Stephanie Pete relies on $511 in monthly food benefits to feed her two young daughters.
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On a frigid, windswept afternoon earlier this month, Stephanie Pete pored over a circular in the Amherst Big Y supermarket, elbows braced on the handlebars of a shopping cart.
She was looking for the good deals, she said; the better to stretch the $511 in monthly SNAP benefits she uses to feed herself and her two young daughters.
Minutes later, Pete swiped her EBT card throughout a checkout scanner as the contents of the cart - strawberries, clementines, mixed greens, pasta, canned sweet peas - moved down the lane's conveyor belt. She has been on food benefits since August, and described them as a lifeline for her family.
"It's made it so I'm a lot less stressed, and I don't have to worry necessarily about how my kids are going to eat," Pete said. "Before, no kidding, it was struggle as to how to get by with food. I would have nothing in the refrigerator at times."
Pete, 28, is one of the more than 750,000 Massachusetts residents who receive benefits the federally-funded SNAP program - formerly known as food stamps. In Massachusetts, the program made headlines for the wrong reasons last year, from technical snafus that denied recipients their benefits to high-profile cases of fraud.
But for Pete and her children - Jemma, 6, and Remmy, 17 months - the assistance is essential. Personal and financial circumstances have left Pete without the money necessary to keep food on the table, and SNAP fills that need, she said.
Pete may not fit your stereotypical view of a food stamp recipient.
Pete moved from her native Arizona to Western Massachusetts, following her then-husband east as he pursued a doctorate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The experience was difficult socially, she said; she knew almost no one, and felt profoundly isolated as she raised Jemma, then a toddler, and had her second daughter in 2014. She and her husband are no longer together.
Pete had worked at UMass Amherst's dining services, but Remmy's birth made full-time work impractical; putting Remmy in daycare would have cost at least $130 per week, a significant fraction of the wages Pete would be earning. And her ex-husband's National Science Foundation-funded fellowship at the University of Massachusetts Amherst prohibited him from seeking outside work while in the program, limiting his ability to lend financial help.
Pete moved into a sublet in Amherst in February of 2014, and for several months received WIC benefits to help raise her newborn daughter. But the lease expired in July, and she moved into the Hadley home of a friend she had met working part-time at a dentist's office - with two mouths to feed and little income to speak of.
"It was really hard with having the girls," Pete said. "Between daycare and not having childcare and stuff, I can't have a full time job."
Pete would go to the Amherst Survival Center and return with milk and vegetables, but she said it soon became clear she needed a steadier source of food.
"I knew I had to do it. There was no way I could feed the kids," she said. ""What initially happened was I could not afford even groceries."
In June she had filled out an application for SNAP benefits, and two months later she found herself in the Holyoke office of the state Department of Transitional Assistance. The building was packed, she said, with about 100 people waiting as workers processed stacks of paperwork.
She was accepted into the program, and trips to the grocery store became opportunities rather than sources of stress. She said she knew other SNAP recipients who fed their children on processed and unhealthy foods, and was determined not to make the same choices.
Her kids are not picky, even her youngest - "Pretty much anything you put on her high chair, she'll eat," Pete said. On a recent trip to Big Y, Pete filled her cart with vegetables, fruit and pasta.
Being on the receiving end of food benefits can carry a stigma. When MassLive was seeking sources for this story, social service agencies contacted for potential interviews said it was a tough sell, with SNAP recipients they worked with unwilling to have their name publicly linked to being on benefits. One man shared his story by email but was unwilling to be identified, saying he feared both retaliation from the Department of Transitional Assistance and vitriol from readers and commenters.
Pete said she has not experienced much of that, aside from rudeness by some DTA employees. At the grocery store, however, she does swipe her card quickly; at a glance it looks like a license or credit card.
"Sometimes I feel like people will look at me," Pete said. "I sometimes wish it was a little more inconspicuous."
But above all, she said, she's grateful to put food on the table, as her youngest grows up and her oldest works her way through kindergarten.
"It's definitely been a huge help," she said.