Things that Happen In a Closet.

Hunger is More than a Missed Meal. Its Impact Can Last a Lifetime. Or Two.

Hi everyone - Big couple of weeks around here!

Just got back from a whirlwind Mother-Daughter trip to NYC with Edie (18). So good for us to reconnect. And we saw family and good friends and binge-watched The Secret Lives of Mormon Housewives in bed every evening, which we cannot get enough of. Exactly what we needed. I also got to finish Atul Gawande’s excellent book on the plane, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, which was incredibly clarifying for me. I expect to write about some aspects of it here, at some point.

Last week, I gave a lecture at The National Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) Professionals Association Conference. These folks create the nutrition policies behind meal programs for infants, children and, disabled and senior adults in day care, in states across the country.

Because feeding people is the goal of their work, and many in the audience were dieticians and policy folks, I thought I’d tell them about Johnnie, an elder who I wrote about in The Meth Lunches. Her story illustrates how hunger settles permanently into people’s lives and defines and re-makes how they live in the world.

Hunger has permanent repercussions that impact whole communities, including relationships in the world, and the ability to trust and feel safety. Abolishing poverty for everyone is our most important work, but until we get our shit together to focus on that, the programs these folks create to stand in the gap and feed people, in the day-in, day-out, matter. Even as we watch these programs being rolled back, eviscerated, complicated and drastically cut.

Some of you who have been hanging around here for awhile will remember Johnnie’s story. No worries, next week we are back to regular programming.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim

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Hi everyone! Welcome to Las Vegas! My name is Kim Foster. I’m a social scientist, former university professor, foster parent, and an author. Among other things, like writing about aging and the issues we face in the last third of our lives, I also write about the ways in which people become vulnerable in our communities.

In 2023, I wrote a book called: The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City about that vulnerability as it intersects with food, and housing instability, disability, aging, mental illness, addiction, and family separation through foster care and incarceration, all of which are most-often comorbidities of poverty.

I thought since you all work on programs preventing and addressing hunger in your states and regions, that I would talk a bit about how hunger and food insecurity can impact a single person’s life. What hunger really means in the most practical terms.

The best way for me to do this is to introduce you to someone I wrote about in The Meth Lunches and now someone I call a dear friend.

This is Johnnie. With my daughter, Lucy (left).

Johnnie works at Smith’s, a grocery store here in downtown Vegas, owned by Kroger.

I was checking out my groceries and my cashier was Johnnie. Everyone calls her Moose, it’s on her name tag. She is in her mid-60’s, Puerto Rican, a lesbian, a lover of animals, particulary cats, and kids. She has worked at grocery stores her whole adult life. We chatted while she ran my food along the belt.

A line formed behind us. In the middle of the conversation, without so much as a hiccup in the checking out of my groceries, Johnnie and I started talking about certain foods she struggled to eat. I told her that my foster son, Raffi (who has since been adopted into our famil) had some of the same issues around food. He had come from a lot of scarcity, and getting food, holding onto food, hiding food, having access to food, was primary in the way he lived every minute of every day.

This interested Johnnie, who blurted out that when she was a child, she had been locked in a closet by her mother and starved. As you can imagine, I was taken aback. The people in line behind me were taken aback.

This was private and intimate stuff, right? Except I’ve found that once you live through something really hard, the scariness and horror of telling it subsides. It’s your everyday, so it’s not shocking at all from your perspective. You can blurt it out in front of strangers because you’ve lived through the worst of it.

This conversation, weirdly, formed the basis of our friendship. We had coffee in the deli area of the bakery that week. She talked and I listened. Johnnie wanted people to know what happened to her. Everyone wants to be seen. So I’m going to share her story with you. I want you to see Johnnie.

Johnnie grew up in Santa Barbara, California, with her mother, Estrella, and her two older sisters. Johnnie remembers the beginnings of her childhood well. Things were good. Estrella had a modeling contract with Revlon and their future was bright. She remembers sitting around the kitchen table eating her mothers’ sopas, like sopa des res con fideo. She remembers arroz con gandules. Warm filling sancochos with chunks of beef, carrots, yautia, potato, green plantains and cassava. Everything was normal. They talked. They played together. They were a family.

But things changed when Johnnie was around five-years-old. Estrella started drinking heavily. Probably to combat the oncoming symptoms of schizophrenia. Johnnie said the changes were subtle, like she was cutting corners, not on top of things. She was more prone to angry outbursts.

