The first day of February marked the start of SNAP cuts in Illinois. On Jan. 30th, our SNAP office of 23 years closed after our funding was eliminated under the One Big Beautiful Bill, resulting in the layoff of 37 staff members.
This comes on the heels of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins releasing new Dietary Guidelines for Americans — a convergence of cuts and changes that seems intentional.
The new dietary guidelines strongly emphasize eating whole, nutrient-dense foods such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains — the same guidance that has been a staple of nutrition messaging for years. Yet the new guidelines also suggests that red meat falls into this category, which is odd considering you need to have processed a slaughtered cow, which by definition seems to fall into the “processed food” category. Without a program like SNAP-Ed to help people make sense of these shifts, who will pick up the work?
For the past 23 years, we have worked with low-income communities, teaching them how to eat healthy and lead an active lifestyle. A huge part of our work involves helping families and individuals navigate the Dietary Guidelines for Americans into practical guidance, especially when the guidance was presented as a pyramid. The MyPlate graphic mimics an actual plate that shows how much space each food groups should occupy — a sensible improvement from the abstraction of the pyramid. It conveyed clear and actionable information at a glance, the new upside-down pyramid does not; it requires abstraction and far more explanation to understand.
If the current administration was truly concerned about the health of the populace, as suggested in their framing of the dietary guideline changes, then the complete dissolution of the SNAP-Ed program would not have happened. Our work has a direct and lasting impact on the wellbeing of entire communities, even among residents who never interact with us directly. We work closely with large institutions that impact hundreds of thousands of people across Chicago. Years ago, we helped draft the health and wellness policies at Chicago Public Schools; while not perfect, they were a big improvement in what existed previously. We also championed universal breakfast, breakfast after the bell, and a variety of other initiatives across the state of Illinois, including Hunters Feeding Illinois, a hunters meat donation program that provided lean protein to communities in need.
Our work is dependent on building and nourishing trust — the trust of people who started as strangers, who then became colleagues, collaborators, friends and in some cases became family.
When the funding for our program was cut, it effectively ended our program and all programs like it nationwide. We have 37 colleagues in the city of Chicago and another 200 across the state of Illinois whose jobs have been cut. There will be no trusted colleague to call on to talk about the new guidelines. There will be no one to teach our most at-risk community members cooking classes or how to stretch their food dollars. No one to help institutional food purchasers navigate the new guidelines.
The complicated abstraction of the upside-down food pyramid along with the odd recommendations for increasing protein, will not easily be resolved. Lean protein is important, but the pervasive idea that we have a shortage of protein in the American diet is misguided at best. The recommendation of eating whole foods is an excellent recommendation and is one of the strongest points in the guidance.
With the new cuts to SNAP benefits and the new added work requirements, more families will need help stretching their food dollars. The loss of a program like ours will have an untold and far-reaching impact.
We call on our elected officials to secure state funding for SNAP-Ed and prioritize solutions for the hardest hit families across the state and in the city of Chicago. Let’s not wait until a crisis fully emerges when we can clearly read the writing on the wall.