Feeding the Crisis. Maggie Dickinson
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and Tony Lucero. I am also grateful for my colleagues at CUNY’s Guttman Community College and for my students who give me hope that a better world is on its way.
I received support for this work through the Wenner Gren Foundation; the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program; the Center for Place, Culture and Politics; and The Relational Poverty Network’s summer institute at the University of Washington. Kate Marshall saw the potential in this work early on. I am grateful for her steady advice and encouragement, which kept the project moving forward. I am also indebted to my manuscript reviewers, Alison Alkon and John Clarke. Alison’s detailed feedback on the manuscript was an incredible gift that made this a much better book. The title Feeding the Crisis is in many ways an homage to the classic book Policing the Crisis and the kind of social, cultural, and political economic analysis it pioneered. It meant the world to me that John Clarke, one of the coauthors of that book, was so supportive of this one.
It is hard to imagine how this book could have come together without the help of so many caregivers who helped make the space and time for me to write. Thanks to my mother, Karen Dickinson; Mary Katherine Youngblood; Ora Yemini Morrison; Niseema Diemer; and the many teachers at JV Forrestal and Sargent Elementary schools.
James Case Leal has supported me every step of the way on this project. Thank you for your patience and your encouragement. I love you like a fact. This book is dedicated to Emmanuel and Diego, whom I love beyond words.
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