On a drizzly day in late August, RaShawn Foxglove took a mid-morning smoke break during a lull in her shift at the tribal-owned store in Unalakleet, Alaska. The weather was typical for early autumn, gray and damp, the potholes on the gravel roads swelling with soupy rainwater. Foxglove stood in a shedlike construction adjacent to the store, blowing smoke away toward the side open to the elements.
Foxglove, who is 33 years old, was born in Anchorage, but has spent most of her life since childhood in Unalakleet, where her father was raised. She has also participated in Medicaid for her entire adult life. She knows that she’s not alone in receiving benefits. At medical appointments, she has seen some of her neighbors—also reliant on Medicaid—sitting in the waiting room alongside her. Nowadays, she wishes her community might be a little more open about struggles that they are facing. “It’s not really something people talk about, not really, no. But I think they should,” she mused.
It has always been expensive to live in Unalakleet, a village spanning just under three square miles positioned along the Norton Sound on the Bering Sea. But by her reckoning, the past year or two has seen a dramatic increase in prices across the board—perhaps because of the tariffs implemented by President Donald Trump, she thinks, or because of the effort and cost of shipping food items to such a remote location.
Whatever the reason, the effect on daily life in Unalakleet is apparent. A single can of sliced peaches sold in the store where Foxglove works as a cashier and stocker costs more than $4, more than twice the cost of a can someone in Anchorage could buy at Walmart. A trip to and from Anchorage, where she has received medical care for her heart, can cost around $1,000—and that’s not including the price of the actual appointment.
[See our full comparison of grocery prices in Unalakleet and Anchorage.]
As an Alaska Native, Foxglove is eligible to receive care from the Indian Health Service. But IHS is chronically underfunded. Many Indigenous Americans also rely on Medicaid, which offers services and coverage that IHS cannot offer. In 2020, nearly one-fifth of all American Indian and Alaska Native people in the United States participated in Medicaid.
Medicaid will cover travel for Foxglove to go to Nome to receive an MRI, or to Anchorage to check on her heart, and it will pay for those expensive treatments. Without it, she simply doesn’t know how she would obtain adequate care.
Foxglove has participated in other federal benefit programs as well, although not with the same consistency. When Foxglove briefly received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, formerly known as food stamps, those funds helped keep her afloat. “It was very helpful, you know, I was able to pay my electric bill or buy more oil or gas,” she recalled. “It helped me buy other stuff with my money, other than using my money for food.”
But Foxglove would use her SNAP funds quickly, so they only covered a portion of her needs each month. An entire day’s worth of benefits—roughly $10 for an average SNAP participant in the state of Alaska—would cover a $9.59 bottle of Kraft Classic Caesar Dressing at Unalakleet’s other store, the AC, where prices are often cheaper than the village-owned market where Foxglove works.
Foxglove lost her SNAP benefits half a year ago, but she hasn’t had the energy to jump over the bureaucratic hurdles that make it difficult to reapply. She is one of thousands of Alaskans who have been affected by a significant state backlog in processing benefits applications. Despite sending in her paperwork a week before the deadline to reconfirm her eligibility for benefits—a step required by the Alaskan government every six months—Foxglove’s application was denied. She hasn’t tried to obtain SNAP since because of the time and effort it would take to fight the denial, or to apply anew.
“It’s a headache to try to dispute something,” Foxglove said. “You don’t want to have to sit there, do your paperwork, get all your paperwork together, especially if you’re working a full-time job. It’s not convenient.”
Like others struggling to afford basic necessities across Alaska, Foxglove has made the calculation that the hoops are simply not worth the effort of jumping through. And she’s worried that, with a president in the White House hostile to the nation’s federal assistance programs and a Congress that has widened the holes in the social safety net, she may lose what support she still has.
Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, negotiated several exemptions to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which dramatically cut SNAP and Medicaid. This includes delaying implementation of certain provisions in her state, as well as exempting Alaska Natives like Foxglove from work requirements. Nonetheless, Foxglove is concerned about the long-term impact decisions made in Washington will have on her life, and the lives of her poor and especially elderly neighbors who may not even be aware that their assistance could be at risk.
“I really hope Trump doesn’t cut that off,” Foxglove worried about her Medicaid benefits. “For us out here in rural areas that don’t have the income to pay our way or the access to get to where we need to go, that helps a lot.”