But her symptoms got progressively worse. Estrella brought a man into the home. Her drinking became chronic. The family started coming apart. Johnnie was too young to see the bigger picture, or name it in any kind of way. But Estrella’s delusions became more and more profound. She and her live-in boyfriend found reasons to spank Johnnie, which became beating Johnnie. Her older sisters were old enough to make themselves scarce, but Johnnie was too young to leave. She took the worst of Estrella’s rages.

Chronic hunger in the household began to be a constant thing.

“There might’ve been beer and eggs in the fridge at this point,” Johnnie told me. “But it was mostly bare and anyway, I was too young to know how to cook.”

This is where she came to view packaged food as her only safe foods. Packaged foods could be shelf-stable for longer periods. Could be eaten secretly when her mother was out of the house or sleeping. Packaged food could be easily hidden away, stuffed behind a pillow or under a bed, up a shirt. These foods always tasted the same - a small consistency that made her happy. Packaged foods, like cereal, chips, anything leftover she could find, became so important to her that they became her coping strategy for saving herself.

There is no nutritional or cooking-heavy program you could create that would be able to transition Johnnie away from eating only packaged foods. This is how vital they are to how she sees her own survival.

For a long time, one sister took some of her beatings for her, and bathed her and washed her clothes. But both older sisters ended up fleeing the house as soon as they could, abandoning her - a riff that they could never really overcome as adult siblings, and ended in the suicide of one of the sisters - and when they left her alone there, everything got worse for Johnnie.

Estrella stopped caring for herself. She slept all hours. She stopped cleaning the house or shopping for food. Caked on dishes piled up in the sink. The house fell into bedlam. They were overrun with mice, roaches and cigarette butts heaped into ashtrays that never got cleaned. Johnnie had a single set of clothes for school. Kids at school said she smelled. She is sure that she did, because by her own accounts, she didn’t bathe much. The more she was mocked by kids, and went unseen by staff and teachers, the more she disconnected from school and the neighborhood.

So, what does Johnnie learn from her hunger? That she is not good enough. That she does not deserve food. That she is not worthy of good things. That she doesn’t even deserve to feel hunger, because feeling hungry is asking for something. So everytime that feeling of hunger arises, it is full of shame. Because no one was going to feed her anyway. And just as she was not worthy of food, she was alos not worthy of love.

This is the message of hunger. It’s so much bigger than a stomach ache or an uncomfortable physical feeling. It is a statement about your basic worth as a human being.

Then, things grew worse.

Estrella became impossibly psychotic, dragging Johnnie out of bed in the middle of the night, beating her, raging at all hours. Johnnie told me that these rages were so paralyzing that now, into her 65 years, she still tip toes quietly around her house without making a sound, because she is still scared to wake her mother.

The family’s kittens died from starvation and lack of attention. Johnnie buried them in the backyard. Knees in the dirt. She covered the kittens with little fists of soil. She felt responsible. She felt they were her kindred spirits. Like it was her fault they starved to death. Like she had control, or power, or the ability to make something, anything happen. That all of this was her fault. The kitten burial sparked a deep love and sense of protection in her for animals, particularly cats, which she has to this day.

Later, Estrella began locking Johnnie in a closet. Johnnie was able to keep the door open at the bottom, by jamming something into the corner, so it didn’t latch all the way shut, and this allowed her to forage for leftover foods.

In the closet, she was shielded from some of the abuse of her mother’s tirades, but also forgotten. She told me about how she knew where her mother kept the sugar. A bag of C+H. (And let me tell you how intense brand recognition is. C+H is still the only brand of sugar Johnnie will buy.) She ran into the kitchen, tipped the bag right into her mouth, and then ran back into the closet.

Sugar was comfort and a full stomach.

Johnnie remembers sharing Milk Bones with the family dog inside the closet. She would feel for the halfway mark in the dark, splitting the biscuit in two. She always gave her dog the biggest half. This was critical for her. She explained how she protected her dog over herself, and why that mattered to her.

“I would starve for her,” she told me.

Starving, the lack of food, is love for Johnnie.

We like to give a lot of lip service to this idea that food is love. Pizza is love. Pasta is love. Lasagna is love. But this is wrong. Make no mistake, food itself is not love.

The act of feeding people is love.

