There’s a silence in the pantry. Not the kind that comes from peace or fullness, but the kind that hums with absence. A low, aching quiet. The kind that settles in when the fridge light flickers out and the shelves hold more air than food. That’s the silence creeping into homes across New Hampshire as the federal shutdown drags on, and the funding cliff for food assistance programs inches closer. Not a metaphorical cliff. A real one. With numbers. With names. With children who don’t understand why the cereal box is empty again.
In Concord, the Department of Health and Human Services is counting days. Not in weeks or months, but in how long they can keep the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program afloat. The math is brutal. If the shutdown continues, the funding dries up. And when it does, the state will have to decide who eats and who waits. There’s no poetry in that. Just policy. Just scarcity. Just a system cracking under the weight of political gridlock and bureaucratic inertia.
WIC isn’t just a line item in a budget. It’s formula. It’s milk. It’s the difference between a toddler growing and a toddler shrinking. In New Hampshire, over 11,000 people rely on it. Most of them are children. Some are pregnant women. All of them are vulnerable. And all of them are now tethered to a funding stream that’s evaporating by the hour. The state has enough reserves to last through November. After that, it’s a question mark. A blank space. A bureaucratic shrug.
Officials are trying to stretch what they have. They’re looking at contingency plans, emergency reserves, administrative gymnastics. But the truth is, there’s no substitute for federal dollars. No workaround for a system designed to be national, not patchwork. And while the state scrambles, families are already feeling the squeeze. Grocery lists are shrinking. Parents are skipping meals. Diapers are being rationed. The shutdown isn’t just a political standoff, it’s a slow bleed. And the ones bleeding aren’t the ones holding the purse strings.
Outside the statehouse, the nonprofit sector is bracing for impact. Food pantries are seeing upticks. Shelters are fielding more calls. Mutual aid networks are revving up, again. It’s a familiar rhythm now. Crisis, response, exhaustion. Repeat. But this time feels different. Heavier. More brittle. Because the shutdown isn’t just threatening WIC. It’s looming over SNAP, over school lunch programs, over the entire fragile web that keeps low-income families from falling through the cracks. And the cracks are widening.
There’s a term for what happens when benefits vanish overnight: the cliff effect. It’s when a small change, like a shutdown, or a missed paycheck, sends a family tumbling out of eligibility, out of support, out of stability. It’s not a gentle slope. It’s a drop. And there’s no safety net at the bottom. Just the cold calculus of poverty. Just the quiet shame of asking for help and hearing, “We’re out.”
In Manchester, a mother of two is already planning for December. She’s cutting back on fresh produce. She’s skipping the pharmacy. She’s wondering if she’ll have to choose between rent and groceries. She doesn’t want her name in the paper. She doesn’t want pity. She just wants the system to work. To do what it promised. To feed her kids. That’s all.
Meanwhile, in Washington, the shutdown grinds on. Negotiations stall. Statements are made. Blame is passed like a hot potato. But none of that fills a lunchbox. None of that puts formula on the shelf. The disconnect is staggering. While lawmakers debate, families calculate. How many meals can we stretch from this bag of rice? Can we make it to the end of the month? What happens if we can’t?
There’s a kind of violence in this kind of waiting. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind. The kind that wears you down. That makes you feel small. That makes you feel like a number on a spreadsheet. And for families in New Hampshire, that violence is becoming routine. Expected. Normalized. That’s the real danger. Not just the funding cliff, but the way we’ve learned to live with it. The way we’ve accepted that some children will go hungry while others debate policy on cable news.
It’s easy to talk about resilience. About community. About how people come together in hard times. And they do. They always do. But resilience shouldn’t be a requirement for survival. Hunger shouldn’t be a test of character. And food shouldn’t be a privilege. It should be a given. A baseline. A promise kept.
As the shutdown continues, that promise is fraying. And the silence in the pantry is growing louder. It’s not just the absence of food. It’s the absence of certainty. Of dignity. Of care. And unless something changes, unless the funding comes through, unless the system remembers who it’s supposed to serve, that silence will become a roar. Not in protest. But in need. In hunger. In the quiet, aching question: why?