Given the state’s remote location, massive size, and scattered population, low-income Alaskans face particularly extreme challenges in getting enough to eat and obtaining health care. But despite the specific conditions of survival in the Last Frontier, Alaskans’ struggles are a microcosm of what poor and rural Americans face across the country. When the social safety net is riddled with holes, people fall through. Foxglove’s daily experiences may be unique to Unalakleet, but her fears about staying afloat in a hostile society are universal.
Unalakleet sits a little less than halfway up the Alaska seaboard, just below the Seward Peninsula, the large bulge in the state’s coastline that juts out into the Bering Sea and comes within about 55 miles of Russia. It hugs Norton Sound, positioned along the mouth of the village’s namesake river. With looming, distant mountains encircling Unalakleet on the sides not bordered by water, the geography is reminiscent of a wide, shallow bowl. A large, odorous landfill overlooks the village at the top of a hill, years’ worth of unburied trash marring the otherwise pristine landscape. Six windmills scattered on nearby hills lazily churn the air, generating a portion of the electricity for this village of under 1,000 people. Along the coast, Unalakleet’s buildings are huddled close together, constructed on stilts to mitigate the effects of flooding.
Halfway up the hill on the road to the landfill, two buildings store food items intended to assist the food-insecure residents of Unalakleet. Foxglove is one of 45 people in Unalakleet who receive regular food deliveries through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP, a federal program coordinated by the tribal village governance with the Anchorage-based Food Bank of Alaska.
The storage buildings are the jurisdiction of Liz Ivanoff, the tribal family coordinator at the tribal village. Ivanoff hand-delivers food items to TEFAP recipients, as well as anyone else who may be in need of an emergency food box. The two small warehouses are filled with boxes of food: packaged goods and fresh fruit, paper towels and dairy items locked in an industrial-grade refrigerator. Some of the items are shipped by the Food Bank of Alaska, which has provided Ivanoff with a chest freezer in one of the warehouses. Other food items are acquired through a woman who buys in bulk from Costco in Anchorage and mails the products to Unalakleet, roughly 500 miles away.
The poverty rate in Unalakleet, hovering at around 12 percent, slightly outstrips the overall rate in the state of Alaska. Tracy Cooper, the executive director of the Native Village of Unalakleet, has seen food insecurity rising in her town in recent years. Recent cuts to federal programs and grants have already affected Unalakleet: According to Cooper, a grant that connected the village to local ranchers and farmers to purchase food was eliminated in March, and she is not optimistic it will return. TEFAP has also been threatened, with $500 million in cuts to one of its major funding streams, although Ivanoff has not yet seen any impact on her regular food deliveries.
Cooper attributes some of the struggle her food-insecure neighbors face to the disappearance of fish in the Bering Strait, particularly king salmon, which have seen a dramatic decrease in population in recent years amid rising sea temperatures and massive trawling operations that accidentally scoop up the fish. This has been a blow for a community that still relies on seasonal work and subsistence living. Alaska Natives have historically been reliant on subsistence hunting and fishing to supplement their nutritional needs.
“Whether folks want to say climate change or deep-sea trawling or whatever it might be, fish weren’t returning like they should be,” said Cooper. Elders on a fixed income especially struggle to purchase groceries, but in recent years she has noticed that even younger people in the community cannot afford basic necessities.
Although its population fluctuates throughout the year with the comings and goings of seasonal workers such as fishers, Unalakleet is considered a subregional hub. It is one of the primary destinations for the major regional airline, Bering Air, with travelers arriving daily in one of the airline’s nine-passenger turbined Cessna Caravan planes. Visitors from other, smaller villages will also travel by snow machine in the winter or boat in the summer for appointments at the local medical center, or to pick up cargo, because their own villages lack the infrastructure to ship freight from Anchorage.
As Unalakleet is so dependent on air travel, a spell of bad weather can leave products unstocked. Cooper recalled a recent instance when wintry conditions meant stores were unable to be restocked. “We had ice on the runway, and it took a long time for that to start to get remediated. Our shelves were bare,” said Cooper.
The struggles that low-income residents in Unalakleet face in obtaining care and affording food reflect conditions across the region and similar rural areas throughout the state. Without the aid of subsistence hunting and fishing, as well as assistance programs, “it just wouldn’t be viable to live out here,” said Sara Lizak, the vocational rehabilitation and welfare services director at Kawerak Inc., based in Nome. Unlike in the Lower 48, where many Indigenous Americans live on reservations, Alaska Natives are shareholders in regional corporations. Kawerak is the nonprofit that provides services to members of the Bering Strait Native Association, including residents of the Native Village of Unalakleet.
