Feeding the Crisis

Care and Abandonment in America's Food Safety Net

Maggie Dickinson

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520973770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, is one of the most controversial forms of social welfare in the United States. Although it's commonly believed that such federal programs have been cut back since the 1980s, Maggie Dickinson charts the dramatic expansion and reformulation of the food safety net in the twenty-first century. Today, receiving SNAP benefits is often tied to work requirements, whichessentially subsidizeslow-wage jobs. Excluded populations—such asthe unemployed, informally employed workers, andundocumented immigrants—must rely on charity to survive. Feeding the Crisis tells the story of eight families as they navigate the terrain of an expanding network of assistance programs in which care and abandonment work hand in hand to make access to food uncertain for people on the social and economic margins. Amid calls at the federal level to expand workrequirements for food assistance, Dickinson shows us how such ideas are bad policy that fail to adequately address hunger in America. Feeding the Crisis brings the voices of food-insecure families into national debates about welfare policy, offering fresh insights into how we can establish a right to food in the United States.

CHAPTER ONE

Feeding the Crisis

Nigel walked into the North Brooklyn Pantry on a hot summer day in the middle of July.¹ I was happy to see him. He was not happy to be back. I had been volunteering at the pantry every week for over a year. I had become part of a motley crew, made up mostly of older women who had lived in the neighborhood for decades. Fabiola, Angela, Katherine, and Ada had welcomed me into the fold, and together we did most of the day-to-day work of the pantry. We carried boxes of cans up the narrow, wooden steps from the basement to the pews upstairs and packed blue plastic bags with a random assortment of food from the food bank each week. We registered several hundred neighborhood residents, gave them each a bag of groceries, and managed conflicts as residents waiting on the line grew restless. We returned leftover food to the basement at the end of the day and cleaned up all the boxes and bits of packaging from the sanctuary floor so the church would be ready for services on Sunday.

Nigel had joined our ragtag crew in February. He lived a few blocks away in a run-down single room that he shared with a roommate. He started coming to dinner at the North Brooklyn Pantry’s soup kitchen on Tuesday nights and soon after began helping out at the pantry each week. Like Angela and Fabiola, two of the most dedicated and consistent volunteers, he relied heavily on the food he took with him from the pantry. All three had started out as pantry clients struggling with deep poverty before they became regular volunteers. Everyone appreciated Nigel. He worked hard, had a good sense of humor, and didn’t mind lifting heavy boxes that the rest of us could barely manage. But we had not seen him for the past two months because he had started working as a bus boy at a diner in Manhattan. I could track his economic fortunes based on whether or not he showed up to volunteer. When he was working, he disappeared. When he lost a job, he came back.

Food assistance has become the leading edge of the twenty-first-century response to growing poverty and economic insecurity. Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an unprecedented outpouring of food assistance across the United States, encompassing both federally funded food programs like SNAP (formerly referred to as food stamps) and emergency food providers like soup kitchens and food pantries.² During the George W. Bush administration, national food stamp rolls rose from just above eighteen million in 2001 to twenty-seven million in 2008. This growth gained even more momentum as a deep recession took hold. By the end of 2012, the rolls reached a record forty-seven million Americans, or around 15 percent of the US population. Despite an official economic recovery, SNAP rolls remain near this historic high, serving over forty-two million people in 2017 (United States Department of Agriculture 2018). The number of people served by soup kitchens and food pantries in this same period has also risen, from twenty-five million in 2005 to 46.5 million in 2012 (Wienfield et al. 2014, Malbi et al. 2010). Millions of American households rely on these forms of food assistance to make ends meet each month. In pantries and soup kitchens across the country, thousands of volunteers show up week after week to cook meals and serve groceries to people in need. And yet, despite a massively expanded food safety net, more than forty-one million Americans experienced food insecurity in 2016 (Coleman-Jensen et al. 2017).

