“2 Wks Living,” she wrote next to the sum.
School had let out the week before. Her three teenagers had arrived home in a swirl of backpacks, buzzing with freedom. But Shinn, 42 and a single mother, was feeling stress, not cheer. She makes so little working full-time as a loan office administrator that her kids qualify to eat free lunch at school — which stops in the summer.
With “2 Wks Living” left in May, the teens had already devoured all the tuna and hoovered up all the pasta. Only one can of SpaghettiOs remained on the shelf.
“We go through food like crazy,” Shinn said. “I keep telling them, ‘Y’all, we can’t go through snacks like this.’”
Last summer, she could rely on the last vestiges of a pandemic-era relief program. That provided an electronic benefit card with $40 a month per child, on top of what she got through SNAP, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program once known as food stamps.
She had used the extra money for milk, hamburger meat and snacks to send with the kids to sports camps. At times those additional dollars meant the difference between eating and not eating, at least for her. She’d trained herself to skip breakfast and lunch so Trent, 16, Maelee, 15, and Maloree, 14, would not go without.
A new food program would have kicked in this summer, had Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt not turned down $48 million from a $2.5 billion initiative that the Biden administration calls “a giant step forward” in ending childhood hunger in the country. Though Oklahoma is one of the most food-insecure states, with surveys finding that more than 200,000 children are hungry at some point during a year, Stitt suggested the administration was “trying to push certain agenda items on kids.”
He joined 12 fellow Republican governors who ultimately refused the money, part of the bipartisan budget agreement Congress reached in 2022. Some said they were reluctant because the country is mired in debt and the government already spends heavily on child nutrition programs — more than $25 billion in fiscal 2023. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves called the new program an attempt “to expand the welfare state.”
In Elk City, some 110 miles due west of the Oklahoma Capitol, Stitt’s rationale no longer mattered by mid-May. What mattered to Shinn was how families like hers would get through the summer — particularly those last days of the month when her kids get panicky without milk in the house and insist there’s “nothing to eat.”
“Prices are going up but your pay isn’t,” she said. “I get so aggravated.” She makes $16 an hour at her full-time job and considers herself lucky if she gets an hour of overtime a week.
Maelee came into the living room, trailed by the family’s pit bull, Sassy, and plopped down on the brown corduroy couch.
“You have a basketball camp next week,” her mother said.
“I’m not going to that,” Maelee replied. “It’s $80.”
“I thought you could still go to it if we didn’t have to pay for it?”
Maelee shook her head no.
“Won’t be bad,” she said. “I’ll get a week off!”
Once a week, a tractor trailer with 10,000 pounds of food from the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma pulls up to a former armory in Elk City that houses a day homeless shelter, a rental-assistance nonprofit and the food pantry where Shinn gets groceries once a month and her son works in the summer unloading boxes. There’s a table in the hallway with giveaway boxes of Narcan. A handmade sign on the yellow cinder-block wall says “Help” in big letters, with an arrow pointing the way.
Inside the Elk City Help Inc. Food Resource Center, volunteers assemble grocery carts full of U.S. Department of Agriculture-branded peas, applesauce and pork patties as well as donated items for residents who meet income guidelines. On Fridays, Executive Director Meghan Palmer puts out a call on Facebook that they’ll be offering perishable leftovers for anyone in town. The hopeful begin arriving two hours early.
There is a growing number of families among the 1,900 people Palmer feeds every month — a distressing though not surprising development given the city’s poverty rate of 26 percent, more than double the national average. Donations fund the center’s $98,000 annual budget. She’s tried for federal grants in the past, but those often require a recipient to be located near a larger city to capitalize on existing infrastructure and maximize impact.
“One of the biggest issues we have is that all of the organizations and programs are tailored for larger cities and larger communities,” she said. “In rural America, we often get forgotten. It’s really powerful and extremely frustrating.”
The state’s decision to opt out of the summer food card program was devastating.
“We were pretty beside ourselves,” Palmer said. “The ball has been dropped for Oklahomans. We’re constantly on the bottom — in mental health, poverty, food insecurity, education. It was just another slap in our face.”
