SNAP Made Us Forget How to Snap Beans

This isn’t an attack on SNAP. It’s not about disrespecting the benefits themselves — it’s about the truth behind the system.

With the recent furloughs and reductions of monthly food benefits, many families are in panic. How will they feed their children? What happens when the card stops working? SNAP has become a lifeline — but also a leash. Too many of us have made no preparation for its discontinuance, let alone for a disaster where we’d have to feed ourselves.

And in times of conflict, we always have to ask the real questions: What do we do now? What got us here? What are we supposed to learn?

The Reality That Hit Home

This hit me while brainstorming how The Bloodline could help our local communities — the same ones we volunteer in daily, the same families who’ve used their SNAP benefits to bring burgers and hot dogs to youth events, or to fill coolers with Hug juices for our children. Then it struck me:

Our people have lost nearly all knowledge of how to literally put food on the table.

And that is no small thing. A nation can’t thrive if its people no longer know how to feed themselves.

I’m not talking about working a 9-to-5 or buying groceries. I’m talking about our grandmothers’ farms — the tomatoes, okra, and cucumbers she grew — and our grandfathers’ trades — the way they hunted wild game like deer, hogs, and rabbits to feed whole families.

Most middle-aged and even senior folks among us don’t know how to do these things anymore. What used to be second nature to us is now a foreign language. Meanwhile, rural youth in small southern towns still grow up learning to plant, fish, and hunt — because their communities never let that knowledge die.

But in our cities, textbooks replaced our tools of survival. We’ve been trained to depend, not to produce.

How We Got Here

The truth is, this wasn’t by accident. These systems were designed to make us dependent — to remove our hands from the soil, our minds from self-sufficiency, and our value from our homes.

If food is easy to obtain, the Black man’s purpose gets questioned. The Black woman’s ancestral wisdom — the knowledge she carried long before slavery — gets replaced by convenience. And now, when that “provision” is threatened, we find ourselves lost.

We’ve forgotten how to survive. How far have we been removed from the very earth that sustained us?

It’s time to talk to the ancestors.

Healing in the Soil

Growing your own food might seem boring, even unappealing, compared to fast food and microwave meals. But the process itself is medicine — spiritual and grounding. Planting, watering, nurturing — these things feed the soul before they feed the body.

Maybe the healing we’ve been searching for is right there in the soil.

And here’s the irony — did you know that seeds themselves are covered under the SNAP program? That means you can literally use the system to break free from it. You can buy seeds and start your own garden using the very benefits meant to keep you reliant.

That’s Zanafamu — collective work for the greater good. That’s what it looks like in action.

Rebellion Through Creation

We have to be creative — even rebellious — in how we think. Food can be grown anywhere.

In a small apartment, you can start with a box: 1 to 1½ feet wide, 10 to 12 inches deep. It doesn’t take much. That box can sit on a porch or near a window, anywhere with light. Start with greens, lettuce, or okra — something simple.

Yes, Black men need to know how to build things. Black women, too. But Black men are supposed to know these things by age 12. Instead, too many know how to pull a trigger before they know how to use a power drill.

That’s the tragedy — and that’s the lesson.

We need to build again. With our hands, with our patience, and with our unity.

This is resistance

Every small act of creation, every garden box on a porch, every person learning to grow food again — that’s revolution in motion. This is the sacred bonding our community needs today. You can’t youth rally or peace march your way to self-sufficiency. It takes action.

Hunting and the Honor of Life

Hunting, in my opinion, builds a man.

It teaches discipline, patience, and reverence. It forces you to understand what it means to take life — and, through that, what it means to honor life.

When you hunt wild game, you do it to provide for your family. You take life only to give life — the same balance the Earth itself follows.

We’ve lost that respect for life. We take each other’s lives with no care in the world because we’ve been stripped from this spiritual understanding. When you prepare food from the earth — from scratch, from sweat, from soil — you understand your place in the world again.

That’s what it means to be self-sufficient. That’s what it means to be free.

We can’t preach liberation unless we’re prepared to live liberated.

Passing the Knowledge Forward

If you’ve been blessed with these skills — to plant, to build, to hunt, to grow — this is your moment to share them. Teach your children. Teach your neighbors. Teach your block.

Whether SNAP comes back or not, this is the blueprint. This is how we heal, how we resist, and how we rebuild our Bloodline.

Because true independence starts with the ability to feed yourself — body, mind, and soul.

May the ancestors guide and protect you always.