The conventional wisdom is that welfare programs have been continually cut back and systematically dismantled both in the United States and globally since the 1980s. But the expansion of food assistance tells a different story—and a more accurate one. In fact, welfare state spending in the United States—and especially programs targeted to poor households—has been growing since the mid-1980s (Moffitt 2015). The growth of the food safety net mirrors larger transitions in the ways policy makers have chosen to address poverty and economic insecurity. The twenty-first-century safety net in the United States has expanded to manage growing poverty and insecurity but does little to alter the political and economic realities that create these conditions in the first place. Since the 1980s, wages for middle- and working-class workers have stagnated, low-wage jobs have proliferated, and work has become more insecure. In what Jacob Hacker has termed “the great risk shift,” employers have walked away from their obligations—from providing full-time work and regular schedules to offering health care, pensions, and other protections to the people who work for them (Hacker 2006, Lambert 2008). Families across the United States have experienced an ongoing housing crisis, marked by foreclosures and evictions (Desmond 2016), adding to a sense of instability and uncertainty for many Americans. As jobs have become more insecure and the cost of living has increased, food assistance has quietly expanded to meet a growing need.

Instead of fixing the crisis of growing economic precarity and insecurity, we are feeding it. Pantry clients and volunteers, like Nigel, Angela, and Fabiola, are on the front lines of a new kind of safety net made up of a complicated patchwork of generosity and withholding, care and abandonment. Programs like SNAP have been reconfigured to subsidize low-wage workers who do not earn enough at their jobs to afford basic necessities like food. SNAP is a federal program that provides funds to low-income households that can be used to purchase food at grocery stores and other retailers. The program has been rebranded as a “work support,” and low-wage workers are encouraged to enroll in the program by policy makers as well as sometimes even their employers (Adad-Santos 2013). At the same time, federal funding for public-private partnerships has unleashed a massive expansion of community groups and nonprofits working to address hunger. The growing network of emergency food providers (EFPs) is comprised of regional food banks that distribute food to small, local community organizations like soup kitchens and food pantries that primarily operate out of faith-based organizations. As Jan Poppendieck points out, EFPs distribute food as charity and, unlike SNAP, offer clients “no enforceable rights whatsoever” (Poppendieck 1994). Both forms of food assistance have expanded dramatically since the turn of the millennium and have become an interlocking system governing hunger and food insecurity in new ways. People like Nigel rely on both forms of food assistance, turning from one to the other depending on changes in their circumstances.

Nigel was forty years old when we met—an African American Marine veteran who had worked in restaurants for most of his adult life. His easy-going outlook made him the black sheep in his family. He grew up in a middle-class home in Brooklyn. His dad was an office worker in a large corporation. His sister had a law degree. Nigel chose a different path, but it wasn’t a particularly troubled one. He had no criminal record and no complicated family life. He never married, had no children, and expressed no regrets about these choices. As a self-described free spirit, Nigel wasn’t rich, but he had always managed to hold down an apartment and a job. He saw himself as “a regular guy” who liked to work and was satisfied with life.

His regular life began to unravel in 2011, when his Brooklyn apartment building was condemned and he was forced to move. This was the first in a series of crises that would plague Nigel for the next three years. At the time, he was working as a sous chef in a small Brooklyn restaurant. He realized it would be a long time until he would be able to save enough to get a place of his own. After wearing out his welcome on a friend’s couch, he went into the New York City shelter system, which placed him in a housing facility in the Bronx. It was a two-hour commute to his job in Brooklyn, and his late-night work hours conflicted with the curfew at the housing facility. Eventually, he was fired for leaving work early one too many times in order to make it back to the Bronx to have a bed to sleep in. The restaurant had been paying him off the books, so he couldn’t apply for unemployment insurance when he lost his job. He found himself with no home, no money, and no way to get back on his feet.

