(Food) Freedom!
I won’t let President Trump starve me out and keep me down. Because I would really, really love to stick around.
President Trump just cut off SNAP—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps.
Next month nearly 42 million Americans—most of them children, elders, or folks with disabilities—will miss meals because there isn’t money left after rent and bills. Seventeen million children stand to go hungry because Trump choked off their food supply.
This isn’t an accidental side effect of the government shutdown. This on purpose.
Manufacturing unrest by choking off the food supply so you can declare an “emergency,” impose martial law, and consolidate power is one of the oldest gambits in the wannabe-dictator playbook. Even our hominid ancestors ran early versions of it back in pre-caveman times.
President Trump watched the unrest that unfolded in our nation’s cities after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and hopes for a repeat. Hungry people desperate enough to riot would give him the pretext he wants to lock down our cities.
We can stop that. We can donate time, money, or non-perishables to our local food shelves to help our community members in need.
But we shouldn’t fool ourselves: this won’t stop here. Today, Trump is pushing the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised folks into survival mode. Tomorrow, it could be you.
Cutting off food stamps for the poorest Americans is a mere preview. You’re next.
Make no mistake, President Trump is coming for your food.
Humans can survive without food for three weeks, but most of us need three meals a day to thrive. Most Americans live in cities and suburbs where we can’t forage or farm enough to feed ourselves. Unless you have a big yard, a green thumb, and a tolerance for urban rodents or eating polluted lake fish (which you really shouldn’t), you depend on the system for sustenance.
Chances are, you couldn’t last for a week without that system, even if you binge watch survival shows on the reg like me.
President Trump understands this on a visceral level: control the food, control the population. We’ve already seen previews of what Dictator Trump’s America would look like with ICE raids that turned residential neighborhoods into militarized zones.
Whether through accelerated inflation, engineered scarcity, or some other manufactured crisis, the aim is the same: make the public dependent, fearful, and controllable. Without food sovereignty, we’ll be at Trump’s authoritarian mercy.
And anyone who still thinks he’ll voluntarily relinquish power is either a fool or living in a bunker. That man intends to die in the White House.
Allowing that to happen is madness when the writing’s blazing on the wall in high-wattage neon.
But we can do something about it. We can reclaim our food freedom.
Most of our yards are decorative grass, concrete, and unused soil. We waste water and energy on landscapes that give nothing back. The way we operate is unsustainable. We must reclaim the land, one plot at a time.
Next spring, dig up a piece of your yard and plant a garden. Don’t know how? Learn online. Or ask a neighbor for help and offer to share the harvest. Don’t have a yard? Join a community garden.
If you’re in Minneapolis where I live, you can find information about managing a community garden plot here:
If you live elsewhere, just type “community garden near me” into Google. You’ll find information about plot applications, tool shares, seed banks, and teamups.
Next spring, instead of spending five hours at a protest that changes nothing, spend that time planting a garden and share your harvest with your neighbor. There’s your protest: plant a seed and grow something that feeds people. When Trump tells us we can’t eat, tell him “yes we can!”
As my SO Jodi bluntly put it, “Fuck a protest, plant a garden.” And after you do that, divest from the stock market.
We won’t create the New Earth with lofty language and performative protests. Talk is cheap. Real transformation requires action and sacrifice for the greater good—practical, sometimes painful work that builds resilience for the long haul.
We need anti-fragility in the face of food scarcity to shield us from authoritarianism. We need shared systems that get stronger under duress: community kitchens, seed libraries, neighborhood harvest shares. That’s how you defend democracy — by making communities unbreakable. We won’t stand up to Dictator Trump unless we come together in community to defend our food freedom.
We’ve grown soft as a species. Most of us view living off the land as something people only do on reality TV shows, even though that’s what humans did for most of our existence. We need to regain our ability to tune into primal intelligence and basic food procurement competence.
I mostly eat a vegan diet for spiritual reasons, but it’s not delivering enough caloric bang for the buck as I age and my body degrades. I don’t want to kill animals or own guns, but I also refuse to be starved into submission.
So my twelve-year-old son and I are taking steps toward food sovereignty. Over the winter we’ll train with a fancy crossbow (yes, archery purists will scoff) and aim to procure turkey in the spring. The boy’s super excited about it, and while I’m not eager to take out a gobbler, I’d way rather do that than let Trump starve us out. And if we do this right, we’ll have enough to feed our family and share with a neighbor in need. For now, I’ll hold off on encouraging others to hunt until I’ve done it myself and can speak from experience.
Do what you can today: donate to a food shelf, volunteer, sign up for a community garden plot, learn to forage, grow and preserve food. Share your abundance.
Food freedom isn’t a slogan. It’s a survival strategy and a powerful form of protest. President Trump’s cruel decision to cut off food assistance for 17 millon kids shows he doesn’t care who gets in the way of his hunger for power.
Grow food. Procure food. Share food. Do that, and we take away the power of anyone who tries to use hunger as a weapon.
