Although SNAP food benefits have been restored since the government shutdown, Republican members of Congress voted last summer to make the program harder to access, including new work requirements and tightened eligibility.
Food banks and health leaders say more people will be hungry and the harm could reverberate for years.
"We were glad to have the shark and potatoes"
Retired teacher Mary Cowhey, who lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, can attest to the longterm consequences of not having enough to eat.
Cowhey grew up on Long Island in a family of 10, including six siblings and two cousins. They lived on her father’s salary as a teacher.
“We had this very stuffed household of people, and we often did not have enough food,” she said.
Every afternoon Cowhey would peel potatoes in the kitchen. They relied on that staple, she said, along with surplus shark given to them by a local fisherman.
“And we were glad to have the shark and potatoes,” she said, “because there were some times when we didn't (even) have the shark and potatoes.”
She still remembers the pain of an empty belly, jealousy over classmates’ lunches, and competing for food at the table.
“It was not uncommon for my sister to reach over and take something off my plate,” she said. “So we learned to eat really fast.”
Only the youngest siblings got milk. And when Cowhey had her first school physical in fourth grade, “I remember the nurse letting me read the scale – you’d push the thing across – and it was 40 pounds.”
She was nine, an age when the CDC says a healthy weight ranges from 50 to 100 pounds.
But she said her family never talked about their lack of food or money to relatives, friends or even the local priest, who once came to dinner. Her mother told the children to leave most of the food for him — without letting on how hungry they were.
“And then my father would sort of spoil my mother's trick by saying to the priest, ‘Be careful, don't set your hand down on the table or one of the kids will put a fork through it!’”
"They just give them food!"
Cowhey became a single mom in her twenties. She moved to Northampton, finding it hard — again — to afford food. Many nights she and her son made do on macaroni and frozen spinach. During that period, she remembers pushing the stroller past the Smith college dining halls.
“I would see the lights on in there, glowing. And I could smell the food coming through like the vent fans from the kitchen,” she said. “And I would always feel this jealousy, like, ‘Oh my God, those people in there, they just walk in and they just give them food!’”
Unlike her parents, Cowhey signed up for food stamps, the precursor to SNAP. She would also go to the local food pantry and tell her son to scooch up in his stroller so she could fit more items in the buggy.
“I was learning it was really important for kids to have milk and cheese and things like that,” she said. “I didn't want him to ever grow up with that feeling of not having enough.”
Cowhey went to college in her thirties, got married and had a second child, and became an elementary school teacher. She said she made a point of letting her students’ families know where they could get food assistance, without singling anyone out. She also became an author, activist and trainer to encourage grassroots organizing in low-income communities.
"I started to connect the dots"
Cowhey is now 65 and retired – thin, but no longer malnourished. She has become a master gardener, partly to ensure she (and her community) always has food. Nevertheless, after a series of broken bones, she was diagnosed with severe osteoporosis, which she blames on an early lack of calcium. Her bones are so brittle her doctor says another fall could disable her.
“It wasn't until I was in a back brace, flat on my back in a trauma center…that I started to connect the dots,” she said.
But the long-term effects of childhood hunger are not just physical. Although Cowhey hasn’t lacked for food in decades, she still describes herself and her siblings as “opportunistic eaters.”
“If there is food around, we will eat it,” she said. “There's this mentality of — in case there's not food tomorrow. For me, that never went away.”
That kind of anxiety takes a lot of mental energy not obvious to the wider community, she said, especially to those who have never been truly hungry. So when President Trump tried to stop food benefits during the government shutdown, “it makes me feel both upset and angry. Because I know that panicky feeling.”
Cowhey still identifies with the 13 percent of American households considered "food insecure" by the US Department of Agriculture in 2023.
There’s no public data after that, because the Trump administration has canceled the annual survey, calling it “subjective, liberal fodder.”
