone brings up the baked bean sandwiches we ate when we were young. I thought they tasted good. The hot, sweet, and spicy beans and sauce smothered the doughy white Wonder bread. I ate that until I was full.

I was too young to know that not everyone ate like that, although I admit I knew at the time that the butter-and-sugar sandwiches were strange. But they were close enough to dessert that I never questioned it. I just hoped my mom had left the butter on the counter so it would get soft enough to spread to every inch of the bread instead of clumping and tearing it apart.

Now I understand why my brother hates to remember those days. Some people like to look back on times of hardship as something that builds character and makes more virtuous people. That’s too simple. Being in a constant state of insecurity makes for an anxious household. With tension comes fear, both for the adults who have to provide, and for the children who too often hear about situations far from their control. It’s stressful.

At 45, my father finally could afford to work one job — instead of four — to feed his family. He stopped sweeping factories at night, distributing papers, and painting houses for people who paid him in frozen wild game still containing buckshot. Watching my mother weep over a sink full of dead birds is still one of the clearest early memories.

By the time I reached grade school, I knew we couldn’t be poor because we lived in one of the nicest neighborhoods in town, and I went to a private Catholic school. Mean kids would call me “rich” because of that. We looked like a family who finally made it.

But the “American Dream” is much more volatile than most want to think it is.

Despite all of my parents’ hard work, all of my siblings have experienced hunger at one time or another once we were on our own. Sometimes, it lasted for months. This happened at different times in our lives. We were working multiple jobs or without them, splitting rent with spouses or friends, attending school, or taking care of young children.

All of us have our stories about how we did it, whether it was smoking three cigarettes a day and eating instant grits at night to make it till morning or attending every church and school function with free food just to fill up before going home to an empty refrigerator.

These aren’t our glory stories. Mostly, they’ve been our shame because we know people talk about “government handouts” being robbed from their paychecks to give free food to undeserving people. We’ve heard them draw distinctions, and often racist and classist ones, about how if only lazy people would work harder, they could get it together.

As I wrote, I could already hear some stranger–reader in my head grumbling about a hungry, smoking person not buying food. Trust me, it’s easier psychologically and practically to bum a cigarette that might erase your hunger than to ask someone for a loaf of bread.

The same brother who hates to talk about our bean sandwiches has wondered aloud if things would be different if there had never been a stigma for getting help. Maybe we would’ve seen our dad more, and maybe our mom wouldn’t have had to do so much by herself.

There are so many what-ifs when musing about the past, but I have learned that oftentimes, the least generous and least understanding of the needy are those who have been there. There are good people who have come through, but there’s a stupid pride that comes with necessary thrift. If you tell yourself you’re more responsible than those who have never had to think twice about where they shop, you gain the moral high ground. One of the many flaws in this line of thinking is that you begin to believe that you are the one completely in charge of your fortune, and thus, the only one to whom you owe gratitude or mercy.

I would be hurt if I didn’t understand that attitude is hard to change, even when circumstances do. No matter how much some people have, there’s still that gnawing insecurity that there’s never going to be enough.

Want will inevitably change people, but it’s not always for the best.