Welfare Food Challenge: A Marshmallow in the Hand
In my fridge, a pineapple and a pint of blueberries are waiting for me. As excited as I am to reintroduce fruit into my diet, I am filled with profound guilt just thinking about them. Because, the truth is, I don’t deserve them. I am not any more deserving of those treats in my fridge than anyone else who made $19 stretch into a week’s worth of groceries. The only difference between me and the folks relying on social assistance is that on Wednesday, I get to go back to eating to my heart’s content. On Wednesday, my joints will stop aching, my headache will subside, and the full body gnawing of unanswered hunger will end. But just for me. For my social assistance-reliant counterparts, there is no end in sight. And it simply is not fair.
When I worked in the DTES, I quickly noticed a trend among the men that I worked with. We would be plugging away, side by side in the kitchen, when they would begin to open up about how they got to be there, living in an SRO, working the odd shift with me at the jobs skills placement. Every one of them went to great lengths to explain to me how they were different from everyone else in the neighbourhood; they were hardworking but down on their luck; they had faced unbelievable hardships but were getting back on their feet. The thing is, what they were saying about themselves was mostly true. They were hardworking. They did face incredible hardships. But they weren’t unique. Because everyone on social assistance has faced hardship and has found the resilience to keep going. The people who rely on social assistance aren’t some “other” whose laziness needs policing. They are us, one illness and two pay cheques removed.
The stories we tell about who those people are need to change. The way we design social assistance programs needs to change. And we can start by rethinking the stories that we tell about ourselves and why we deserve dignity while others struggle to eke out a meager existence.
When I was in university, I was taught about the marshmallow experiment. Simply put, children were seated at a table upon which there was one marshmallow. The tester informed the child that they would be left alone in the room with said mallow. If they stayed in the room without eating the treat, when the tester returned, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. This experiment has been used by many an apostle of the meritocracy to demonstrate the honest-to-goodness value of self control. We were told, in class, that the children who did not give in to eating the marshmallow went on to be wildly successful in life. Self control makes strong people and strong people prosper.
I was reminded of the marshmallow experiment this week as I was eating my daily ration of ginger cookies. There were four small biscuits in my work bag. I told myself, only eat two now. You will be hungry again later. Self control makes strong people and strong people prosper. Fine and well, but I had only had 400 calories that day and it was, at this point, 3 pm and I was very hungry. I could not think about addressing future hunger when present hunger was growling inside of me.
And that’s the thing about the marshmallow experiment. It is a snapshot in time that tells us nothing about the children who participated except that some of them ate the marshmallow and some waited. We don’t know if any of those kids were experiencing food insecurity. But I can tell you, that when you are hungry, or you have experienced inconsistent access to food, the survival urge is strong. The marshmallow will be eaten because, as they say, a marshmallow in the hand is worth two in the tester’s office.
The marshmallow experiment brings me back to my earlier point. If we want to have a dignified social assistance system that builds people up rather than keeping them in a state of perpetual distress, we need to start telling different stories about who welfare recipients are and who we are in comparison. As it stands, we have a welfare system designed to dehumanize, humiliate, and inflict harm on our most vulnerable neighbours. And we keep this system despite the growing research demonstrating that poor diet, poverty, lack of exercise (I had to skip the gym this week due to my 1100 calorie diet), and social isolation are contributors to chronic illness, despite research that reports increased hospitalizations of food insecure individuals with diabetes at the end of the month when the grocery money has run out. When considering the financial cost of chronic illness management and hospitalizations combined with the loss of quality of life for those relying on welfare, it really starts to feel like the system is not designed as social assistance but as a public punishment.
It is time to stop punishing our most vulnerable neighbours for their vulnerability. It is time to implement a system that allows welfare recipients to have security, to have meaningful lives, and to thrive in their communities. It is time to do away with the stories about the good children who waited for a second marshmallow and went on to be the thought leaders of tomorrow. It is time to understand that every person deserves to live their life with dignity, even when that life is one that requires assistance. It is time to raise the rates.
My deepest gratitude to the organizers of the Welfare Food Challenge and to everyone who participated in this campaign. It is my hope that we won’t need to revisit this challenge next year because the rates will have been raised but, if not, I look forward to continuing to support this very important cause. With love and solidarity from Ottawa.