Humans feel loved and nourished when they are being fed. This is particularly true of babies and children. In fact the results have been codified in the scientific research known as attachment theory. Here’s how it goes:

When a baby cries out and a parent or guardian comes to them with a bottle or breast, or a comforting snuggle, an attachment bond is formed. The baby is hungry. The baby cries. The caretaker responds with food. The baby learns that they are safe by receiving the food. Their needs are being met. The baby learns the world is kind and reinforcing and responsive to their needs.

When food is not available - either because the family is in crisis, like with mental illness and addiction, abuse and neglect, or because there are co-morbidities of poverty present, like working multiple jobs, trouble buying formula, bringing in caregivers who might not be experienced. These irregularities in care teach the baby that the world is harsh and unsupporting. That her needs are not being met. That there is danger.

The absence of food = a lack of comfort and security in the world, and that understanding stays coded in us. It becomes a part of who we are. But it’s not just the one person who is changed by hunger, it’s generational. All of us experience the residuals of hunger in our communities.

Here’s an example of that:

This is straight out of the neurobiology playbook: Let’s say that a woman is pregnant. She is poor, possibly has other kids to feed. She is scrimping to save money. She isn’t eating well or enough. The fetus learns about how plentiful food is in the outside world.

Essentially, the fetus learns that food is not plentiful. There is danger. The fetus learns that if there isn’t a lot of food in their world, they should save up. And something happens to the fetus which is PERMANENT.

It’s metabolism gets thrifty.

For the rest of this child’s life outside the womb, they will get very good at storing food. That means their bodies will hold onto calories. These folks will end up with a greater chance of developing life-ending and life-altering diseases, like adult onset diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and obesity that is resistant to healthy diet and exercise.

And the research tells us this continues not just for this particular baby, with the mom who was hungry, but also for her baby when she grows up. Remember she permanently has a thrifty metabolism, so when she gets pregnant, her body will do what it’s good at - it will steal nutrients from her fetus, which will give that fetus a thrifty metabolism, and so on and so on across generations.

Hunger is sticky.

And because it impacts a sense of safety in the world, hunger impacts how these folks form relationships and conduct themselves in the world.

For those babies who are fed regularly and are attached to caregivers, they develop a sense of safety in the world. They grow up to have relationships that reflect that connection.

These babies turn into adults who can have healthy, boundaried relationships with the people they meet. They are able to seek out support and comfort from other people. They can manage their emotions and handle conflict.

But babies and children who were not fed regularly or adequately, often end up having relationships that reflect those schisms. They might crave closeness, but struggle with that closeness when it presents itself. Their relationships can feel terrifying because any kind of feelings of dependence and vulnerability set off warning bells that something isn’t right.

They might prefer casual relationships to committed ones. They can be prone to withdrawing from people in close relationships, because the feeling of vulnerability can get intense and unmanageable.

In extreme cases, as in children who have been neglected and improperly fed in orphanages, or locked in solitary situations, like the closet, for example, these kids can grow into adults who find the love and compassion given to them acutely painful and will do whatever they need to do to ensure they are not loved.

This means often using antisocial behaviors that disrupt families and relationships to ensure they remain uncared for. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Lying, stealing, outrageous behaviors, and aggression are common enough strategies to push healthy people away. Kids from extreme deprivation use these deal-breaking behaviors to crack apart their relationships. Because being dependent is painful and fruitless.

These feelings can be healed in some ways, in the right environments with the right therapy and lots of patience and time to heal. But not cured. These are lifelong struggles that these folks will have to manage. And many people will often never really understand why they do what they do.

As an example, Johnnie wanted to be a part of my book launch when The Meth Lunches came out. We worked on setting her up for success for a full year. My daughter, Lucy, was going to pick her up and escort her. Her friend from Smith’s was going to come too, so she would feel comfortable. We rehearsed it - the pickup, what she would wear, where she would sit, what the place looked like and ways she could feel safe.

In the end, she came up with an excuse not to attend.

And this is Johnnie’s way in relationships. She is a constant date-breaker. She wants and desires the connection. But when the connection comes, it’s often too much. Overwhelming. Terrifying. And so the thing she wants and needs and craves is ever elusive, because when it comes too close, it hurts.

But Johnnie is okay. She is resilient as hell. She has a trove of customers and co-workers who care about her. She is feeling stronger these days after some med changes and she says she is almost ready to date again. She has her three cats. She adores them like they are her kids. She is ready to sacrifice herself for them, if need be. She gives them all the love she didn’t get. Her mother, Estrella, also wrote her a letter before she died apologizing for all the pain she caused.

To this day, despite everything, Johnnie loves her and misses her and has forgiven her.