The town’s rural location hampers its ability to respond to needy residents in other ways, too. In the eastern part of the state, two Native American tribes — the Cherokee and the Chickasaw — are administering the summer card program on their own and reaching 250,000 children, according to federal officials.
The tribes, nonprofits and local school districts expanded the spots where kids can get free meals or pick up a sack lunch. Yet a large swath of Oklahoma remains unserved. The closest location to Elk City is 25 miles away.
As another week drew to a close, Palmer started laying out trays of day-old bread for the general giveaway. She buttonholed Trent, on his way to summer football conditioning, and tried to ply him with leftovers.
“Do you want a watermelon?” she asked.
“Sure,” Trent said. “Maelee loves watermelon.”
“Take two!” Palmer urged, fitting another in the crook of his arm.
At 1 p.m., three undocumented women from Central America arrived and began going through large cardboard boxes of vegetables. A grandmother came to rummage for her grandchildren. Then Jennifer Thomas pulled up in a silver Ford Expedition.
She was there to drop off a flier for an upcoming 48-hour prayer revival, but she, too, began putting together a bag of potatoes, onions and tangerines to take to her 78-year-old mother, a pantry client.
“She loves the ‘choice’ menu here,” Thomas told Palmer.
“In 32 counties, we’re the only pantry with a menu,” Palmer replied. “I should trademark that and retire. I’ve been thinking about organizing a ‘give back’ day, when people bring back the things they won’t eat.”
The voice of Fox News contributor Marc Siegel, playing on Thomas’s SUV radio, floated over the food pallets, the foragers, the grassy smell of turning vegetables.
“I just drove across the United States Southwest with my son, who is 19, so he could see the country,” Siegel was saying. “Everywhere I went on the interstates, the truckers were complaining to me, the prices are going up. McDonald’s, anything is going up.”
Thomas was sifting through a box next to the migrant women. She found an ear of corn and held it up in the air.
“Aaaaah, look!” she said. The others laughed and cheered. Thomas dug some more and unearthed a second ear and gave it to one of the women. “I feel rich!” she responded in Spanish.
Elk City, population 11,300, has long been a boom-and-bust town along Route 66, its fortunes tied to the oil fields that surround it. When natural gas drilling plummeted about five years ago and crews headed south to the Permian Basin in Texas, dozens of small businesses dried up.
“It’s deader than a hammer,” said Charles Poindexter, a retired oil rig worker waiting in line at the pantry recently. “There’s nothing boomin’ but coffee shops and Mexican restaurants.”
On the first day of every month, SNAP recipients start receiving their benefits and descend on the Walmart here, leaving many shelves bare. It’s why Shinn usually holds off a bit on her monthly grocery shopping.
In June, she waited until almost the following weekend, finally driving over with Maelee and her list. She then took two hours to wind through the cavernous store, painstakingly entering prices on her cellphone’s calculator so she would not go over a self-imposed $350 limit.
Shinn bypassed the iceberg lettuce (two heads for $4.36) that she sometimes uses to make seafood salad, the Reese’s Puffs cereal that is Maelee’s favorite ($3.48) and the packages of Little Debbie Honey Buns ($2.68) that she took to basketball camp last year. At the last minute, the coaches decided Maelee could attend this year at no charge, and Shinn was counting on her daughter’s friends to share their snacks.
Maelee’s one hope: that there might be enough money left after the long walk through the store for a carton of sliced watermelon ($4.58). Not this trip. The only treats that go in the cart are $2 boxes of brownie mix, which will go a lot further.
“They’re used to it, it’s sad to say,” Shinn said. “We all have to sacrifice.”
The bill was $351.85, which left $14 on her SNAP card to last through the end of the month. So 12 days later, Shinn stopped at the food bank to get provisions.
“I’m so tired,” she told Palmer when she got out of the car, still wearing her blue work shirt, her eyes puffy. “I was up till midnight last night.”
