Breads are sorted in the donation center at Feed More, a central-Virginia-anchored food bank. (File photo by Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)
During last year’s interruption in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, commonly known as food stamps, I was given the names of more than 100 people who would go without food if we didn’t act.
We mobilized funds, packed grocery bags, baked casseroles, and started making deliveries.
One evening, I drove to a mobile home park to deliver a box of nonperishable food and a few casseroles. The road was little more than rutted dirt. It was dark, and I couldn’t find the numbers on the buildings.
I found a man standing outside and asked if he was the person I had been looking for. He said “yes,” so I handed him the food and drove away.
Before I reached the end of the road, my phone rang.
It was the woman who I had been trying to reach. She was crying, angry, and desperate. Her children were hungry. It turned out I had delivered food to the wrong person.
I went back with more.
What stayed with me was not the mistake, but the panic in her voice, the sound of someone living so close to the edge that one wrong delivery could leave her children without nourishment.
This is not simply a story about one family. It is a story about how many of our neighbors are living without margin for error.
On mornings when I drive into Columbia, cars are already idling outside Harvest Hope long before the pantry opens. Across Sumter, children discreetly receive backpacks filled with food on Fridays because there may be nothing in the refrigerator or pantry over the weekend.
And families living in motels often have no kitchen, stove, or oven, which means that even when we bring groceries, we have to consider what can be prepared with nothing more than a microwave.
In Sumter County, more than one in five children experiences food insecurity.
Statewide, more than 590,000 South Carolinians rely on SNAP, nearly half of them children. Yet South Carolina has declined to participate in SUN Bucks, which would provide families an additional $120 per child to buy groceries during the summer, supplementing programs that provide free prepared meals when school’s not in session.
A 12-year national study from 2004 to 2016 linked greater SNAP participation to fewer child protective services and foster care cases, evidence that food assistance can help keep families safely together.
The idea that access to food strengthens entire communities is not new.
Thousands of years ago, the Old Testament offered a striking vision of what people with abundance owed to those without it.
In Leviticus, landowners were commanded not to harvest their fields to the edges but to leave part of what they grew for the poor and the stranger. Deuteronomy extended that protection to widows and orphans. Provision for people in need was not treated as an afterthought; it was built into the harvest itself.
It was called gleaning.
Dignity was built into the system. Hungry people did not have to prove their destitution before they were allowed to eat; those with abundance were simply required to leave something at the
edges for those who needed it.
Today, we ask people to document every facet of their financial lives to prove they are poor enough for help. But people rarely ask strangers for food casually. When someone says they are hungry, perhaps we should begin by believing them.
The ancient command is simple: do not take everything for yourself; leave something at the edges for your neighbors.
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he did not say, “Give me this day my daily bread.” He said, “Give us this day our daily bread.” In that framing, bread belongs to “us.”
Life’s necessities are not individual concerns. The well-being of our neighbors is inextricably woven into our own.
Food pantries, canned food drives, grocery deliveries and casseroles are incredibly important.
I’ve witnessed them sustain families through impossible seasons. But compassion cannot become an excuse for accepting conditions that should never have become normalized.
Daily bread should not be extraordinary in a country that wastes an estimated 30% to 40% of its food supply every year.
The question is not simply whether we will feed someone when they are hungry; it is whether we will leave enough room at the edges so fewer of our neighbors face hunger at all.
We have enough food. What we have not built is a reliable way to ensure that everyone shares in it.
Because if we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” then “us” has to mean all of us.
Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
