The next few weeks of living in a Dorothea Lange photo are going to shatter a lot of Americans' preconceptions about

[tblue37]

who's using SNAP and WIC.

www.pbs.org/wnet/america...

— AMPTsuper (@amptsuper.bsky.social) 2025-10-26T19:08:59.718Z

[Irish_Dem]

1. Both my parents were hungry during the depression.

They never got over it.
We always had a lot of food in our pantry growing up.
They hated looking at empty cupboards.

[tblue37]

2. My mom was, too.

Dad's parents had a huge vegetable garden and raised rabbits & chickens, so they didn't go hungry.

[Irish_Dem]

3. Yes the food insecurity never goes away.

It is always there in the background.

[tblue37]

4. It was evident in Mom's desperate relationship to food.

[Irish_Dem]

5. Yes my mother as well.

Hoarding food and overeating.
Using food as security and soothing.

Her father, my grandfather, had been hungry as a child as well.
Whenever the grandchildren came to visit he always had the house
stocked up on all kinds of little treats, cakes, cookies, ice cream.
He made us big dishes of ice cream and root beer floats, he called black bears.
We loved it all.

But then we got older and as teens told Grandpa we had to cut back
we were dieting. His face would fall so we would eat a Twinkie and
ice cream for his sake.

[tblue37]

6. This exactly!

Hoarding food and overeating.
Using food as security and soothing.

She died of congestive heart failure caused by diabetes.

[MissB]

8. I'm not old enough to have lived during the Great Depression but I can confirm food insecurity is a thing

I grew up in a middle-class household. We moved around a lot; dad was a contractor that bought land in new subdivisions, built a couple of houses and moved on. Eventually we settled down into our own home.

Mom and dad divorced when I was in early elementary school. Mom worked as a waitress, and tried very hard to save the house (dad moved out; she bought out his share of the house). It meant that we ate a ton of potatoes. There weren't any snack foods. We usually had a few cans of food in the pantry. I can't begin to say how many potatoes we ate. I'd argue we dropped slightly out of middle class at that point. I used to have to go over to the neighbors to "borrow" some ingredients for a meal.

I keep a very deep pantry. I will be donating as much as I can.

[Brother Buzz]

7. There's another chapter of Dorothea Lange's work that is relevant today. Most were confiscated and censored for decades

This collection is of astounding quality and paints a dark, dark picture of Americana
https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs