nothin SNAP “Shots” Bring Hunger Home | New Haven Independent

SNAP Shots” Bring Hunger Home

Allan Appel Photo

After Congress cut Miracle Brown’s food stamp (SNAP) benefits by $11, she wanted to make people understand her daily struggles to afford to eat. So she pulled out a camera.

Brown spent hours every month collecting bottles and cans to bridge the crucial gap caused by the SNAP cut. Sometimes her bottles and cans don’t make up that difference, sometimes not even by half. She took photos of her daily routine, including her increasingly regular destination, the bottle and can redemption center off of Ella Grasso Boulevard.

Brown’s photos and captions and those of other New Haveners comprise a moving documentary record of the struggle for basic food and health now being experienced by about one-third of New Haven residents, who are food insecure.”

Miracle Brown Photo

Redemption center seen through window of her dad’s van.

The aim of the Witnesses to Hunger exhibit is to place cameras in the hands of the women, and a few men, who are struggling in order to bring home the experience in a visual and visceral manner; the target is the general public but most especially policy makers to help them move toward solutions, said Mariana Chilton.

An opening reception for the exhibit drew 50 officials and food activists to City Hall along with the witness”/photographers.

Chilton is the Drexel University professor and food researcher whose Center for Hunger-Free Communities is the overall organize creator of the exhibition.

New Haven is the sixth city to have such an exhibit.

Chilton with “witnesses” Ndiaye and Brown.

‘Food insecurity’” is a nice phrase, but it means you’re hungry and [often] in pain,” said U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a champion of restoration of food stamp benefits, who was among the speakers at the Thursday opening.

Hunger must not be allowed a place at the table of plenty that is Connecticut,” she said. She called the cutting of SNAP benefits a disgrace and indictment of Congress as an institution.”

Jo-Ann Ndiaye said she heard about the opportunity to document her struggle to feed a family of three on $497 a month in SNAP benefits through a flyer at her local food pantry, Christian Community Action, in the Hill.

Describing herself as tired of talk and wanting solutions, Ndiaye documented how she decided to grow her own fresh vegetables and fruits — items often hard to come by at pantries — in her backyard on Winthrop Street. She had little money for the garden, only a raised box, which friends bought new top soil to fill.

Her photographs show the packets from the seed she used, some of the proud summer squash she has raised, along with tomatoes, peppers, and collard greens, and also the hands of her daughter mixing Rice-A-Roni in a frying pan.

Ndiaye said her daughter, who has a weight problem, doesn’t much like the vegetables. Ndiaye is step-by-step encouraging a change by dropping the veggies into the Rice-A-Roni.

The garden is a short-term solution, for her and others, but it is action.“If ten people in my community did this,” the action would be so much the larger, she said. For a long time we were talking, this is action, the gardens, summer jobs for kids, there are so many empty lots” to utilize in the city.

Another of the New Haven photographers, Kimberly Hart, showed pictures of the food pantry she goes to. The caption: I waited for two and a half hours to get one bag of food.”

Another arresting image shows her young son eating dinner, a peanut butter sandwich. The caption of that photo: Really, mom, no meat?”

Ndiaye said she is giving back” by bringing the excess from her garden to the food pantry. This change from being a kind of victim of a problem that can seem without end, to becoming an advocate and an expert explainer of the brass tacks of hunger, is one of the important, if subtle, shifts that take place when a participant take a camera in hand, said Chilton.

I was not aware of the deep lack of self-esteem [in women struggling with food survival]. The camera gives the opportunity to speak; they see that they’re part of a national dialogue. That photo is … a step toward mastery,’ Chilton added.

The New Haven Food Policy Council was the primary organizer following DeLauro’s suggestion after she saw a similar exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the Food Stamp Act, in Washington D.C.

One of Ndiyae’s photos shows receipts from the stores with best bargains.

Mayor Toni Harp, who was also among the speakers at the opening, said New Haven County’s food insecurity numbers are the highest of any county in the state, and that the exhibit coincides with a municipal push to build momentum to solutions. Some 124,230 people in New Haven County — or 14.3 percent of the population — qualify as food insecure,” according to Harp. (Click here to read about another hunger-related event in which she participated last week, to launch a Hunger Action Month.”)

Harp and other food activists met privately with DeLauro after the meeting to discuss specifics. Harp said that she is keen on increasing the number of urban gardens and finding the money — half is already in hand from a private donor — to underwrite a full-timer on the city staff to focus on food issues and to coordinate initiatives.

Witnesses to Hunger, the New Haven edition, runs through Sept. 19 in the atrium of City Hall.

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