Growing Like Weeds

I started thinking about food differently during COVID. When the pandemic was at its height, I was in the depths of postpartum adjustment. I was home—privileged enough to isolate from the news, from work, and from fear—content to comply and stay safe.

When I returned to work as a school law attorney in early 2021, it felt like the world had changed. My assignments were different: student discipline issues skyrocketed, employee insubordination surged. Between these valleys were incredible peaks—teachers who delivered meals to students’ families after school, ensuring no child went hungry even as everything else felt uncertain.

Food insecurity is well-documented and easily quantified; its long-term effects on student learning and health are widely known. Yet there is something about hunger that remains unfathomable. Since COVID, I feel as though all I see are calls for donations to food pantries—and, in the wake of years-long atrocities abroad, international pleas for emergency food aid. I’ve donated to UNICEF and to my local library, which is running a food drive this month. While the news is generally overwhelming, food insecurity is perhaps the one issue that can still bring me to tears.

Food insecurity is most visible in educational settings, yet our social safety net continues to lean heavily on educators. We ask teachers not only to instruct, but to feed, clothe, and comfort. School pantries, though vital, can create new challenges—such as the quiet bullying of students who are seen using them.

The SNAP pause on November 1 exposes a contradiction: we expect schools to feed our children, but we don’t extend the same urgency to the parents feeding them at home. It shouldn’t take a shutdown to remind us that food is infrastructure.

SNAP is not abstract. It’s breakfast before algebra, lunch before the last period of the day. It’s groceries for parents working double shifts and stability for small-town markets that depend on predictable spending. When those benefits pause—even briefly—the ripple begins in grocery aisles and ends in classrooms, clinics, and workplaces. We will all see the effects, even if we don’t believe hunger lives in our own backyards.

I keep thinking of those teachers who drove after dark, delivering meals during lockdown. They weren’t feeding students out of obligation, but out of recognition—that learning begins long before the first bell, and it begins with food. As November 1 approaches, I wonder what it says about us, as a nation, that we still need reminders of that.