Stone Soup Farm - SNAP How to find help, and how to help

A Tiny Homestead

Today I'm talking with Megan McGovern at Stone Soup Farm.

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00:00
You're listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. Have you thought about being a cottage food producer? Or if you're a cottage food producer, have you thought about expanding it into a small business? Cottage Foodie Con is probably for you. You can find more information at cottagefoodiecon.com and if you use the code HOME15, you'll get 15 % off your registration costs.

00:29
and that price is valid through the end of November. So again, check out cottagefruitycon.com. A tiny homestead is sponsored by uh cottagefoodiecon.com. Today I'm talking with Megan McGovern at Stone Soup Farm in Oregon. Is that right? No, I'm in a little town called Ferndale, Washington, which is about as far north west in the United States you can get without being in the ocean or Canada.

00:59
I was one state away. I screwed up. I'm sorry. uh Good um afternoon, Megan. How are you? Good. I'm doing great. Thanks. Good. um So how's the weather there? um You know, the nice thing about Washington, and we love it here, we are right on the, it's a beautiful place. We're in between mountains on the East and they are just gorgeous mountains. And on the West, about eight miles of us, there is ocean.

01:27
So we have everything we have. could literally if you were doing like a design theme, you could have, you know, Western house in a little log cabin or you could have a cabin in the woods or you could have beach house. It's really fantastic here. And the best part is that it never gets really cold and it never gets really hot. So in the winter never gets dips below freezing a few times, never gets a hard freeze or much snow, a couple inches here and there. Summer never gets above 75, 80 degrees.

01:57
The winter is dark and gloomy and they call it the big dark. In the summer, you've got daylight till almost 10 o'clock at night. You can't even go watch fireworks, 4th of July, because it never gets dark. In the winter, it's dark at 430 and doesn't get light till 815 and we're right heading into that. And it rains every day all day long. And this weekend, this whole week has been dark and gloomy and overcast and sad. Makes me miss summer already and it's only November.

02:26
As I sounds like November. We're kind of in the same boat today. It's drizzly and it's gray and I think it's like 45 degrees outside in Minnesota. Yeah, but it gets cold there. also not only cold, you have sunny days occasionally though, right? Oh, we have lots of beautiful, bright, crisp.

02:46
Yeah, bright blue sunny days, you bright blue sky sunny days. Yes, absolutely. But today is not one of them. my my husband happens to have a doctor's appointment here in an hour. So he's home today. And he just got the wood burning boiler started for the first time this season.

03:05
Yeah, yeah, we're about to start. Same thing. I love that thing. It saves us so much money in the wintertime, because as long as we're willing to do the work, the wood is paid for. Well, we have a very old not OK, not very old by Minnesota standards, but we have a farmhouse that's been a farm since the 1920s. And one of our little buildings outside was built as a place for farmhands to sleep in the 1940s. And my two adults

03:34
sons are both ones in college and ones just graduated and they're both moving home for a while to save money and they want to live in this little outbuilding. It is not insulated. It is not warm. It is basically a barn and they're trying to keep warm with a little propane stove and it's not working. We might need to upgrade to wood for a while or something because it's or I could insulate but you know that's work. So we'll see.

03:59
Whatever you're do you better get on it. No kidding the bar cats are sleeping on their beds right now to get everybody keep warm. yeah, exactly All right. So tell me a little bit about your farm we Honestly, we did not set out to be farmers Although I have always loved food and the food supply and figuring out where my food came from but we have

04:26
three kids who are all gluten-free and dairy-free for health reasons. And so we need to be very strict about what we eat. And my middle son, he's in college right now, but he needed room to roam. He could not be contained in a suburban household. And he's the kid that when you go to the park, he's the one that all the other moms are pointing at the tallest tree and saying, whose kid is that?

04:54
and it would be mine. And so when we, we had to move to Washington for my husband's job and we decided that a farm, all he wanted was goats and we have always homeschooled, but he in particular was the one who benefited the most from homeschooling. We call it goat schooling. And so we needed a place where he could have goats and trees to climb and where he could just move and move and move. And this was perfect for him. It's an old dairy farm from the 1920s.

