Food and Poverty

Food Insecurity and Food Sovereignty among America's Poor

Leslie Hossfeld,E. Brooke Kelly,Julia Waity

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780826522054
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Food insecurity rates, which skyrocketed with the Great Recession, have yet to fall to pre-recession levels. Food pantries are stretched thin, and states are imposing new restrictions on programs like SNAP that are preventing people from getting crucial government assistance. At the same time, we see an increase in obesity that results from lack of access to healthy foods. The poor face a daily choice between paying bills and paying for food.

PART ONE

CONCEPTS

Around 1990, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) began measuring household food security, a concept centered on understanding whether households have enough consistent food to live a healthy, active life. Food insecure households, conversely, have difficulty and uncertainty in meeting these basic food needs. The development of this measure emanated from the 1984 US Presidential Task Force on Food Assistance, which drew attention to the lack of a good measure of hunger. The USDA has refined the measure over the years to capture the range of severity of food insecure households and their relationship to hunger.

The concept of food sovereignty is a concept about the right to food, more specifically about the right of people to define their own food and agricultural production. The idea arose in the 1990s in response to policies and practices around food security and large-scale agribusiness production of food globally, and the immiseration of small family farmers and producers. Food sovereignty has grown into a global movement about how and where food is produced and who benefits when people are in control of “healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Declaration of the Forum for Food Sovereignty 2007).

The chapters in this first section examine these concepts in greater detail. While this book focuses primarily on food and poverty in the United States, we begin this section with a discussion of food security and food sovereignty from the Global South. The contrast to, and comparison of, experiences and policy development around food insecurity in developing nations provides a rich context to begin an examination of these very issues here in the United States. This is followed by two innovative chapters, one that considers rethinking food as a measure of poverty, and another that examines cultural factors—like foodways and lifestyle patterns—that mediate food and poverty.

1

Security via Sovereignty

Lessons from the Global South

MYRIAM PAREDES AND MARK EDWARDS

The American shopper walking down a grocery store aisle naively participates in a food system full of ironies and unintended consequences. If asked to interpret the contrast between great volumes of food on the shelves and the request at the cash register for contributions to the food bank, a thoughtful person will quickly recognize the most blatant of ironies—a country that produces mass quantities of food and pays farmers to stop producing too much is also a country with 17.4 million food insecure households (Coleman-Jensen, Rabbitt, Gregory, and Singh 2015). But beyond this glaring contradiction, the complexities and frequent dysfunctions of the country’s provisioning remain a mystery. One reason for shoppers’ naiveté is the dominance of food security “thinking” about the feeding of populations and the lack of awareness of an alternative food sovereignty theoretical framework. In this chapter we highlight the distinctions, connections, and implications of these frameworks, advocating for a more thoughtful approach to understanding the feeding of the United States by incorporating the strengths of food sovereignty, a concept embraced by South Americans in their constitutions.

Consider another apparent contradiction. From a food security point of view, high rates of obesity and diabetes among poor Americans are nonintuitive, especially given that in other countries poverty can lead to stunted growth and gaunt faces. But a food sovereignty lens brings into focus the fact that powerful interests arrange for government-subsidized commodities that keep prices low on calorie-intensive, nutrition-poor diets, while healthy fruits and vegetables remain unsubsidized, more expensive, and therefore more accessible to middle and upper classes.

The sovereignty lens also reveals ironies inherent in the production and delivery components of the food system. For example, sometimes, the same trucks that transport organic produce from the rural “salad-bowl” areas to the cities are the same ones that bring back from port cities the less expensive canned produce gathered and processed elsewhere, at times from halfway around the world. So, rural farmworkers in the United States use their meager wages not to purchase the food they cultivated and harvested, but instead to buy food that other farmworkers produced more cheaply elsewhere. Even stranger, low-income workers and the unemployed, both in remote rural and in densely urban places, often find themselves in the midst of food deserts; that is, they live in places that lack a wide variety of affordable, quality foods and instead are full of cheap, highly processed foods. Supermarkets may choose to avoid urban ghettos, or not stock their stores with the same quality produce owing to economic and transportation obstacles, while little country stores are often so remote that food distribution companies decide not to deliver fresh dairy, bread, or produce to such small markets.

Further ironies appear when a sovereignty lens is used to consider the food access concerns of low-wage, working Americans. For example, many of the low-income inhabitants of these urban food deserts work in “food service” while low-income workers in rural places are often engaged in cultivating, harvesting, and packing food. In both rural and urban areas of the northwestern United States, food service workers have been among the highest represented workers among food insecure households (Grussing and Edwards 2006). Meanwhile, at the end of the food chain, consumers who work in retail (such as Walmart) often earn wages so low that they must turn to federal assistance (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—SNAP), providing them modest funds to purchase food, often from the very employers who pay them low wages.

The computer-precise and remarkably organized food-delivery system that daily feeds multitudes with safe, if not always healthy, food also displays occasional unintended consequences that achieve notoriety in the media. For example, the same amazingly efficient industrial food complex that distributes massive quantities to most parts of the country and the world also produces large outbreaks of food-borne illnesses when food safety is compromised. One bad crop of cantaloupes or batch of ice cream contaminated with Listeria (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2015b) or one side of beef infected with “mad cow disease” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2015a) can put at risk thousands of consumers because indeed millions of consumers partake of the rationalized system that so widely distributes cantaloupes, ice cream, and hamburger from and to all parts of the country. From a food security point of view, such problems may be regarded as unavoidable collateral damage that can be minimized with ever-greater technological improvements. With a food sovereignty lens, one may instead ask if perhaps there are alternate possibilities to access more localized food via community or family gardens, relying on closer providers or markets that need little to no public intervention.