By the time fruits and vegetables finally make it to the more rural villages in the region Kawerak serves, Lizak said, they are often halfway to their expiration date, or even already rotting. “And that’s if you can afford it,” Lizak continued. “Which you can’t.”
When the Senate passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in early July, the deciding vote came from Murkowski, who—despite her open skepticism of the legislation—was swayed in its favor by a number of provisions intended to limit the impact on her state, including multiple exemptions and delays in implementation. When justifying her vote, Murkowski said in an interview with NBC News that she “tried to take care of Alaska’s interests.” She also made an unusual, and honest, acknowledgment: “I know that in many parts of the country, there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill.”
Reading through the bill makes clear how deliberate Murkowski was in negotiating exemptions to the social safety net in ways that would most benefit her state. Although the legislation significantly limited certain funding streams by which most states are able to get federal reimbursement for their Medicaid costs, Alaska is the only state not reliant on those methods. Murkowski and other skeptical Republican lawmakers secured a $50 billion fund intended to shore up rural hospitals that might otherwise be affected by cuts to Medicaid, but opponents argue that it’s unclear whether this money will adequately cover potential losses.
Another provision would allow areas of Alaska to obtain exemptions to the work requirements for SNAP if their unemployment rate is greater than 150 percent of the national rate. Medicaid recipients could also be exempt from work requirements if they live in an area with high unemployment.
Perhaps most notable are the several specific exemptions made for Indigenous Americans, including Alaska Natives, who disproportionately struggle with poverty and food insecurity and would be deeply affected by cuts to benefits. Alaska Natives have also been a particularly important constituency for Murkowski throughout her political career. Alaska Natives are automatically excluded from new, more stringent work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid for able-bodied adults without dependents. They are also exempt from a provision that requires states that have expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to redetermine eligibility for recipients every six months.
Alaska Natives and American Indians already are excluded from Medicaid cost-sharing under federal law, so such a provision included in the new law will not apply to them. But a non–Native Alaskan who earns between 100 and 138 percent of the federal poverty level would be subject to new cost-sharing requirements. So, for example, a white Alaskan fitting those requirements living in Nome could pay up to $35 for an appointment to get an X-ray, while an Alaska Native also living in Nome would not.
Some opponents of the law believe it may be difficult to determine who is an Alaska Native, given that there are many people in the state who may have both tribal and non-tribal ancestors. The legacy of racism against Alaska Natives in the state is another sore spot that the law might agitate. Amanda Snyder, the pastor at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Nome, worries that such provisions could exacerbate discrimination in her community, which has both significant Alaska Native and white populations.
“If we have this bill coming through that gives more Native preference in a community that’s mixed, I could see that causing more anger and bitterness toward people who label Native people as drunks, or Native people as less than or as uneducated,” said Snyder, who is white. “So will that actually increase tensions when suddenly people lose their benefits based on the color of their skin, and seeing it as the fault of others, and not the fault of D.C. or Lisa Murkowski?”
Despite Murkowski’s efforts, some believe the law will still wreak significant damage on an already-weakened state social safety net. From the perspective of Democratic state Representative Genevieve Mina, whose Anchorage district has the highest percentage of SNAP participants in the state, “Everybody has been thrown into the ocean, but we’ve been given a life jacket—but it’s a life jacket that has holes in it.”
For example, exemptions to work requirements are applicable to the majority of the state in terms of land mass, but not in terms of population. They will not cover more urban and wealthier parts of the state, such as the Anchorage area, much of southern Alaska, Fairbanks, and the North Slope. An Alaskan in the Bethel Census Area would be exempt from SNAP and Medicaid work requirements because they live in a region with a high unemployment rate, while a non–Native Alaskan living in the Anchorage area would not be excepted from that provision. (The Bethel region has recently been rocked by typhoon-induced flooding that has devastated the infrastructure in outlying coastal villages.)
“If you’re cutting me with a slightly less long knife, is it better? Like, no, I would prefer not to be cut,” said Jenny-Marie Stryker, executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party. “The carve-outs are good. If you’re going to do a bad thing, we’re happy to be hurt less. But I don’t think that’s going to win voters.”