05:23
And it had been neglected for the last 30, 40 years and was kind of falling apart. But we moved here and got that boy a goat and holy moly, he was happy. And within a couple of years we were in 4-H and all of a sudden we had cows and we were raising beef cows or steers. And we had a couple of cows to raise the steers. And it was a lot of fun. We've never done crops. I've just done extensive gardening. But Washington State is fantastic for food.

05:52
Because this was an old farm stand or farmstead, we had apple trees that are 100 years old and there's blackberry bushes everywhere. And if you spit out a cherry seed, a tree grows the next year. It's just incredibly fertile and beautiful. And with all this rain, you know, there's never a drought. There's a pond, there's a creek. It's just kind of a lovely place. And we never really made much money on the farm, but we always made enough that we had a side of beef in the freezer and maybe uh half

06:21
pig and you know tons of applesauce and apple cider and then we trade with neighbors and so it wasn't ever designed to make money but it was certainly designed to you know keep a farming lifestyle and keeping up with our food and our family. love it and I love that you called it goat schooling that is beautiful. Well he always said he was not academic and he wasn't going to go to college and he wasn't interested in anything and there was no way he was very interested he has his own

06:51
you know, special interests, we'll call them, and his was politics and he was very, very into politics. And I said, well, you can't do much with politics if you don't go to college. There's, you know, there's not much call for guys who graduated from high school but can name every senator. It's not really, you know, a niche market for that. And with goat schooling, we never did any curriculum. We never did anything except

07:16
you know, following his interests. And so he was in a program for politics in high school called Youth and Government. It's run by the YMCA and it teaches you how to write a bill and how to work with state legislature and what it means to be in politics. And so he was always very into that. And we did a lot of cool stuff homeschooling. And I'll tell you what, that kid got into every college he applied to and he got waitlisted at Harvard. so goat schooling apparently works and that might be my new

07:43
Big thing, maybe I'll make my first million dollars by teaching people how to goat school. I think you should. think the world would be a better place if you did. So anyway, it's been a, we're slowing down now. My husband is 62 and he's always had an outside job to feed the cows. And since my sons are both grown, my 15 year old daughter, for whatever reason, doesn't like slopping pigs and feeding cows. So. oh

08:10
The animals are slowing down. know, funny, huh? But we still have the acreage and we still have my son's beloved goats. And I'm still very uh heavily involved in the food community in our town. You are amazing at setting me up for the segue. Thank you. Kind of figured. I really wanted to hear about your farm because that's kind of what the podcast is about. And I really love talking to people who are doing things like you're doing.

08:40
But I saw a couple of your Facebook posts about this situation with Snap. And I was like, I need to talk to this lady because I need to talk to somebody about my feelings about this Snap situation going on in America right now. So I'm going to let, well, I actually made notes. That's how focused I was on this. Okay, good. So I'm going to share what I found and then you can jump in and tell me what you think about what I found.

09:08
The thing is, a lot of people assume that SNAP is something that only people who are lazy and of color need. And this is not true. I found statistics. Roughly one in eight people in the U.S. used SNAP benefits this year, with approximately 42 million Americans receiving aid to afford groceries each month. That's a lot of people.

09:36
Here's the thing, SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition, because what it is meant to do is to keep children, especially, but people who are disabled and people who need a little boost, is designed to help them get better nutrition. Because the fundamental American system has always been set up since the 1940s, since we set up Social Security and all the other benefits we now take for granted, things like weekends.