The two moms met through their daughters; Maelee is best friends with Palmer’s oldest, MiCayla. The families have grown close, with Palmer and husband Jason, a disabled Iraq War veteran, helping out with rides or watching the kids. Shinn’s ex-husband, who’s incarcerated on substance-abuse-related charges, has not seen his children since 2021 or provided significant monetary support for years, she said. An older son — Tanner, 24, from a previous relationship — lives in town and helps his mom with her rent.
“MiCayla was nervous about doing that Father’s Day post about her dad,” Palmer told her at one point. “She didn’t want to hurt Maelee’s feelings.”
“She’s a daddy’s girl. It kills her,” Shinn said. “Trent won’t talk about it. He says, ‘I don’t have a dad.’ I’m like, ‘Your dad has a disease, an illness.’” Maloree, the go-with-the-flow youngest, doesn’t talk much about him either and seeks refuge with friends from church.
Palmer helped load the food in the car — a flat of strawberries, grapes, milk, biscuit dough, two large packs of frozen chicken, hamburger meat, day-old croissants, cupcakes and a box of Hungry Jack pancake mix.
“Do you want some chicken feet?” Palmer asked. Packs of the bulbous leg meat, donated by the local butcher and labeled “Chicken Paws,” were in the freezer. “Get your teeth real clean!”
“Ew, no!” Shinn said. “My ex-mother-in-law used to make those.”
Maelee and Maloree helped unpack the car at home, a small brick rancher a few blocks away on a street where a neighbor posted “Slow Down. This is a Neighborhood, Not a Racetrack” signs on all the mailboxes. The refrigerator was almost bare, with a single pack of pork chops, a bit of lunch meat and a gallon of milk Shinn had bought at the local grocery the day before — for “nearly 6 bucks!” It was almost gone.
She dreads opening the fridge when there’s nothing in it. Now she had enough food to finish the month. She handed Maelee the package of Hungry Jack to put away.
“Now you can make pancakes!” she said.
“We’re out of syrup,” Maelee said.
A few days later, Shinn went to pick up Maelee from summer basketball conditioning. The teen was hot and tired and asked to stop on the way home for a slushy.
“I hate to tell them no,” Shinn said that evening as she was cooking dinner — chicken breasts, broccoli rice and potatoes. She unwrapped a block of cream cheese and put it in the sizzling pan, then added a package of taco seasoning. “I hate telling them you have to wait another week and a half before we can get a snow cone. … Money plays an issue in everything. Nobody understands this.”
Trent was away at a football scrimmage and Maloree was in the room she shares with her sister, chilling on her bed under blue and white twinkle lights. MiCayla had come to spend the night, and she and Maelee were giggling and playing games on their phones in the living room.
“Do you know what I would use that [summer] card money for if I had it this year?” Shinn said, stirring the chicken. “Birthday cakes.”
Last year she bought two prepared cakes for her daughters, who both have June birthdays. They had little parties at the splash park with friends and served each cake with water and Capri Suns. This year she had to ask her dad to buy Maloree’s cake — a “Baby Shark”-themed creation that cost $42 at Walmart.
Or, thinking about other possibilities, maybe she would let Maelee take the card and buy whatever snacks she wanted for basketball camp — chocolate doughnuts, juices, cereal bars, Bumble Bee tuna packets.
Shinn had done her monthly expenses that day and arrived at $171 for June’s “2 Wks Living.” They were approaching the difficult stretch, where the kids begin to complain about the lack of food in the fridge. Maelee, in particular, gets nervous when they’re out of milk.
“I’ve had to make mac and cheese with water before,” Shinn said. “But she gets mad. When she can’t have milk, she thinks she’s starving.”
Trent, on the other hand, will hardly ever say what’s worrying him, but he’ll instruct his sisters to keep quiet and not bother their mother. About a month ago, he broke down and asked her, “Would it be easier if I wasn’t here?” They both wept.
“Dinner’s ready. Come and eat,” Shinn said to Maelee and MiCayla. Maelee took some chicken and rice, while MiCayla wanted a turkey sandwich. Shinn eyed the remaining portion after the girls were done.
“There’s plenty for Trent. I guess I can go ahead,” she said to the girls. And she began to fill her plate.
Dan Keating and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.
