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Poor People Deserve To Taste Something Other Than Shame
My mom was already ashamed and sorry. She deserved to also eat pie.
“They’re buying steak and lobster with food stamps!”
Every few months this headline, or one like it, finds its way around conservative publications, into political pundit shows, and onto senate floors. A relic of the “Welfare Queen” stories of the ’80s, the fear of poor people squandering the charity of hard-working American tax dollars leads to countless classist memes, reactionary petitions, and tighter restrictions on the ways in which poor Americans are allowed to live.
When I hear these words, I don’t think of lobster or steak, I think of Boston cream pie. A Boston cream pie was what my mother came home with one evening when I was in the 6th grade. She walked in the house after another evening of working late and placed a paper grocery bag on the dining table.
“Kids!” she announced excitedly, “I’ve got a treat for you!”
My brother and I gathered around the table as she produced a cake from the grocery bag. “Ever have a Boston cream pie?” she asked.
I was furious with her.
By 6th grade I had already figured out that we were poor and that it was a moral failure on our part. We were…