10:06
and no more child labor, we now have programs set up that in theory every American should have basic access to food. That everybody should either be able to, if you have a disability and can't work, you are too aged to work, you have a back that won't allow you to do any of, and you had always worked in a factory line, that um you're supposed to get a basic supplemental

10:34
need that would enable you to feed yourself. But what was happening was people weren't eating well enough. Children were not getting enough nutrition. People were living on rice. And SNAP is set up to make sure that you get a little bit extra every month so that a mother with three kids, if her husband has passed away, the husband's not in the picture, there's no child support, her kids can get apples, or they can get oranges, or once in a while they could get a birthday cake or ingredients for birthday cake from the store. So it's not meant to be something that

11:03
is the only way that people live. That's why it's called the Supplemental Program. Right. But the way things have gone, and I don't care who you blame or how you think we got here, the way things have gone, many people are not getting even the basics for food. And there are a lot of families, I'm friends with a family, a homeschooling family, that had adopted three children from foster care because of severe neglect and

11:33
One of the things that ah the kids had told me, they became very good friends with my friends, with my kids, that the hardest weeks of the year for them were Easter break and Thanksgiving break because the rest of the year, every day they ate at school, they ate breakfast and lunch every day, five days a week. They struggled on weekends because their parents didn't feed them, but at least they knew they had those 10 meals a week.

11:58
But during Easter week, there's no extra lunch program. The school doesn't set up an extra lunch program during that break. during Christmas, there's a break. And usually during Christmas, they would have relatives, they would have friends, they would have some leftover food somewhere. But that was all they got was what the school gave them. So something like that, and this, mean, obviously the parents didn't even bother applying to SNAP where they kept the food for themselves. But kids like that, there are millions of kids like that in the United States.

12:27
who don't have any food at all, and they don't have the basics. And I think people seem to misunderstand and think that there's people who are just applying for SNAP and eating it on their own. I have a sister who's homeless. She's mentally ill. She can't live on her own. We, as my family, have kind of plugged in to help her get an apartment because she was living on the streets. And she's applied for SNAP, and she gets $300 a month for food.

12:58
And of course we could all pitch in and also give her 300 a month for food. But there are plenty of people who don't have families who could pitch in and get an apartment. There are people on the streets who have no food at all. And SNAP is just, I mean, if you're living in a tent and the only food you get is, you know, your $150 in SNAP benefits, that's about $35 a week, something like that, that you're trying to make last all month long. And

13:27
$35 a week doesn't last long. You know, not for one person and not if you don't have a kitchen and you're trying to make sandwiches, it's literally just tuna fish and a thing of mayonnaise and bread from the dollar store. And it's even worse now because of inflation. Oh, it's worse now because of inflation and it's because of the restrictions and it's worse because you have to do all sorts of hoops to jump through to prove that you benefit for this. And I hear so many accusations and

13:56
things like, oh, well, it's only going to illegal immigrants. If you look at the application, I'm not making this up. This isn't fake news. If you go look at the application for SNAP, the first thing it says is you have to be a legal citizen or you have to be legal resident or a citizen of the United States to get SNAP benefits. End of discussion. So it's not going to people who don't need it. No one is going to go apply for SNAP if they don't need it. And they're not going to get approved if they don't need it.

14:23
I don't know. see a lot of people complaining and say, well, they buy soda and they buy pizza and how dare they, you know, they're buying steak. Well, you know what, what's in your grocery cart people? How, you know, how do you your business? Yeah. And the other thing is, is that I thought with SNAP benefits, you couldn't buy like, like candy or, Oh no, you can buy whatever you want. And that is, and I understand to some degree, I understand

14:50
why people don't want other people buying candy or pop with their own, with tax money. But on the other hand, it really is supplemental. If the parents of these kids are really just getting by, if they're buying stuff for a birthday cake, or they want to have a party for their kid because their kids never had one, and they take $25 out of their SNAP benefits to buy some candy for a party, or they take $25 to buy some soda so that their kids have soda for the field trip like everybody else,

15:20
I can't imagine judging somebody for that. And if they didn't do that, yeah. I didn't know that. um When I had my first child, my only daughter, I got WIC benefits, which is not the same thing. And with WIC, I was not allowed to get anything except stuff that was nutritionally dense like peanut butter and milk and eggs. WIC is set up. um