Alaska’s dramatically high SNAP error rate—the percentage of underpayments and overpayments in benefits in the state in a given year—comes into play elsewhere in the law. States will soon begin paying for a portion of SNAP benefits, which were previously fully covered by the federal government, depending on their error rates. With its hefty SNAP backlog, Alaska will benefit from a provision granting a delay for an additional one to two years to give a state with a high error rate additional time to lower it before it has to start paying its share. Although that provision will apply to a few states other than Alaska, it was inserted with the primary motive of earning Murkowski’s vote.
Alaska had the highest error rate of any state in the country in fiscal year 2024, at nearly 25 percent. Even if the state manages to get its error rate down to 10 percent by the fall of 2027, Alaska would still be shouldering 15 percent of the cost of SNAP benefits starting in fall of 2029, when the fiscal year begins. If the state is unable to fully cover that cost, it might reduce benefit amounts, introducing sticker shock for low-income Alaskans already struggling with high food prices.
States will also need to start shouldering 75 percent of the cost of administering SNAP beginning in late 2026, which could place a further burden on Alaska’s already-strained system. Mina noted that many of the state’s services had already been “cut to the bone,” which could make it difficult to find funding for SNAP. “All of this comes to the political will of our legislature and also our state administration and our governor to figure out, like, ‘What’s a better way to fund the things that really matter to help people live and thrive in the state?’” said Mina. “We’re going to have to just plan for a reality that we’re going to have some sort of an error rate.”
Because portions of the law will be rolled out piecemeal over several years, state Senator Löki Tobin, a Democrat who represents a disproportionately low-income area of Anchorage, said that the uncertainty around implementation of the law was a major concern. When the state is putting these provisions into effect, Tobin wondered, who will be at the table if executing them proves more difficult than expected? “The consequences for particularly folks in rural communities, whether they are Alaska Native or not, are going to be really severe if we don’t have a better understanding of what the implementation process will look like,” said Tobin.
The headquarters of the Food Bank of Alaska resembles nothing so much as a gigantic Costco warehouse, an industrial cavern spanning 80,000 square feet on the edge of Anchorage. A recently completed neighboring building, also in use by the organization, encompasses 30,000 square feet. Fluorescent bulbs cast harsh light on the rows and rows of towering shelves, stacked with boxes of prepacked food. In 2024, the food bank distributed nearly eight million pounds of food through partners across the state—such as pantries and community organizations—providing roughly 6.7 million meals.
It was after hours when Rachael Miller, the chief advocacy officer of the Food Bank of Alaska, conducted a tour of the facility, uninterrupted by the bustle of workers or the beeping of forklifts moving pallets. Miller pointed out a station where earlier that summer, players from the Seattle Seahawks—for Alaskans, the “local” NFL team—had tired themselves out packing boxes for distribution. Elsewhere, pallets of boxes awaited delivery to a church in Wrangell, a town in the southeast of the state.
The food bank prints its postage in-house, shipping directly to communities in need; Alaska has a unique program established by the U.S. Postal Service more than 50 years ago known as Bypass Mail, which allows private carriers to bypass USPS facilities when mailing large quantities of food across the state. But even with the capacity to directly mail to struggling communities, there are what Miller calls “Alaska challenges.” The majority of food is not sourced in-state. Products not only need to be shipped to Alaska; they then must make their way across a state that is larger than Texas, California, and Montana combined, but that has only around 14,000 miles of public road, about the same as Vermont.
The hurdles to obtaining food become ever more challenging for the poorest Alaskans. Fifty-five percent of Alaskans who receive multiple social benefits participate in both programs. Miller and others in the anti-hunger space in Alaska are worried about the long-term consequences of imposing new work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid recipients, even if there are exceptions carved out for certain populations and regions in the state.
“I think the potential harm in reducing access to food and medical care was severely underplayed by folks speaking publicly about it,” said Miller. “Why would we not want to give everybody access to enough calories to fill out a job application? If we’re going to increase work requirements, that’s extra hard to do when you’re super hungry.”
The Food Bank of Alaska is a major source for communities with high food insecurity across the state, providing a cushion for households that may be eligible for SNAP but are not receiving benefits. As of September, Alaska had a SNAP backlog of more than 3,000 applicants, a significant improvement from the high of more than 15,000 in 2023, but daunting nonetheless in a low-population state.
