Our cupboard was bare

The food was decent, a bit better than run-of-the-mill cafeteria food, and healthier. I could tell that whoever made the food had thought about it carefully, had tried to make it nutritious, hearty. One man, one of the few who looked truly homeless, came through the line, then sat in a corner. His tray was piled with food, enough for three meals. He ate methodically, slowly. He finished it all before we left.

Other people filtered in, and a few had children. I watched these children. At first I thought they were angry and sullen, like Chloe was. But they stood quietly next to their mothers, and they were polite and kind, much unlike Chloe, who was flicking bits of stringy turkey at her siblings. It wasn't until Ivan and Giselle saw the other kids and got up to talk to them, and I saw those kids flinch, that it began to make sense. Ivan and Giselle were acting like being here was no big deal because they hadn't grown up with this, and they hadn't a clue what it meant to be at a soup kitchen. They didn't feel ashamed of anything. So they asked questions of everyone, wondered aloud about how the serving dishes kept the food warm, and why there were single desserts instead of the served kind, and where the bathroom was. Even Chloe's sullenness was better than what I saw in those other kids, which was an acceptance of the situation and all it implied, all we load it with, all I loaded it with, despite my liberal proclamations, my lovely words and rhetoric argued in college classrooms, where I could turn a pretty phrase and win an argument about classism or poverty. I had grown up "poor," whatever that means, and hungry sometimes, too. But I had never been to a soup kitchen, didn't have a clue what it looked like, what it felt like, and I'm sorry now that I had pretended to know and that I had made use of something I had no right to use.

I could segue into some political rant here, a slick dismissal of the Bush administration, perhaps, or a paragraph declaring my support for Barack Obama. But the moment I walked into the soup kitchen -- the moment I acknowledged, publicly, that I could not provide food for myself or my children (which is why the soup kitchen is so much more difficult than the food bank) -- is the moment that my ability to believe in the politics of this country was forever altered. I know why poor people have historically low voter-turnout rates. If you vote, you acknowledge that you believe in the system. And to believe in the system when you're at the very bottom, when you've watched the chrome and ink-black SUVs drive by while you're packing your own beater with dried beans and lentils, to believe at that point is fucking painful. You either say the system works and you've earned your place, or you concede that there is something wrong and there might not be any way to fix it. The entire summer of 2007, as I struggled to keep us fed, I hated thinking of politics, an unusual characteristic for me. It hurt to listen to any presidential candidate talk about the working poor, and not because they weren't genuine, but because all their talk was just that -- talk. It was like listening to my former self, the one who didn't know how bad things could get.

A few months out of the crisis, and with a little money in my pocket, I bought a $3 wedge of brie. This is laughable, I know. I'm a goddamn parody of myself, with all my bougie aspirations and affectations. But when I unwrapped the cheese at home, I remembered suddenly the soup kitchen: the thick smell of beans and onions, the hard light coming through the naked windows, Ivan taking a bite of day-old Danish and spitting it out because he was used to better. I had to fight the urge to return the brie. It felt wasteful and indulgent. When I did eat it, I thought about all the things food means to us, all the things it stands in for. We may joke about brie, or expensive wine, or organic tomatoes, but food reminds us of who we are, who we're supposed to be. Brie says, I'm not poor and I'm well educated and I'm responsible, a good mother. I will never be hungry. We try to believe all these things don't matter, but it's like closing your eyes and believing no one can see you.