15:45
for women and children, but it's also set up to help farmers. It's one of the ways that they get rid of excess cheese and milk is they know it's going to go into the WIC program. And it's one of ways they keep dairy prices stable. They know it's going to go into the WIC program. Okay. I don't want to get sidetracked, but that's why I would confuse. No, But this program is literally, they give you basically cash on a card. You can buy whatever you want, except what I think is interesting. You can't buy hot food. So you can't buy a rotisserie chicken. You can't buy a heated up lasagna. You can't buy a

16:14
pizza from the window at the grocery store where they have hot pizzas set there. Which I agree, if you are on WIC and you're using this money, you should be buying a chicken and cooking it. But there are so many people now who are living in a shelter, staying at their sister's house on the couch, and they can't cook a whole chicken. There are so many people who can't cook nowadays. At all. I'm a scout master for a scout troop here. And one of the things we're doing this month is

16:43
We're going to go and volunteer at a place like a food pantry where they hand out meals and food to people. And I am very, very passionate about food rescue. And this is one of the places that rescues food that would be thrown away. And so this place always has carrots and lettuce and onions to hand out to people. But a lot of the people who come through are living in a car. And if you're living in a car, you're living in an RV with a broken heater, handing somebody an onion isn't going to help anything.

17:13
No. And giving someone carrots with the... So many people, this is the other thing that gets me besides food waste is the fact that our government and our healthcare system treats teeth as a luxury item. And so many people have no teeth that it makes it really hard to feed people because you can't feed anybody anything except soup if they're missing three teeth. Or rice. Or rye-lates or something. It's rice.

17:41
It's rice, bread, soup, stew. And so when you hand somebody carrots, onions, and potatoes, and they're raw, of course it's wonderful food that can go to somebody who's hungry. But there are a lot of people who can't benefit from this kind of thing. And so I just think people are missing the point when they say, oh, snap benefits go to lazy people who are buying junk. Of course there are people who are buying junk. Most of them are

18:09
there are a lot of poor people who are really uneducated about food and about nutrition and there people who are super educated about food and nutrition but who can't do better and they can't do better because they're living in their car or because their kids have eating disorders or the kids have anxiety or because that's what the other kids in their class want and they just want their kid to feel like they fit in. You know? Absolutely. And this situation with SNAP when I found out what three weeks ago?

18:38
that people who receive SNAP benefits weren't going to receive them. I had a moment of just tears in my eyes because all I could think about was all these little kids who aren't going to eat well. Well, you know what's going to happen? I was really upset.

18:56
Go ahead. No, go ahead. You go first. What did you say to your husband? I said to my husband, said, honey, I I thought things were bad. said, things just went from bad to abysmal. And he was like, what are you talking about? And I explained it to him and I had tears in my eyes. And he said, you love our children more than life itself. said, I sure do. And they're adults. He said, you love babies and toddlers.

19:21
a lot. I said, do. said, and that's who this is really, really, really going to affect because number one, those kids are not going to have food that's good for them. Number two, their parents are going to be so stressed out that that's going to affect them. said, this is just like a snowball effect. And I just talked for 20 minutes and he was like, so what can you do? And I laughed and I said, I'm going to find somebody to chat with about on my podcast.

19:51
He said, do that. He said, because you are one person, he said, but you have a voice. And I was like, yes, I do. So that's why we're talking. So one of the things, what I was going say before is that one of the things is that in a lot of families, the kids won't go hungry because the mother won't eat. Yep. And that's just a hundred percent fact that a lot of mothers, especially right now, they've always been eating light and telling the kids they're not hungry. But now the mother just won't eat and that's just the way it goes.

