Seth Moulton

Republican U.S. Senate candidate John Deaton joined Congressman and Democratic candidate Seth Moulton for a forum on food insecurity hosted by Project Bread on Wednesday, as incumbent Sen. Ed Markey backed out at the last minute to attend another event with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

Deaton and Moulton were part of a three-person panel that also included socialist candidate Joe Tache, and were asked several questions related to food insecurity in Massachusetts from those attending.

Markey had originally committed to the forum, but at the last minute had backed out to instead participate in a discussion on affordable housing for LGBTQ+ senior citizens with Pressley at The Pryde in Hyde Park, which describes itself as a “unique housing community redefining affordable, modern housing for LGBTQ seniors.”

“There’s no candidate running from office today that probably has experienced food insecurity to the level that I have,” Deaton said in his opening remarks, honing back on his impoverished and abusive childhood.

“Between the ages of 9 and 11, I was raised for two years by a child predator. You would think that’s my worst childhood memory, but it’s not. As awful as it was, and is now, my worst childhood memory is listening to my mother cry herself to sleep on the nights that we didn’t have food and she didn’t know where the food was going to go… There were 48 million Americans last night with food insecurity, 14 million of them are children. I was one of those children,” he said.

Moulton highlighted his work in Congress to reduce hunger and food insecurity in Massachusetts.

“The fact that 40% of Massachusetts households have faced food insecurity in just the past year is just fundamentally immoral and wrong. The fact that any kid would go hungry in the wealthiest nation on earth is absolutely wrong. And for the people who work every single day to try to end that crisis, to get kids and families the food that they need, we should all be grateful,” said Moulton.

“I want to tell you one of the things that I’m proud of as a member of Congress is trying very hard to instill a sense of public service in the work that I do with a team that I lead. So we have this program called ‘Serve with Seth,’ where we go out and do service projects,” he said.

The candidates were also asked about a drop in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients across Massachusetts amid a wave of SNAP fraud schemes uncovered in the Bay State and across the country.

Deaton slammed federal cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, and voiced his support for loosening guidelines related to ending benefits for certain recipients, but also said the state needs to take SNAP fraud and the state’s payment error rate more seriously.

“There’s nothing wrong with requiring people to work, but you can’t just make it a paper thing. You can’t make guidelines that then are cut off because they don’t meet some paper guidelines,” said Deaton.

“Here in Massachusetts, they have the highest in New England SNAP error rate at 14%. That’s not real intentional fraud, but there is fraud taking place,” he continued. “And while people like the (Trump) administration say, ‘We’ve got to clean up the fraud,’ well, we got the state government that won’t do an audit like the 72% of the voters said. So how is Washington, whether it’s Seth or myself or Joe going to D.C., how do you get money to a state that won’t even comply with the audit?”

Moulton called for restoring and expanding the SNAP program in all states, while also pointing the finger at the nationwide immigration crackdown being carried out by the Trump administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as the war in Iran, for the decline in SNAP recipients paired with a rise in food prices.

“I think it’s pretty obvious that we all agree that SNAP should be restored and expanded. But we’ve got to do a lot more to address the underlying problem,” Moulton said.

“We also need to stop these ICE raids, which are immoral on their face, but are especially targeted at farm workers. I mean, in fact, immigrants make up so much of the food pipeline from literally being out in the fields right to serving food in restaurants and everywhere in between,” he added. “And when we have a government that has terrorized the city and taking immigrants out of our community, let’s be honest about the disproportionate effect that that has on our food system.”

The panel was also asked about rising food prices, feeding the homeless, and more issues surrounding food insecurity.