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As someone who relies on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to feed myself, and whose parents depend on them too, the damage of President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on food assistance hits disgustingly close to home.

While the government has since reopened and postponed SNAP benefits are finally set to resume, the fact that we lost them will forever linger. Millions weren’t forced to just brace the impact of losing SNAP, but to worry about the long-term effect of food insecurity, financial strain and access barriers integrated in the community. Americans should never be treated as a disposable entity that can be put on the back burner again.

Every month, my family and I find ourselves thinking about how to get the next meal on the table, calculating what we can stretch and what we’ll have to go without. These cuts weren’t abstract policy changes: They’re the reason millions struggled every day, forced to make impossible choices between food, rent and dignity.
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But it’s hard to fathom the cruelty, considering Trump hosted a “Great Gatsby” themed Halloween party just hours before millions of Americans lost their SNAP benefits.

His celebration of excess while those struggling to eat are told to tighten their belts is a deliberate reminder of how power isolates itself from consequence. For a leader to parade under chandeliers while people wonder how they’ll afford groceries is more than hypocrisy – it’s an insult to the very idea of public service.

On a national scale, SNAP supports more than 42 million Americans each month. They shouldn’t be seen as a number or a statistic, but proof of the millions of families doing their best to get by.

Although I find myself at a loss of what to do today to get food, let alone the rest of this month, my struggle is nothing compared to single mothers, immigrants and low-income families who depend on these benefits to feed their kids.

I’ve had food stamps my entire life, but it should be emphasized that they’re aid, not an answer to this problem’s growing prevalence in America. SNAP is meant as a supplement, but with rising food prices, that supplement feels less effective every month.

In Syracuse, half of all children live in poverty, and nearly one-third of households don’t have access to a car to reach grocery stores. More than half of the city’s neighborhoods are classified as food deserts, meaning access to fresh, healthy food is severely limited.

But to call Syracuse a “food desert” doesn’t even begin to describe the problem. The city faces food apartheid, a man-made system of racial and economic inequality that decides who has access to affordable, nutritious food and who doesn’t.

In areas where fresh produce is scarce, residents rely heavily on processed foods, which leads to poorer health outcomes and what experts call a lack of “nutrition security,” or consistent access to meals that actually promote health. These systematic failures ensure that those already struggling are also the ones most punished by rising costs and shrinking benefits.

I live with this inequality every day. Millions similar to me are helping their own families financially, while juggling their own expenses, because that’s what survival looks like. Different social classes have different ways of measuring help – some call it inheritance while I call it making it through the month.

Growing up in poverty, my family relied on every form of assistance we could – SNAP, Women, Infants and Children and Medicaid are a few – and each one remains a fragile thread holding our lives together.

America isn’t suffering from a lack of food, it’s suffering from a lack of justice. Until we recognize that hunger is a product of policy, not chance, we’ll keep watching families choose between groceries and rent while pretending it’s just the way things go.

There comes a point where hunger isn’t considered a statistic, but a measure of conscience. The “leader” of this country continues to feed a fire it was meant to extinguish.

As someone who has been deeply affected and is now forced to worry about how to get by without essential food assistance, I’ve found myself turning to local food pantries just to make ends meet.

While these resources are a lifeline for people like me, we should look at the bigger picture and focus on the families who don’t have that option. The leader of this country is treating the abuse of millions as though it were merely a technicality, an acceptable side effect, disregarding the harm to real people.

Saimun Uddin is a graduate student majoring in engineering management. She can be reached at sauddin@syr.edu.

Published on November 16, 2025 at 7:43 pm