Nigel was miserable in the shelter. He was living in an unfamiliar neighborhood under strict rules that he found constraining. After nearly six months, his counselor there managed to get him transferred to a single-room-occupancy building near the North Brooklyn Pantry. There was no curfew, so he would be able to come and go as he pleased and set his own schedule. One of the requirements of his new housing was that he open a public assistance case so he could qualify for the $215 rent subsidy, a small cash allowance, and food stamps. Nigel had never applied for food stamps or public assistance before. He was grateful to have the help while he looked for work, but he was also uneasy. “Sure, I paid my taxes, I did service for the country, but a year ago, I wasn’t in the system. I didn’t know I could apply for . . . I never even knew about this stuff. How to get SNAP and all this stuff. And my eyes are still being opened. It’s an education, but I’m not quite sure I want the degree. I want to start working again. I want to be regular again. I want to be a regular guy. I really do. But I’m here and I can’t really pull that off quite yet.” Between public assistance, food stamps, soup kitchens, and food from the pantry, Nigel made ends meet while he looked for work. He eventually landed a job at a diner, which paid minimum wage. He was happy to be working again. The other volunteers at the pantry hoped he would finally be able to get back on his feet. However, the job did not pay enough to really change his situation. He still qualified for food stamps, and saving for an apartment would be a challenge. But it was a job, and it meant at least he no longer needed food from the pantry.

Then, after two months, Nigel’s boss decided to take him off the books and pay him $5 an hour plus tips. Nigel, an experienced restaurant worker, balked at the request. “He wanted to take me off the books because I was making too much on minimum wage.” It wasn’t just the pay cut that bothered Nigel. It was also the fact that he would no longer receive paystubs or tax forms. Working under the table would mean he would no longer qualify for the wage subsidies provided to low-wage workers, including the earned income tax credit, credit toward unemployment, and social security. Being paid off the books meant he would lose his food stamp benefits as well. Single adults are required to show they work twenty hours a week in exchange for food assistance—something that is hard to prove without documentation. As Nigel put it, “I need something on paper. I want a paper trail now. I need my taxes. I need my refund. I really do.” Nigel was dejected by the whole situation. He quit, hoping he could find something better. “I’m walking home (from work) with forty, fifty bucks, which is something, but I thought I should be treated better. So, I left. I walked out. In retrospect, perhaps I should have at least stayed to see how that would have played out. But I didn’t. What’s the saying? Pride before fall? So therefore, I fell.”

When Nigel left his job, he lost his food stamps because he could no longer show that he was working. He returned to the food pantry and the soup kitchen as his main source of sustenance. He was frustrated by his lack of work, low pay, and unstable housing. We worked side by side that afternoon, and after several hours of sorting cans and packing bags, he left, taking rice, canned peas, apple juice, and some day-old bread from a local bakery with him. Like many of the people who came to the pantry, Nigel needed help finding a job and stable, affordable housing, but what he found instead was food. Every crisis was met with a bag of groceries or a hot meal.

Nigel’s experience raises some important questions about the contemporary response to poverty in the United States. Why have these entangled economic crises been met with the outpouring of food? What is the particular historical and political climate that has made expanding food assistance the preferred remedy for stagnating wages, widespread un- and underemployment, and growing precarity and insecurity for the working class? And what does this expansion of food assistance in the twenty-first century mean for the ways we can, collectively, imagine addressing the economic crises and insecurities of the present moment?

WHY FOOD?

Understanding the growth of the food safety net requires an understanding of the broader political context in which food has become the go-to solution to poverty in the twenty-first century. The growth in the food safety net is linked to three major developments, which I lay out in more detail below and in the chapters that follow: a fundamental transformation of the US welfare state in the late twentieth century, the emergence of public-private partnerships as a primary solution to issues of poverty, and growing concerns about obesity and diet-related disease.

Welfare reforms passed in the mid-1990s garnered a tremendous amount of scholarly and political attention. These reforms sharply restricted access to cash assistance for poor families with children in the United States, giving rise to the political common sense that both political parties in the United States were committed to shrinking the size and scope of the welfare state as a whole. Mainstream political analysts have largely celebrated the reduction in cash assistance as an unqualified success, reducing both spending and the role of government in the lives of the poor. On the left, analysts have linked welfare reforms with a broader process of impoverishment and growing income inequality through restricted access to aid, including a startling rise in extreme poverty in the United States (Maskovsky and Morgen 2003, Piven 2001, Edin and Shaefer 2016). Social theorists have argued that cuts to cash assistance represent “the continual contraction of welfare in the age of hypermobile capital and flexible work”(Wacquant 2009). Others show how politicians built support for cuts to cash assistance for poor families by mobilizing thinly veiled racial stereotypes about welfare recipients. In the process, they successfully inflamed racial divisions over the role of the social safety net in society, making racism the single most important factor driving white Americans’ opposition to welfare (Gilens 1999).