This crisis was years in the making. In 2010, during the administration of former Governor Sean Parnell, the state shifted to an assembly line–style system for processing applications for social benefits, where unrelated teams would address different elements of an application. Fred Rapp, a SNAP eligibility technician who has worked in the state Division of Public Assistance for 18 years, believes that this change marked the onset of the problem. DPA workers who would otherwise be conducting interviews were instructed to assist with processing pending applications, which only worsened the workload. Then, in 2021, Governor Mike Dunleavy cut more than 100 jobs from the Division of Public Assistance, leaving the agency—which administers benefits programs such as SNAP and Medicaid—understaffed. When the pandemic hit, Congress approved a number of new emergency policies that made it easier to obtain and maintain benefits. But when those programs expired, more people were suddenly applying anew.
In an effort to address the crisis, the DPA authorized an extension of benefits to needy Alaskans while it worked through the backlog, deliberately bypassing elements of the verification process. As a result, Alaska had the highest percentage of SNAP overpayments in the country in 2023, with the error rate hovering above 60 percent. This rate was cut to 25 percent in 2024, but Alaska has limited time to make improvements before it is affected by the cost-sharing provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Many Alaskans will wait months for their applications to be processed, leaving them without necessary benefits for several months. Rapp recalled a recent client he assisted, a woman in her seventies, who had been waiting for her Medicaid benefits since July 2024. When the agency finally is able to provide the benefits, it will apply them retroactively, covering the costs of the missed months—but by that time, Rapp said, “the damage is already done.” People have been using funds intended for car payments, or rent, or utilities, or other such necessities to pay for food or health care instead.
“Stuff falls behind so that they can buy food while they’re waiting for us to get their benefits,” explained Rapp. “So now when they finally get their benefits and they get a huge lump sum—I mean, yeah, it does make them happy at that point, but it doesn’t relieve the suffering and problems that they had to deal with for the last six or eight months waiting for us to work their case.”
Jasmin Smith, an Anchorage-based community organizer and business owner with 10-year-old twins, has applied for SNAP but been unable to access benefits because of difficulties in scheduling an eligibility interview over the phone. Even more urgently, she briefly lost her Medicaid benefits, despite receiving an insurance card in the mail.
Smith and one of her children have asthma, and the significant cost of inhalers and other medication, which would normally be covered by Medicaid, suddenly needed to be paid out of pocket. When I spoke to her in late August, she said that her benefits appeared to be cut off because of administrative errors by the DPA—not because of any issue with her application. She described the frustration of trying to connect with the agency to obtain her benefits.
“You’re calling, calling, calling every day, and every day the virtual agent’s like, ‘Oh, you’ve got to call at 7:50, at 7:50 you’re going to get the emergency Medicaid line.’ And you call that line every day, and then every day they tell you, ‘I’m so sorry. We’re maxed out. We can’t take any other people.’ And so in the meantime, you’re just kind of sitting there, like—you’re still getting bills,” said Smith. “I’m supposed to have insurance right now, and y’all literally just cut it off because of the issue on your end.”
Smith is unafraid to advocate for herself. When I met her, she was wearing dangling earrings in the shape of pink folding chairs, a reference to the famous quote attributed to the first Black woman to run for president, Representative Shirley Chisholm: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” But Smith pointed out that many low-income people may struggle with a language barrier, or a lack of time, or even a lack of knowledge of whom to contact when they don’t receive their benefits. When I followed up with her in September, Smith’s Medicaid benefits had been restored, but she knows that not all applicants are able to see their cases resolved so quickly.
Despite the funds that the state legislature has allocated to improving the technology of the state’s benefits system, Rapp does not expect any improvements. He is further galled by the DPA’s hiring of out-of-state contractors to handle applications, rather than hiring more in-state technicians and paying them an equal amount. “What I would say to the public is, don’t expect any great improvement anytime soon, in my estimation. If you’re going to need help from the government of the state of Alaska’s safety net, you’re going to need to plan ahead,” said Rapp.
If Unalakleet is the hub for nearby villages, Nome is unquestionably the locus of the Seward Peninsula. It has just 3,600 residents, but it is still by far the most populous community in the Nome Census Area, a region that is close in size to West Virginia. It has a large grocery store, a medical center, and several restaurants, including a Subway housed in a building that doubles as a movie theater.
Most famous for being the terminus of the Iditarod, the annual sled dog race, Nome was literally put on the map during the gold rush at the turn of the twentieth century. Much of the architecture is influenced by that era, with wooden facades that would not look out of place in an old-fashioned Wild West tourist town. It is a frequent stop for cruise ships rambling up and down the western coast of Alaska, so out-of-state tourists are not an unfamiliar sight for locals.