20:21
And of course there are other people who won't eat, there's, so a couple of things about SNAP. um 60 % of the families that use SNAP have children under 18 and the other 40%, almost all of them are um elderly and they cannot go get a job. They cannot go, you know, do better. They're, social security doesn't cover their basic expenses if they have social security and

20:48
So there's no way for them to supplement this. This is it. They just go without. But one of the interesting things is that 200,000 people that are on SNAP or using SNAP benefits are active duty military. you're talking about a father who's deployed in the military and a mother with two kids who's left behind on base or in their hometown. And the father's pay doesn't stretch far enough to cover basic

21:17
living because if it did, then the family wouldn't qualify for SNAP. So the father, I don't know what starting salary for the military is probably around $40,000 a year. It's probably minimum wage in a lot of uh cases if the father gets deployed. And I may be way off military. I'm terrible with numbers like that. But it's low enough that it qualifies as below the standard for SNAP. So the father gets deployed. The mother stays behind with two kids. They don't have money for food. Should the mother go get a job?

21:45
I mean, who knows what her circumstances is? Maybe her mother's on hospice. Maybe her dad lives with them. Maybe one of her kids is disabled. It doesn't matter. We can't just tell everybody to go get a job. In the meantime, these people who are saying, they don't deserve it, who deserves it more? A kid whose father is deployed doesn't deserve food? Is that really what you're saying when you say cut SNAP benefits?

22:12
So I'm just frustrated by the whole thing. But yes, I do think there are things we can do to fix it. Okay. Well, I don't know. I don't know how to fix the government being shut down, but I do know that as a single person in the world, I'm married, but as a single human being, myself, entity, there are things that I can do. And I'm doing one of them by talking about this with you. The other thing that I can do.

22:40
is I can go to our local food shelf, we are friends with the president, and say, what do you need? Do you need us to volunteer? Do you need money? Do you need gift cards so that people can go buy their own groceries? What do you need? And do those things. The other thing is that churches, I don't know, when I was a kid, I'm 56, but when I was a kid, the local church, when somebody needed help,

23:09
They jumped right to it. I don't know churches are still like that. I hope that they are. And in Minnesota, there is a phone number that you can call. I think it's called the first call for help. And they specifically help people, whether you're having a mental health crisis, whether you need food, whether you need housing, that's the place you call and they are the resource to help you. I don't know if every state has that, but Minnesota does. I'm sure most states have some kind of

23:38
hotline or some kind of place where you can go and you can call and they give you access to all of the state funding things. However, most state budgets are really in trouble right now. There's not a lot of food going to food banks. There's certainly not extra flowing anywhere. um I did read this morning that in some states, SNAP benefits are being turned back on again, even though there's a court order saying they shouldn't and they're going back and forth. um

24:06
Even if SNAP benefits were turned back on today, there are so many cuts everywhere that this is an important conversation to have about how to help. what we're trying to do is we can't, it's like when you show up to you know, an accident scene and there's, you know, hundred bodies on the ground and you don't know who's well and who's sick and who's, you're playing triage, but you're a civilian. Say you have a...

24:31
basic, basic first aid and you understand how to help a person in shock, but you're certainly not a trauma surgeon, your job isn't to go into surgery on this and your job isn't to say, whose fault was the accident? And your fault isn't to say, well, I'm going to blame this person or that person or talk about how the airplane's gauge must've been faulty. Your job is to look at the first person next to you and say, what can I do to help you?

25:01
And how, or how can I help the helpers? You go to the lead helper, the person who's running the trauma response and say, what do you need? Your job isn't to go to each individual person and say, well, how do you feel about this? Can you prove to me that you need help more than the person over there? I need you to tell me that you deserve help before I go help anybody else. Cause I need to see who's in that none of that matters. What matters is going to the person who does know how to help, which would be here.

25:30
the food pantries, the churches, the areas in our, our, every community that have been doing this for years. And here you are just showing up on the scene saying, I know how to do it better than you. And I want to help, but it needs to feel good. Or I want to help, but I don't like the way you're doing it. And I don't like, I know the church is handing out food, but it's not the same denomination I'm in. So maybe none of that matters. No, don't make it about you. Make it about the people who need help. Right. And

25:58
So literally there are two ways to help. And one would be going to the person on the ground nearest to you and saying, what do you need right this second? Are you dying? Do you need a band-aid? Do you have a headache? How can I stabilize you until help can get here? The other thing you can do is go to the head of the place, the food bank, whatever it is, and say, what do you want me to do? And they might say, don't talk to the people on the ground. Go get me more bandages.

