In “Making Groceries,” New Orleans-based Gravy journalist Katie Jane Fernelius travels to the frontlines of food insecurity in Louisiana—from the bustling warehouse floor of Second Harvest Food Bank in south Louisiana to a grocery aisle in rural Evangeline Parish—to examine the place of food stamps in fighting hunger.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is a federal food-assistance program that helps low-income households buy groceries. It has consistently been shown to reduce food insecurity and poverty, especially among children.

But SNAP has also been at the center of policy fights for decades, as legislators at both the state and federal level debate not only who should be eligible to receive benefits, but what they can spend those benefits on. While some legislators may emphasize the impact of SNAP on state and federal budgets, moms like Dafnee Chatman experience the importance of SNAP in their personal budgets, knowing the crucial role that food stamps can play in feeding her family of five.

In this episode of Gravy, Fernelius follows Chatman through a grocery store as she does the math of a weekly shop on SNAP benefits. She also speaks with John Sillers and Lindsay Hendrix of the Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana about how families struggling with food insecurity fill their pantries. Fernelius looks at hunger in Louisiana from a wider angle: not as a single crisis, but as a system of support, strain, and political choices that shapes how everyday families eat.

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Acknowledgements:

Thank you to scholars Tracy Roof and Laurie Green for their illuminating conversations about the history of food stamps.

Thank you to Second Harvest Food Bank in New Orleans and Dafnee Chatman, for their helpful, impassioned participation in this episode.

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