Food stamp rage bait

0:03There's been this argument that the government shutdown isn't getting as much attention as everyone thought it would because it's not affecting that many people. That's about to change. More than 40 million Americans rely on SNAP, or food stamps, to eat. And on Saturday, due to the shutdown, those benefits are going to run out. Last night on Air Force One, President Trump was asked what's going to happen, and he said, we're going to get it done. We're going to get it done. Coming up on Today Explains, the conversation around food stamps and who deserves them has always been toxic in the U.S., But this new kind of viral rage bait social media video is juicing it this time around.

0:40Get up off your behind and do what they're asking you to do. Stop waiting for a handout. Stop moving your mouth. Start moving them hands. No more handing you a debit card filled with other people's cash for you to go load up on Oreos. Because guess what? If you don't work, you're not going to eat.

1:11This is Today Explained. My name is Chrissy Clark, and I am a journalist. I have covered the social safety net and the policies and the history that have led us to the kind of social safety net that we have for many, many years. A couple months ago, I noticed on Twitter that these videos, Chrissy, kept showing up on my algorithm. I refuse to work. The whole reason I had kids was the amount of government benefits that you get for one child. Now they're telling me I have to go work. Now I have to go do all this. Well, I literally got five kids. Yeah, I take my food stamps. I'm going to take more than a little bit.

1:53So I'm at risk of losing my food stamp benefits because I'm not putting in effort. Are you serious? It would be usually a woman, and she would be saying something very proudly, like... So my sister made a video about how my whole entire family gets EBT. And everyone is calling us bums because we don't work and we live off the government. And we are proud of that. Have you seen these videos in your algorithm? It's funny. We must have different algorithms because... Because I haven't seen them personally as much, but I certainly have. I've looked at them sort of as a phenomenon of like, what is going on with these?

2:35And I've had a lot of questions and a lot of thoughts. Tell me where your thoughts go when you see videos like this. Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing is, of course, just, you know, like we have no idea who these people are or if they actually do receive food stamps or not. I was looking at one of these videos and it's specifically a parody account that says that it's somebody who likes to do satire and skits. So my almost 18 year old has been saving for a car and he has a lot of money saved. But then I realized that I needed my nails done and I needed to go clothes shopping and I needed gas. So I took half of his money.

3:13So I think one thing is, like, do these people, are they actually authentically food stamp recipients themselves, SNAP recipients themselves? And then the reactions that you see in the comments, people calling these people entitled parasites, looters, people living off food stamps, intergenerational dependency. This message is for all the people that are complaining that they're not getting their food stamps for November. What did you do with October's food stamp money? But I got a question. What makes you think that you're entitled to take anything that you ain't work with? When y 'all were receiving food stamps, you were selling the food stamps.

3:52So you weren't worried about feeding your children the meat. The first thing that comes to mind is like, this is just not an accurate representation of most people who are receiving food assistance. Like it is playing in a tried and true and very old set of tropes and stereotypes that we have. But if you actually look at the numbers, that is not an accurate depiction of most food stamp recipients. For one thing, the vast majority of people who receive food stamps, I don't think anybody would expect them to work. Two thirds of participants are children or adults over age 60 or people with disabilities.

4:29Then when you sort of take those folks out and you look at most SNAP participants who theoretically can work, a majority of those people are working in any given month. And a vast majority of them have worked either in the last 12 months or will be working in the next 12 months. The average benefit for the average food SNAP recipient is about$6 a day. So this whole idea that the typical SNAP recipient is just sucking off the government teat and doesn't want to work and just is lazy, that is not reflected in the data. What about the response, entitled parasites, looters, intergenerational dependency?

5:14Does that surprise you? Sadly, it does not because it is a story as old as our country and even older, that there is this deep anxiety that folks in the U.S. have kind of collectively and that has been kind of amplified in many ways by politicians. Everybody got on the wagon, all these young, able-bodied young men who don't have dependents riding the wagon. So you know what? We put work requirements in. Sort of this deep anxiety about when we help people collectively, are we helping the right people? There's this fundamental divide I think a lot of Americans have and that runs through American history of who are the deserving poor, the people that deserve our help, and who are the not deserving poor.

6:04How do our assumptions and even our suspicions get turned into policy? Well, I mean, we all have probably heard of Reagan's tropes around, quote unquote, welfare queens. In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans benefits for four non-existent deceased veterans husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running$150 ,000 a year. And that was also tied into efforts that he made to put deep cuts into food stamp eligibility and food stamp payments in the 1980s.

6:51And then you jump to 1996, when Congress passed sort of the most sweeping welfare reforms in history and was very much tied to work requirements. From now on, our nation's answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare. It will be the dignity, the power, and the ethic of work. Today we are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be, a second chance, not a way of life. You know, there's this one sort of telling moment right before then. The New Republic, the magazine, had a cover photo in August of 1996 with the big splashy headline, Day of Reckoning, Sign the Bill Now.

