"Pinched" is Salon's series of personal essays about life during the recession. August 18th's essay was written by Heather Ryan who has a masters degree, a job and three kids. She wrote about swallowing her pride and taking her kids to a soup kitchen in 2007.It had been a hard decision for me to go in the first place. We had a house full of food, mostly from the food bank, and some staples friends who were moving had given us. I was employed as a secretary for the county, a job that didn't make use of my graduate degree or my intelligence but had let me keep the kids in the same school and city after my divorce. I made a decent wage. I had health insurance and dental insurance. On my desk was a packet of new retirement and savings options. But summer child care was $1,800 a month for my three kids, and the child support I received from their father was a paltry sum mandated by the state. It didn't even begin to cover the cost of one kid's child care for a single summer month. We didn't qualify for WIC vouchers or food stamps. The previous week, I had swallowed my pride and driven my old Subaru to a local food bank. The women there were kind and gave me a box filled with cans of tuna and bags of pasta. I was only allowed to get one box per month, though, and what they gave me would last a week, maybe 10 days. I was looking into weeks of hunger....Ryan's story is incredibly poignant and honest, especially after I mentioned how fortunate Jesse and I have been while subsisting on a single income.
A few months out of the crisis, and with a little money in my pocket, I bought a $3 wedge of brie. This is laughable, I know. I'm a goddamn parody of myself, with all my bougie aspirations and affectations. But when I unwrapped the cheese at home, I remembered suddenly the soup kitchen: the thick smell of beans and onions, the hard light coming through the naked windows, Ivan taking a bite of day-old Danish and spitting it out because he was used to better. I had to fight the urge to return the brie. It felt wasteful and indulgent. When I did eat it, I thought about all the things food means to us, all the things it stands in for. We may joke about brie, or expensive wine, or organic tomatoes, but food reminds us of who we are, who we're supposed to be. Brie says, I'm not poor and I'm well educated and I'm responsible, a good mother. I will never be hungry. We try to believe all these things don't matter, but it's like closing your eyes and believing no one can see you.Read the complete essay at Salon.
image via Salon