26:27
Can you call 14 different people for me and get them to come help? Whatever it is they want, that's the way you can be most useful. And in the food banks case, so many people want to help by buying canned food or going to their grocery store and getting donations to give to the food bank. And that is 100 % a viable, useful way to give to the food bank and to give to people.

26:54
The food banks are also inundated with boxes of canned mac and cheese or boxes of mac and cheese and canned green beans. And every single year at Thanksgiving, they have thousands of cans of green beans, but they don't have apples. Right. And they might not have rice and they might not have beans because nobody wants to give them that because that's not nearly as much fun as giving them mac and cheese. And if you give them 10 boxes of Kraft mac and cheese for a family that is living in a shelter and they don't have butter and they don't have milk.

27:23
and they don't have a way to cook it, you're not actually helping. It's like going to one of the people on the ground who has a broken leg and putting a bandage on their arm. What you want to do is help, but the help isn't what they need. So you need to figure out a way that your help can better align with what the helpers want. And so if you call your local food bank or right now, probably in every community, there are Facebook posts from the food bank and there are, you know,

27:53
articles in newspaper from the food bank saying, this is how you can help. And unfortunately, the number one thing they want is cash. Yeah. not many people, a lot of people don't have the cash to donate. But my suggestion, and some people have said this is not the best suggestion, and I'll tell you why, but I love the suggestion. My suggestion is everybody stop, if you have any discretionary income at all.

28:18
If you can afford a coffee out, if you eat at a diner, if you go and get pie once in a while, if you go to McDonald's, stop doing that. Take that money and take it to the food bank. Because if we can afford to eat out right now and we're out eating anything, there are people and the food banks could use that money better. And this is what it means to love our neighbors is to give up a meal out. I'm not saying skip a meal, eat it at home. ah But take that income and

28:47
give it to the food bank. And the reason I suggest that instead of taking that money and going and buying food for someone is because my oldest son, who is a sweet, kind young man, he's just wonderful. And he spent three months in Asia and Cambodia and Laos and China, and really did a lot of great work with them. he worked with, he lived with the family of farmers for a while in Cambodia. And he came home

29:17
to our farm and said, why aren't we growing food for people? There are people hungry. What is wrong with us that we have land and we're not growing crops? And he was about, oh, I think 19 when he came home and he spent an entire summer growing an acres worth of potatoes. And it was all by himself and we don't have a tractor. He just did it all by hand and plowed and everything else. And he grew a lot of potatoes and he donated them to the food bank and they were thrilled.

29:46
But they said, this is about $30 worth of potatoes for us. Yeah. And he said, what? And he said, yeah, we have grants and we're tax free and we can buy them in lots and we can buy them by the truckload. We can buy a truckload of potatoes for about $40. So we appreciate the potatoes and we love that. But if you're going to spend hundreds of hours on something,

30:11
you could spend the hundred, because he asked how he could help better. And they were not being unkind. They were really as nice as they could be. But they said, if you want to spend hundreds of hours on something, you could do a fundraiser. If you raised $500 with a fundraiser, we could buy 10 truckloads of potatoes. And he was like, why does anybody grow potatoes? Like, well, first, because they like the taste of potatoes and because it's good. But also, you know, when you give money to the food bank,

30:36
It goes a lot further than anything you could do. Buying a 10 pound bag of potatoes and donating it to Food Bank is great. That cost of that 10 pound bag of potatoes might be able to buy them 70 pounds of potatoes. Yeah, the dollar goes further because of how it works. And I'm glad you said that because I was going to bring that up too. um The other thing that I wanted to say is that

31:02
A lot of things that people are doing right now are so super cool and I want to wrap it up here because I try to keep these at 30 minutes. I'm going to wrap it up with this. In Minnesota, a lot of our restaurants are basically telling people if you are hungry, come eat. You don't have to pay for it. Come eat. You don't have to prove that you have SNAP benefits. Just if you're hungry, come talk to us. And some of them

31:31
have said no questions asked. Some of them have said no questions asked unless we feel like we're being taken advantage of and then we will ask questions. I am so proud of these restaurants that are trying to help and I get that it's a good public relations thing but they don't have to. course. No and I've seen yeah I've seen a couple places saying we'll give you personal pan pizzas to all children no questions just bring your kids. Yep and that's amazing.