But for all of the services that make it the economic center of the Bering Strait region, Nome still lacks the resources of a more metropolitan area like Anchorage. An employee at a local gift shop described to me how she regularly flies three hours round trip to and from Anchorage simply to go to Costco; in terms of distance and time in the air, this is akin to a resident of Columbus, Ohio, traveling to New York City to pick up a supersize pack of Kirkland-brand granola bars. But where a trip between New York and Columbus could cost as little as $80 round trip, travel between Nome and Anchorage is closer to $300.
Those unable to afford extensive travel will often post on local Facebook pages asking if anyone has extra groceries that they would be willing to share with their neighbors. It is common to see coolers filled with food as carry-on luggage on smaller flights; any extra space may be used to hold surplus groceries for those in need.
“People will go on Facebook now and just ask, ‘Please, we don’t have any food. We’ve been out of food for a couple days. The kids are really hungry. Is there anyone that can help?’” said Lizak of Kawerak Inc.
Lizak has also seen an uptick in participation in an emergency assistance program administered by Kawerak to help households that either aren’t eligible or have not yet received their benefits. Kawerak will interact directly with vendors, purchasing items for participating members such as food, cleaning supplies, and gear for subsistence hunting. Although this program has historically been used by individuals, Lizak said that more and more families are participating in the program, which is administered on a month-to-month basis. The number has jumped from 87 participants in 2022, to 236 in 2023, to 345 in 2024, to 268 in January through June of 2025.
“We’re welfare assistance workers. We see the pain that families go through when their kids haven’t eaten in a few days,” said Lizak. In March, she continued, “We were getting calls every week from families that hadn’t had their SNAP benefits determined, and they didn’t have a food bank in their community.”
With SNAP benefits running out before participants can buy all the food that they need for the month, the network of community assistance becomes ever more important. Snyder, the pastor at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Nome, recalled a recent phone call from a chronically unhoused acquaintance in a nearby village who had used her SNAP benefits for the month and asked to borrow money so she could afford a cake for her daughter’s birthday. The grocery store called Snyder to get her credit card information, allowing her to spend the $55 to cover this woman’s groceries.
Aside from the impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Trump administration has frozen or suspended several key agricultural and nutrition programs, including the sudden cuts to TEFAP in March. This program is “often the only way we can serve rural communities,” said Miller of the Food Bank of Alaska, because it covers the cost of food shipping and storage.
Even if Congress decides to fund TEFAP in the next fiscal year at a flat rate, that would amount to a cut, explained Miller, because of increasing food prices. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has also decided to terminate an annual report studying food insecurity across the country, which is used by state and local policymakers—as well as anti-hunger organizations such as food banks—to more specifically target populations in need.
Then there is the potential impact of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has advocated for preventing SNAP benefits from being used to purchase soda and junk food. Several states have also been granted waivers for barring SNAP benefits from being used to purchase soda and other unhealthy food items, a step that the Alaska state government is considering as well.
But this kind of strategy may backfire for Alaskans. Given the difficulty in obtaining fresh fruits and vegetables in several parts of the state, shelf-stable foods are staples for many rural Alaskans. It is far cheaper and safer to buy instant ramen, for example, than tomatoes that may already be close to rotten. Miller noted that in areas where drinking water is unsafe, soda may be the only plausible alternative. Junk food, in short, may sometimes be Alaskans’ best option for getting any sort of nutrition whatsoever.
“Without having a sustained and guaranteed supply chain that can support fresher food, less shelf-stable food, then you’re making the problem worse by banning ultra-processed foods, because now we’re left with nothing,” warned Miller. “Fresh food is good for you, but it is so dangerous to talk about taking away a resource without a guaranteed replacement.”
Alaska has unique challenges that differentiate it from the Lower 48, but the struggles that rural residents in particular face to access food are indicative of a larger pattern across the country. The lack of investment in the social safety net on the federal and state levels will have consequences for all low-income Americans, but especially those in states like Alaska that are already struggling to successfully administer benefits.
Lizak is worried about how determining eligibility for work requirements will affect an already backlogged system, wondering whether there will be enough caseworkers to determine whether someone is fulfilling work requirements. Between the state and the federal government, she believes that there is simply not enough investment in ensuring benefits programs stay afloat—and that this is only indicative of how low-income households will find it difficult to obtain adequate care across the country.
“They’re just not funding the need. That’s what it comes down to,” said Lizak. “And it’ll happen in any state that’s not funding the need.”
