In an editorial, Jersey City mayoral candidate Jim McGreevey discusses why the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) “matters so profoundly.”
I first came to understand the power, and the pain, of hunger when I was in seminary, working with Exodus Transitional Community in Harlem. We would serve pancakes and hot dogs, and every plate would be wiped clean.
People didn’t eat because they particularly wanted pancakes or hot dogs; they ate because they didn’t know when they might eat again. Hunger wasn’t an abstraction; it was a relentless presence that shaped how they moved through the world.
Years later, when we began the New Jersey Reentry Corporation, I saw that same vulnerability again…