7:38This is encouraging Clinton to sign the welfare reform acts that were going to really gut welfare as we knew it. And on the cover of the magazine is a picture of a Black woman with a cigarette in her hand holding a little baby who's drinking from a bottle. And then below it, sign the welfare bill now. I remember the 1990s. I was a kid, but I know that the welfare queen trope was kind of in the water. It does make me think about what's going on in the present day, where a single tweet that claims to be a video of a woman saying, I have nine kids and I'm never going to get a job because I get food stamps, can suddenly reach millions of people.

8:27When you see these videos on social media, is there something different now because of just how viral they can go? It's interesting. I mean, I'm sure there is. But the feeling that I get is not, oh, we're in this new world. It is here we go again. This is the same playbook, the same fears. Maybe they're amplified. They get to people faster. But yeah, I was a kid in the 90s also, and it was in the water. It was just kind of what there were these certain stereotypes and certain suspicions that we didn't need social media for. They were already there. And I think that that message and those suspicions are going to travel one way or another.

9:20There is one big difference in 2025 from the past, and we've talked about it on the show. Safety net programs are typically seen as Democratic terrain. Democrats vote for them. Democrats need them. But then the situation changed after the 2024 election because a lot of poor and working class people voted for Donald Trump. So recently you saw Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times saying we need to fund SNAP. Well, yeah, I don't care who they voted for. I mean, my view is, is that no child in this country ought to go to bed hungry because a bunch of politicians in Washington can't decide what they want to do.

10:00And they're intent on blaming each other. Do you see Republicans changing their tune on welfare because increasingly the people who need benefits are voting Republican? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I mean, I guess I would push back a little bit on it because, for example, like if you look at Josh Hawley, he has come out with this bill and he has spoken about, you know, reading his op ed in The New York Times. I very much was sort of reading it through the lens of like, he's trying to focus on the quote-unquote deserving poor here. I also think that if you actually look at his voting record, this summer he voted for the sweeping changes to food stamp eligibility and other sorts of public assistance eligibility that were in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill.

10:53And those, in some ways, are going to have much more long-term and far-reaching effects in terms of limiting who has access to food stamps and to other kinds of government assistance. Saturday is when the benefits run out. You've been reporting on this, Chrissy, for a very long time. When people lose their benefits and when they lose them in such great numbers, where do they turn for help? Where do they go to find food? Yeah, I mean, there is a network of food banks and food pantries, you know, sort of the nonprofit sector is obviously trying to fill in the breach. But I think anybody you talk to in that world says there is no way that we could replace the kind of support that food stamps offers and that we collectively as a nation through our government offer.

11:54A few years ago, I was in Dayton, Ohio, and I was at a Walmart right at midnight because I knew that was when the clock strikes 12.01, you have your monthly benefits. And the number of people who, right when the clock struck 12.01, were going into Walmart late at night to start buying food showed you the immediate need. This isn't something you can wait until the next day, even. I ran into this woman who was with her eight-year-old son at like midnight, 1230 a.m., and her food stamps had already run out from the last month. As much as she tried to budget things, she also had a job. She worked for, I think, a Dollar General.

12:50She just couldn't make ends meet without this help. So you think about that come November 1st, what that's going to mean to not get that When you are planning, you need to go to the grocery store, like stat, to get your food, and then you don't have the money to buy it.

13:11Chrissy Clark is a journalist who covers the social safety net. Coming up, how to eat when you're really broke.

13:33Okay, let's see here. Today. Today. Explained. Explained. I'm Noelle King with Kiki Ruff. Kiki's a content creator who fits into this category of influencers who teach people to eat on the cheap. Kiki makes recession meals using things that can be found at dollar stores and food banks. Kiki, why did you start this channel? It's a funny story. So I was let go from my job at the beginning of the year, and I remember being great at software demonstrations. So I said, hey, you know what? I will just buy a camera, go freelance, and make software demonstrations for different companies within the product ecosystem I'm in.

14:19And I posted one cooking video for fun. You couldn't get eggs? Is this your first time being poor? we're still going to have breakfast. And it was a common latchkey meal for kids who had access to bread, butter, and cinnamon sugar. I don't want to see the butter. I don't want to see the toast. I want this completely covered in cinnamon sugar, right? And people loved it. And I started realizing that as food access was slimming, the need for these recipes just got so much greater. So I figured, you know what, I'll do a couple more, see what happens. This dinner can be made with hot dog sausage or bratwurst.

14:54I'm going with bratwurst because I got them for$2 after the 4th of July. It's come to my attention that not everyone's mom taught them how to throw together a chili. What am I supposed to do with more canned potatoes? I am so glad you asked. No rules for this dish. No shame in my kitchen. I woke up and I had 150 ,000 followers and I was like, whoa, where'd you guys come from? But to me, that just meant that since there was such a demand that this became my responsibility. Where did you learn to cook on the cheap? So I faced a period of hardship my second year of college, and it got to the point where I needed to drop out just for my own sake.