Finally, federal public policy focused on food systems in the United States (a country whose constitution emphasizes the separation of powers) has ironically placed one agency (the US Department of Agriculture, USDA) in charge of advocating for both producers and consumers. Because food industry companies are organized and resource rich, they can influence decision makers more readily than can the poor, leading to a situation akin to putting foxes in charge of the hen house (to borrow a food metaphor). Agribusiness and the food industry spend tens of millions of dollars each year on campaign contributions (for candidates sympathetic to the industry) and on lobbyists. The result is pressure on the USDA for subsidies on corn and beef and resistance to efforts to raise nutrition standards on school lunches. Debates over whether ketchup is a vegetable, and less silly but nonetheless contentious wrangling over revising the USDA’s food pyramids, reveal how the USDA faces often irreconcilable goals and competing pressures from unequally matched constituents. So, one part of the USDA favors commodity producers (e.g., dairy industry) while another part of the agency is questioning the healthfulness of all that cheese on lunchroom pizza. A food security lens does not address such questions about who is deciding the menu of the poor but rather focuses on making sure that food is distributed widely. The sovereignty lens brings into relief these discontinuities and could remind Americans (a) that what they eat is largely determined by much bigger forces and vested interests and (b) that they could actively support their own interests regarding feeding their families.

American eaters of any class, but especially of working and lower classes, need not invent the critique and the questions on their own. They can learn from the efforts, successes, and failures of international movements seeking to ask these uncomfortable questions in countries where economic and political circumstances have made it possible to give voice to them. We focus on two South American examples. First, Ecuador, where unlike in the United States, the constitution of the country addresses food rights for producers and consumers, and the food system is explicitly called out as a vital part of society to be evaluated and debated through a deeply democratic process that creates new institutions of deliberation. The concept of food sovereignty plays a central role in the polity of the country although not without problems. Second, in Brazil, a food sovereignty framework takes center stage in that country’s integrated, multipronged approach to creating food security for the population, while taking seriously the structural reasons for hunger. Brazil’s Zero Hunger policy, like Ecuador’s policy, includes the creation of institutions that allow the participation of the wider public in the design and implementation of local programs that include the support of local and regional producers. We begin by first elaborating on the food security and food sovereignty frameworks, describing how conflicting and/or compatible they are, before turning attention to these two South American examples and some of the lessons US eaters can learn from them.

Food Security and Food Sovereignty

Food Security: A Dominant but Incomplete Narrative

The concept of food security is almost as intuitive as hunger. No one wants to be hungry, and everyone wants the security of knowing that their next meal is assured. And most would likely wish for food security for their community, region, or country as well—a condition where there is plenty for all and assured access to that plenty in the future. Yet, as intuitive as this understanding of food security may be, there has remained a surprising amount of debate about, and number of differences in, definitions of food security.

In 1974, before food security in America was being widely discussed, growing international concern over world hunger led professional development bureaucrats and academics to establish a food security framework at the World Food Congress in Rome. Over the subsequent decades, the concept evolved as consensus grew that there should be internationally shared responsibility for national-level hunger, recognizing that the Green Revolution (i.e., large-scale technical improvements in agriculture that dramatically increased world production of crops) was not rapidly or automatically leading to reductions in poverty or malnutrition. Indeed, in some cases, that revolution may have increased hunger vulnerability in some countries (McIntyre et al. 2009). By 1996, at the World Food Congress, there was international acknowledgement of the social causes of hunger and an emerging recognition that access to food is a “universal right.” Even with these changes, food security as the end goal remained and continues as the dominant framework for understanding the feeding of the world’s population.

Examining official definitions of food security reveals the primary elements of a food security framework for understanding the feeding of countries. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations World Health Organization declared that “food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels [is achieved] when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (Food and Agriculture Organization 2003, 28). This definition describes a condition where access is never in question, where quality is assured, and where culture is taken into account (“preferences”). Parsing the sentence reveals that “access” is what people have, and the remainder of the definition describes “what” they have access to. Note that it does not address production, processing, manufacturing, and sourcing of foods, leaving open the debate as to whether this condition of constant access is achievable through the current international food system. Some critics argue that this definition predisposes actions to be the development of technical solutions for production and delivery but without illuminating the sources of food insecurity, and hence the root causes of it.

In the United States, the concept of food security was introduced to decision makers in the mid-1990s by the USDA. The USDA continues to use a minimalist definition of food security that ignores many of the elements found in the FAO definition, describing it as “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life” (Coleman-Jensen, Rabbitt, Gregory, and Singh 2015). Issues related to food preference, nutrition, safety, and means by which food is obtained are not explicitly included in the USDA definition nor in the official measure of food security used by the agency. The measure focuses primarily on respondents having enough money for purchasing food and ignores receipt of SNAP, food boxes, school breakfasts and lunches, or congregant meals. The definition emphasizes purchase rather than production or even eating, which, while shallow, is not unreasonable given the fact that most people do not produce any of their own food anyway.

But definitions of problems are not neutral. They are reflective of assumptions about the way the world works. When those assumptions are hidden, they exert power in unexamined ways. This is true of the international and domestic defi...