Joe VanAlstine remembers growing up on SNAP or food stamps. He’s now a specialist for the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians Food Distribution Program.
The program started when it was authorized in the Food Stamp Act, and gave people living in the tribes an alternative to food stamps. The ‘commodity food,’ as some still refer to it as, comes from the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) program.
“We used to get those actual foo...