Feeding the Crisis. Maggie Dickinson
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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 services, EFPs “expand the welfare state without expanding the state itself” (Crenson and Ginsberg 2002, 225). Feeding America, the national umbrella organization that supports and promotes food banks in the United States, boasts that “food banks combine USDA commodities and storage and distribution funding with private donations of food and funds, infrastructure, and manpower to leverage the program far beyond its budgeted amount. In this way, the USDA and the emergency food system exemplify an optimum model of public-private partnership” (2018).
Previous expansions of welfare benefits have made the state a target of collective political action for poor people demanding access to more resources. In the 1960s, a powerful national welfare rights movement emerged out of the broader civil rights movements (Piven and Cloward 1979, Nadasen 2004, Kornbluh 2007, West 1981). Activists sat in at welfare offices and pushed for legislation that would expand support for the work that poor women did as mothers and caretakers in their communities. Expansions of the welfare state through contracting out to nonprofit organizations make these kinds of collective political actions less likely, since the public face of emergency food providers is not a street-level government bureaucrat whose job depends, at least to some degree, on serving clients, but a volunteer. In this way, the growth of nonprofit social service providers is a key aspect of contemporary poverty governance, replacing entitlements provided by the state with charity. Unlike state-provided welfare benefits, social services that are contracted out provide resources without expanding rights. As Jeff Maskovsky and Judith Goode have shown, this form of privatization, “removes the poor from a direct relationship with the state, a relationship that historically has been essential to the expression of collective agency for poor communities. In this context, the neoliberal celebration of the removal of the state from poor people’s everyday lives may be seen for what it is: an ideological power play” (Maskovsky and Goode 2001, 9).
A central component of public-private partnerships, in contrast to traditional state-run welfare programs, is mobilizing an enormous volunteer labor force that can carry out the work of distributing food aid for little or no compensation. Chapter 4 provides an analysis of the new labor regimes emerging out of the growing emergency food network. As emergency food providers like soup kitchens and food pantries proliferate across the country, these institutions have become an important site of informal employment. Poor women who volunteer, like Fabiola and Angela, are empowered to care for their communities. Chapter 4 also examines how all caring labor, including volunteer work, is shaped by race, class, and gender inequalities and explores the conflicts that emerge around how volunteer labor in emergency food providers should be remunerated, recognized, and regulated.
The final development driving the expansion of federal food assistance is growing concern about obesity and diet-related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease that disproportionately impact poor people. Food aid has increasingly been linked to debates about obesity, nutrition, public health, and urban health inequalities.4 Nearly 10 percent of American adults suffer from diabetes, and 32 percent have high blood pressure (CDC 2018, 2017). Living in poverty significantly increases people’s chances of developing these conditions and suffering more serious complications from them (Kim, Berger, and Matte 2006). Growing concerns over the links between poverty and chronic diet-related disease have led policy makers to put public health concerns at the center of food policy.
Policy makers and advocates emphasize the importance of programs like SNAP and emergency food to encourage healthy eating. Chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension are consistently described in market terms: as a cost to the overall economy in direct medical expenses, lost productivity, higher insurance premiums, and absence from work. The fear is no longer that poor people in the United States might go hungry. It is that without food assistance, they will eat poorly, get sick, and become a costly burden on society. In recent congressional debates over cuts to the SNAP program, Representative Jim McGovern put it succinctly, “a cut of $2 billion a year in food stamps could trigger an increase in $15 billion in medical costs for diabetes over the next decade. . . . Any cuts will cost us more. They will save us nothing” (McGovern 2014). Policy makers have maintained strong support for SNAP as both a work support and as a nutrition program necessary for maintaining a viable, healthy labor force in the United States. And yet improvements in low-income households’ health remain elusive.
Chapter 5 shows how the increased attention to health and nutrition in the food safety net has not translated into significantly improved nutrition outcomes for poor families. Stephanie’s experience shows how poor families make do in the face of bureaucratic neglect from the welfare office, SNAP policies designed to keep people on the edge of food insecurity, a food system where the cheapest calories are also the unhealthiest, and unreliable resources from food pantries. As she and her husband struggle to find work, maintain their housing, and feed their children, they experience long periods of severe food insecurity. Over the course of a year, Stephanie’s health deteriorates, posing new challenges as she attempts to secure work that can halt her family’s downward spiral into deep poverty. Her experience demonstrates the inadequacies of the current food safety net as a public health intervention.
These three developments all point to a transformation in the relationship between the state, the labor market, and citizens. Since the 1980s, the rollback of the regulatory state has led to rising inequality and insecurity. The role of the safety net is no longer to protect citizens from economic misfortune, but to create the optimal conditions for companies and individuals to act in ways that promote economic growth. State policies are designed to cajole individuals into “productivity”—through work, through community service, and through optimizing their health. Antipoverty policy is being used to grease the wheels of labor exploitation—not only by cutting assistance to poor