15:32And I was immediately shot into the reality of working multiple 825 jobs. And with that, I realized that, hey, even though I'm doing like 12, 16-hour days, I still can't afford to eat. I all of a sudden didn't have insurance through the school, and I had no housing assistance. So I went and I applied for SNAP. I applied for EBT, and they had said, hey, since you have two jobs, we're going to give you 40 bucks a month. I was like, oh, great. So I went on to losing that SNAP assistance when I got a 10 cents an hour raise at one of my jobs. And I'm self-taught, I would say. I used to experiment in the kitchen when I was a kid.

16:19And I really stepped back from that during the 2008 recession because my parents, it was hard for them if I messed something up, you know, because all of a sudden I'm wasting ingredients. So during that period of hardship in college is when I really honed in these skills. And I said, you know what, I'll bake a loaf of bread today. I'll bake cinnamon rolls today. And maybe all I ate that day was cinnamon rolls, but at least I was fed. Tell us about the kind of thing that you cook for your audience. So I try to listen to my community, people in my comments asking, what do you have access to this week?

17:00Or what do you need to learn? And a comment that I've been seeing really frequently is protein. And what do I do with my black beans? I don't know when it became a luxury to have protein, but we're going to work on that today because we don't have any other choices now, do we? The most requested meals I have seen come in this last week use beans, rice, or pasta. So I've done a couple different variations of black beans. I started with a World War II bean loaf, which is like a meatloaf replacement. It comes out looking like a piece of meatloaf or a piece of bread, but just remember, treat it like meat.

17:34So if you're going to do steak sauce or barbecue sauce or ketchup, whatever you would put on your meatloaf, you're going to put on this bean loaf. I've also done black bean burgers and now I've done meatballs. And they are cooked differently, but now someone who only has access to black beans has the ability to choose what they actually want to put on their plate rather than just heating up the can of beans and having the same thing over and over again. It gives them that element of choice and dignity when it comes to eating. Tell me about dignity. When I talk about the element of choice and having dignity, I could boil it down to, let's say someone is going to a soup kitchen and they don't have a choice as to what they're eating.

18:17They're eating potato soup every day at the same soup kitchen. Now, all of a sudden, they introduced minestrone or three-bean soup, and they have the ability to choose what is going into their body. and that is not only dignity, but it's also autonomy that a lot of people who are facing food insecurity just don't have at this time. What was the hardest part for you about being on SNAP? The hardest part was making that budget work and deciding like what was worth it, stepping away from things like I maybe wanted to eat because they were more nutritious or I knew they'd be more filling, but having the reality of like, okay well that's out of my dollar and a quarter budget for the day where can I make that up so it's like balancing money with hunger I would say because there were still nights where I just didn't have dinner because I couldn't afford it and I could just sleep it off and that is a lot of people's reality right now so managing the budget and the hunger was just really difficult I wonder, as you've been talking to people who are on the precipice of losing SNAP benefits, of losing the safety net, what are they telling you about how they feel?

19:38raw, pure, primal fear. I mean, like that is a basic need. And when you don't know where your food is going to come from, or even like, let's add a layer of complexity to it, where your children's food is going to come from, it's scary. And it is again, like shameful. And you feel afraid to reach out for help because it's like, everybody is sitting in this position who can actually help me? Am I too embarrassed to ask my, you know, community center or my church for aid because then all of a sudden it looks like I am financially unstable? And I wish that there was more that I could do to quell those fears.

20:22But really, all I can do right now is be present and give what I have. We talked in the first half of our show about why the U.S. is so bad at taking care of people on basic stuff like food. I mean, this is a very rich country. And even researching, I've been shocked how many Americans are going hungry. What is the diagnosis? What do you think has gone wrong here? Wealth inequality, definitely. I think when I was younger, when I was first forming my own political, socioeconomic opinions, I remember thinking, huh, I bet you trickle down economics really does work. And since there's been so much wealth hoarding, there's no trickling down.

21:08There's these huge extravagant expenses that could be like, donate one of your yachts, you know, and feed America. I just think that since there is so much sitting at the top and we aren't reinvesting into our society and we're looking more at luxury and wealth hoarding, that it's going to continue to affect the bottom whose work is being profited off of. If you could use your influence to send a message to our government about what you see every day, these interactions that you have and what you're worried about, what would the message be? I think that the message would be that if you are going to represent your constituents on basic needs, you need to go meet your constituents where they're at.

21:55You need to actually be present so you can visualize the struggles that people are having. Because right now I feel like our population is looked at in terms of just numbers and stats and demographics. And it's like if you are not actually out actively in your community looking at how this is affecting the average American, then what are you doing?

22:23I think that my biggest message and my biggest takeaway, especially, especially for anyone who has profited off of someone else's time and work, is to make sure that you are leaning into the bottom as much as you are the top.

22:48Kiki Ruff. You can find her on social media at Kiki Ruff. Danielle Hewitt produced today's show. Amina El-Sadi edited. Adrienne Lilly and Patrick Boyd are our engineers. And Laura Bullard checks the facts. Vox memberships are still on sale. Get them while they're hot. Perks like newsletters, unlimited reading, no ads on this podcast. I saw the new ad copy, you guys. ish. Vox.com slash members to sign up and get that discount now. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.

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