BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR and PHILIP KOTLER
In a nation that wastes over a third of its food, we are now told that we cannot afford to feed the poor. The United States of America — the richest country in human history — is deliberately turning its back on its most vulnerable citizens.
Let that sink in.
Millions of families, seniors, and children are about to lose access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — the modest but vital benefit that puts groceries on the table for over 41 million Americans. The cruelty is not accidental. It is ideological. It is systemic. And it is being justified under the false banners of “fiscal responsibility,” “self-reliance,” and “reform.”
This is a betrayal of the social contract. Not only can we not feed the world, we can’t even feed our own citizens.
Hunger as Policy
Hunger is not a natural disaster. It’s a policy choice.
When political leaders — many of them wealthy beyond imagination — decide that tax cuts for corporations matter more than food for children, that is not economics; it is moral decay disguised as governance.
The Trump administration’s decision to curtail SNAP benefits, under the pretext of promoting “work” or controlling costs, echoes the same tired myth: that poverty is a moral failing, and hunger a deserved punishment.
But let’s be clear: the majority of SNAP households already include someone who works. They are home health aides, retail clerks, warehouse workers, gig drivers — the invisible labor holding this economy together. They don’t lack work ethic; they lack living wages.
The Myth of Dependency
The narrative of “dependency” is the oldest trick in the American playbook — a political dog whistle used to divide and dehumanize. It was used to dismantle welfare in the 1990s, and it’s being repackaged today to justify taking food from children’s mouths.
But SNAP is not welfare; it is a lifeline. It is one of the most efficient and fraud-resistant programs the federal government runs. Every $1 of SNAP spending generates up to $1.80 in local economic activity. Farmers, grocers, and small-town retailers all depend on it. When you cut SNAP, you don’t just starve the poor — you starve Main Street.
So let’s stop pretending this is about budgets. It’s about power — who deserves dignity, and who gets written off as expendable.
Ironically, this hurts MAGA the most.
Who Suffers?
The data tells the story plainly.
- 41% of SNAP recipients are children.
- 37% are White. 26% are Black. 16% are Latino.
- 29% of households have earned income.
- 81% live at or below the poverty line.
SNAP cuts will deepen child hunger, drive seniors into medical debt, and devastate rural communities already on the edge. The poorest will go without food, and local economies will lose billions in spending.
In moral terms, this is violence — slow, bureaucratic violence enacted by signatures and spreadsheets.
What Can We Do?
We must SNAP out of it, America.
The time for polite statements and online petitions is over. Hunger requires resistance. It requires moral imagination. It requires collective action that disrupts the machinery of neglect.
Here’s how we begin:
- Tell the stories — put faces to the statistics. Let the public hear from working parents, veterans, seniors, and students whose lives depend on SNAP. Storytelling is a weapon against indifference.
- Mobilize locally — organize Empty Plate demonstrations, sit-ins at USDA offices, and community meal shares that feed people while exposing government neglect. Pair protest with compassion.
- Pressure power — call, visit, and confront elected officials in their districts. Flood their offices with testimonies. Demand public statements of accountability.
- Build alliances — connect food justice movements with farmers, labor unions, and faith leaders. Hunger is not a partisan issue; it is a human one.
- Reframe the narrative — food is not a handout. It is a human right. SNAP is not “aid” — it is a social investment in stability, health, and dignity.
- Vote and remember — hold to account every official who chose cruelty over compassion. Hunger must become a political liability.
- Picket your local grocery store — let the food giants understand that it is in their best interest to support SNAP.
A Betrayal of Christian Values
The Republicans are interested in pushing their Christian agenda except when it actually helps people.
For Jesus said, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink… Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:35–40)
To cut food from the poor is not fiscal discipline — it is spiritual disobedience. Every loaf withheld, every benefit slashed, is a denial of that commandment.
Christian faith is not measured by church attendance or campaign slogans about morality; it is measured by whether we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and welcome the stranger.
When leaders who claim Christian values vote to take food from children, they do not defend the faith — they betray it. They have turned the Gospel of compassion into an economics of exclusion. They have forgotten that mercy, not money, is the measure of righteousness.
The teaching is unambiguous:
If Christ is in the hungry, then starving them is crucifying him again.
If Christ is in the poor, then neglecting them is rejecting him once more.
To be Christian is to care — relentlessly, inconveniently, politically, economically, and materially — for those who cannot feed themselves.
To do otherwise is to worship a god of greed and cruelty.
A Nation is Measured by its Heart
The measure of a civilization is not its GDP or its military budget; it is how it treats the poor, the sick, and the hungry.
SNAP is not just a policy — it is a reflection of who we are, or who we have become. If we allow hunger to become normalized, we will have lost the moral foundation of democracy itself.
This is the time to reclaim our Common Good. To stand together and say: We will not starve our neighbors. We will not criminalize poverty. We will not abandon compassion.
America, it’s time to SNAP out of it.
Because the cruelty is not the point — it’s the problem.
The night before SNAP expired, Trump hosted a Gilded-Age Great Gatsby themed party at Mar del Lago, even as two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to use emergency funding to provide SNAP benefits for the 42 million people who rely on the program to feed their families.
Remember: The Trump administration couldn’t find the money to feed American citizens, yet it’s working feverishly to send $40 billion over to Argentina.
Did we learn nothing from the French Revolution?