32:00
The other thing that I've seen is a lot of our libraries are setting up little food libraries inside the library. And yes, it's canned goods and it's macaroni and cheese, but at least it's something. They're trying to do something. Oh, and I'm not dismissing canned goods and macaroni and cheese. If you're hungry, macaroni and cheese in a can of tomatoes goes a long way. And there are plenty of people who live in houses and who have stable housing. But if they spend their rent money on food,

32:30
won't have housing. so mac and cheese goes a long way if you've got a kitchen. The other thing that I would suggest if you want to bring food to a food pantry or a food shelf is the instant oatmeal that you can get that you just put in hot water. The flavored ones, the packets. They're not really good for you. They're not like steel-cut oats with raisins and all the good things. uh

32:57
That's the kind of thing that people who can't cook could actually just get hot water from the sink. It doesn't have to be hot, hot. It just has to be warm. And they have some kind of food that they can just pour in. You can literally pour water into that bag.

33:14
Yeah, mean flavor and also if you're sleeping rough or if you're turning down your heating oil to save money, a hot meal or hot breakfast or hot dinner goes a long way to keeping warm. Yeah, exactly. And if you're going to get mac and cheese, get the mac and cheese that's already in the little cup and all you need is water. Yeah. There are ways around this to make it work. there are. I mean, that's what we're doing with my scout troop is we're trying to create ready to eat meals that somebody with

33:44
Bad teeth can eat that somebody, you're living in a tent, you can just heat up. But also something that people in a family would like. If they could maybe add a potato or two, would even make it better. Yes, absolutely. And actually, I lied. I'm going to wrap it up with this. OK. If you don't know how to cook and you have a kitchen, if you live in a place where you have a kitchen and you could be cooking, learn to freaking cook. You're going to save yourself some money.

34:12
Well, yeah, and you're going to eat a whole lot better too. Yes. This, this I don't cook thing. It makes me crazy. I don't understand. And I'm talking about people who have a kitchen with a stove and with an oven and with a microwave and with a refrigerator. You know, if you have the accessories to do it, cooking is fun. So cooking is fun. Even, even just adding an egg to ramen makes a difference. You know? Yeah. So

34:40
I just, there's so many things about food that are so important. And then SNAP benefits get cut. And I was like, okay, it's time to talk about food. Hey, I don't know if you and I are going to change the world by talking about it, but it's a good place to start because maybe somebody else, if we have enough people trying to change the world, eventually it will, it will make a difference. Yeah. I just want people to know where they can go to get help. And I want people who want to help to know how they can offer their help.

35:09
That's all I want right now. yeah, anything we can do. All right, Megan, thank you so much for going on a minor tear with me about this. I appreciate it. And where can people find you online? uh My, I'm mostly on Facebook and it's Megan McGovern, M-E-A-G-A-N McGovern. And I have a Facebook page where I about those children and homeschooling and all sorts of stuff.

35:35
Yes. Go check out Megan's page. I was looking at the other day and I could have spent hours reading through it, but it didn't have hours. I was very disappointed in myself. All right, Megan, as always, people can find me at a tinyhomesteadpodcast.com. Check out my Patreon, patreon.com slash a tiny homestead. And a tiny homestead podcast is sponsored by Cottage Foodie Con. Cause I just got another sponsor. I'm so excited.

36:03
Thank you, Megan. I really You're welcome. Thank you. I appreciate being here. All right. Bye. Bye.