Meet my brother. He’s 25, he’s white, and he comes from a middle-class family.

Mike graduated from the University of Delaware with little debt. He did some traveling, got married, bought a farm in Nicaragua, and had a baby girl. He’s in graduate school and working part-time at Food For Peace.

Mike buys his food with food stamps.

As the only provider for his family and a grad student living under the poverty line, he was a prime candidate for government aid. Today, he’s just one of many people who never expected to depend on government support for food.

“We’re seeing people getting food stamps who never thought they’d get them,” said Tina Osso, director of the Shared Harvest Food Bank to the New York Times.

The recession has brought food-stamp use to record highs. Food stamps now help feed one in eight Americans.

Due to the necessary expansion of the food stamps program, however, we have seen a general “de-stigmatization” of the previously scorned form of government aid.

The New York Times reports the story of retired insurance broker Sandi Bernstein, who found herself eligible for food stamps after the economy tanked.

“I come here and I see people who are knowledgeable, normal, well-spoken, well-dressed,” Bernstein said, recalling her experiences requesting aid. “These are people I could be having lunch with.”

These people are my brother. These people are a reflection of our country’s hurting economy. These people are changing the face of food stamps.

Of course, we can’t exclude more traditional food-stamp recipients from this conversation. Receiving the majority of food stamp aid, the low-income earning population has arguably been impacted by this expansion and de-stigmatization of food stamps more than anyone.

With highly educated, well-dressed professionals suddenly using food stamps, the welfare stigma that’s been historically associated with the chronically poor has been lifted. Now, when they go to the store to buy food for their families with food stamps, the grad student standing in front of them in line could easily be in the same situation.

Today, there’s not that much distinguishing those who get by, and those who need help. This has inevitably led to the positive changes in the way that food stamps are viewed.

This dying stigma is clearly a positive step for food stamps and could even indicate a larger trend of diminishing stigmas surrounding other government welfare programs as well. It’s important to realize, though, that this change in mindset has only been made possible because more people have fallen into poverty.

Still, there’s hope that as our economy is nursed back to health, the lack of prejudice surrounding food stamps will carry through. Perhaps people would be able to remember a time in December 2009, when a 25-year-old, white, middle class, grad student relied on food stamps to feed his family of three.

Maybe they’d remember what it was like to need help and not be made ashamed of it.