“I have to forgive her,” she told me. “Because if I don’t, I can’t forgive myself and move on.”

This has been particularly moving for me, as I consider who in my life deserves grace. If Johnnie can forgive Estrella, can’t I forgive people who hurt me in much less outrageous and permanent ways? Can’t I forgive myself for whatever fuck ups I’ve made? How do we decide who gets grace and who doesn’t? How bad do you have to fuck up to never deserve or receive grace? These are the things Johnnie has made me consider.

Johnnie works in a supermarket on purpose and always has. So she will be surrounded by food. Think about that: If you are a human who worries you will not be able to eat, being able to have a job where you can be surrounded by food is the ultimate relief to the near-constant anxiety of rising hunger.

“I eat the same things over and over,” Johnnie told me.

I live on cereal, Captain Crunch mostly, anything that can be opened and swallowed immediately. She hides cookies around her apartment even though she lives alone, in case she needs them.

“Sugar is very important to me,” Johnnie told me. “And I eat fast because I’m certain it will disappear before I get it down.”

Johnnie does understand that other people feel nurtured by food, and so she does cook for partners when she is in a relationship. But she would never cook for herself. She would never nurture herself that way. In her last relationship, she talks about asking her partner to leave extra food in the pan. That way she always has extra if she needs it. Ironically, my son, Raffi, does this still as well at 13. He always needs to know there is extra food in the pot, in case he needs to eat more.

Neither of them will ever change this need. Or if they change the behavior, they will still feel the slight urge, the ever-present, just-below-the-surface thread of anxiety that makes them wonder if there is enough for them. The insight she has given me about how to best live with a history of hunger and deprivation has helped us support Raffi in ways David and I couldn’t have grasped without her perspective. She loves my children deeply. For this, I am grateful.

One of the reasons I tell Johnnie’s story is this: We, in the abolishing poverty space, have this idea that when people do not eat whole foods, or embrace nutrition, or are shopping mostly in the food aisles in the middle of the grocery store, that we can shape their shopping and eating routines by simply building a supermarket in a desolate neighborhood, or expose people to a gorgeous wall of organc kale and broccoli. Johnnie proves that changing what has developed in childhood can be at best, challenging. At worst, impossible.

If we want to change how people eat, we need to start in the womb. We start with fetuses and babies. We start with young families. Our focus needs to be generational. Not one meal. Or the next meal. Or the one after that. But big picture poverty relief, as laid out by sociologist Matthew Desmond.

And this is born out of scientific research.

Look at The New Hope Project, a program in Milwaukee, which tracked working families just over the poverty line. Researchers found that roughly $3,000 per child, per year for the first five years of the child’s life was community-changing. That $15,000 investment in families produced adults who worked 135 more hours a year in their 20’s and 30’s.

In the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences Journal in 2022, researchers found that giving families extra money for their children didn't just change the family, it changed THE ACTUAL BRAINS of children. More money for young families = increased brain development for kids. I mean, incredible to know this, right?

We also know that attaching extra cash to every child has an outsized impact on co-morbidities that we rarely think about, like giving more women the opportunity to keep their babies instead of giving them up for adoption. Or helping poor families get off the radar of Child Protection, making family separation more unnecessary. We also could see more women able to leave relationships when domestic violence is present, and parents better able to support their kids if a partner is incarcerated.

Extra cash for young families would have massive implications for all of us, because the more stable the family is, the more stable the children, the better attached they are in their families, the better they do in school, the less crime and delinquency, the more stability in the community, the more productive hours in the workforce for future generations, the better able people are to support themselves and their families and struggle less, the better and bigger the thriving capitalist machine.

Johnnie + I hugging it out in the vegetable aisle yesterday. As you do. Photo credit: Desi Foster (age 9)

So why this talk, here and now?

I’m sure your job, like most jobs, feels like a lot of bureaucracy, red tape, obstacles, limitations, people saying NO, and an onslaught of time-sucking emails and meetings, but the why of your work is vital.

You are on the front lines of this struggle, even as politicians in Washington want to make access to food and life-enhancing benefits that raise people up, more difficult to obtain.

You are working to eradicate poverty, end hunger, support struggling elders, find resources for people who are disabled and sick. You are working to shift biases, short-sightedness and discrimination. And to fortify families and keep them together. You know, by the work you do, that all of this will make us and our communties safer and richer and more stable in every way possible.

Thank you for doing this work. For our communities. For people like my friend, Johnnie. Your work matters.

Thank you.