What has been largely overlooked in much of this analysis is the degree to which social spending targeted to the poor has, in fact, grown. While unemployed single-parent households have less access to public benefits, employed, two-parent households have much more access to assistance today (Ben-Shalom, Moffitt, and Scholz 2011; Moffitt 2015). In the early 2000s, policy makers at the federal, state, and local levels began to ease access to food stamp benefits. These efforts were largely motivated by a new attitude among administrators and policy makers that reframed food stamps as a “work support” for low-wage workers. The expansion of food stamps fit the mold of safety-net programs, such as the earned income tax credit, that subsidize wages and exclude non-workers from assistance. Politicians no longer rely on overt racial stereotypes like the infamous welfare queen to argue for cuts to social programs. Instead, they have redesigned the social safety net to benefit low-income workers, who are framed as deserving because they work. At the same time, these policies exclude a growing population of unemployed or informally employed residents, associating them with the long-standing racialized stereotype of the lazy, undeserving poor. Non-workers are fast becoming a distinct group who can be cut out of the social compact and excluded from social protections.

This new welfare state configuration, subsidizing low-wage workers and excluding the unemployed or informally employed, is the template on which future budget decisions will likely be made. As the Trump administration’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, recently put it, “If you are on food stamps and you are able bodied, we need you to go to work. There is a dignity to work and there’s a necessity to work to help the country succeed”(Purser and Hennigan 2017). The Trump administration’s push to tighten the links between SNAP assistance and work is part of a broader project to link all forms of public assistance, including Medicaid, to participation in the labor force. Nigel’s experience is typical. Losing his job meant losing his SNAP benefits because he could no longer show that he was employed. By tying food stamps to work, these benefits have become a key incentive and a key punishment, encouraging working people to accept the increasingly poor terms employers are offering them. At a political level, distinctions between the working poor and the non-working poor have become a racializing discourse, justifying the exclusion of a group of citizens from basic rights and protections, like the right to food or health care.³

As I show in chapters 2 and 3, reorienting welfare assistance around the idea of “work support” also has radical implications for the gender dimensions of the twenty-first-century welfare state. Chapter 2 looks at how programs that once primarily assisted poor mothers in the care of their children now support poor workers in their ability to work. I follow two mothers, Nydia and Adwa, as they navigate SNAP policies that determine which families have access to food assistance and which do not. Women gain access to food assistance by performing the role of the “good mother.” However, good mothering, under these policies, has been redefined as providing a role model for children by going to work and holding down a job.

In chapter 3, I show how the work-based safety net complicates assumptions about men, fatherhood, and welfare. Welfare policy in the United States was designed around the ideal of the wage-earning male who worked to provide for his dependents. In an era of insecure work, this ideal is increasingly out of reach for many poor and working-class men. Through the experiences of two men, Jimmy and Jesús, who regularly frequented the North Brooklyn Pantry, chapter 3 shows how men use food assistance to fulfill their roles as caregivers within their family networks. Their experiences challenge the narrative that welfare programs enable absentee fathers to abandon their children, suggesting instead that food assistance is a way for men to maintain family ties in the absence of well-paid work.

The second development shaping the growing food safety net is the heavy investment in public-private partnerships and the emphasis on voluntary or private efforts to address poverty. The growth and institutionalization of food banks, soup kitchens, and food pantries is part of a significant push toward states contracting out social services to nonprofit service agencies, a process that began in the 1960s in the United States and more recently in Europe (Muehlebach 2011, Ranci 2001, Crenson and Ginsberg 2002). The role of the state is no longer to provide people with social protections but to encourage private citizens and local organizations to take responsibility for poverty and other social problems. Emergency food providers began growing rapidly in the 1980s and today engage an enormous number of volunteers (Poppendieck 1998). Like other nonprofits that are contracted to provide social...