SNAP Challenge Update

For the past week, my wife and I - joined by others from our Tifereth Israel synagogue community - have taken what is called the SNAP Challenge. Each day, we lived on the same $4 per person per day maximum food expenditure mandated by federal law to low income folks who don't have enough money to eat.

We drank lots of water. We ate a lot of starchy foods because they were cheap. We made a lot of soups and chowders, to allow us to turn one meal's worth of food into three.

And mostly we got very, very angry. In a compassionate society, no one should have to live like this.

When I was a boy, my dad almost died and my mom had to take care of two children while her husband was in the hospital for a half year. We lived near the water, and after school every day my sister and I would go fishing. If we caught anything worth keeping, we added it to last night's chowder leftovers and considered ourselves lucky. If we didn't, we added water to last night's leftovers and went to bed hungry.

There are a lot of people in District 19 who go to bed hungry. Annapolis is letting them down. So I'm running to stand up for them. For I, too, know what it's like to go to bed hungry.