Feeding the Crisis. Maggie Dickinson
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but also by expanding it in ways that subsidize low-wage work, encourage community organizations to take responsibility for poverty, and help individuals maintain work-ready bodies.
To a remarkable extent, food assistance in the United States has been transformed to support the employment relationship and to cut costs—not to ensure that poor people have access to food. When people like Nigel lose a job, they are often cut off from federal food assistance and turn to emergency food providers like soup kitchens and food pantries. This configuration of assistance represents a shift from the way welfare state programs operated in the twentieth century. Welfare protections were extended in the postwar era largely in response to social movements (Piven and Cloward 1993). The programs that were created safeguarded people from certain predictable risks, such as illness, old age, or unemployment caused by dips in the business cycle. But the relationship between these programs and the labor market has shifted significantly. In an era when work has become flexible, insecure, and unreliable, the predictable risks have changed. With low-wage, part-time jobs becoming more prevalent in the United States, social support is being transformed to protect against the systemic risk of below-subsistence wages and to punish and exclude poor people who fail to establish a foothold in the formal economy. Thus, the growing food safety net is, in many ways, a set of technocratic fixes to the problems of economic insecurity, based in policies designed to push people into the labor market rather than to protect them when the market fails. The urgent need is for new politics and policies that can address both hunger and economic insecurity. Chapter 6 draws on the insights and analyses of the people profiled in this book to suggest a new approach to anti-hunger politics that does just that.
SEEING POWER
This study is based on two years of ethnographic research in the North Brooklyn Pantry. In addition to helping out around the pantry, I held regular hours each week to assist people applying for public benefits, including SNAP. I went to the welfare office with them and read through the inscrutable letters from New York City’s Human Resources Administration, trying to help make sense of the convoluted legalese that often meant the difference between having money for food or rent and getting mired in an even deeper financial crisis. My interest was initially in food programs, but I quickly realized that food was often just the tip of the iceberg. I sought out local advocates and nonprofits to find programs that could assist people in finding jobs and housing. As much as I tried, I never found a jobs program that could successfully connect pantry clients with decent work. Housing advocates I spoke to pointed to temporary housing options. The only permanent possibility was public housing, but the waiting list was decades long. The need for permanent, affordable housing in New York far outweighs the availability. There were simply no effective programs for connecting people with affordable housing or decent jobs. What I could almost always do, however, was help people get food, either in the form of a pantry bag or through a SNAP application.
While other ethnographic researchers attempt to “intervene as little as possible” (Desmond 2016, 321) in order to observe life as it is actually lived, my approach was based on interfering. I argued with welfare workers, asked pointed questions, and helped community members prepare their documents so that they would more easily qualify for benefits. I learned the ins and outs of how to do this work from a network of citywide advocates who had been pushing to expand access to food stamps in New York City for many years. I also conducted two focus groups with case workers at the welfare offices in North Brooklyn and interviewed nine local pantry directors, who are often the gatekeepers of food assistance. Eleanor Leacock has argued that, “given an able and conscientious researcher, advocacy leads to a fuller and more accurate understanding than attempted neutrality” (Leacock 1987). Advocacy can lead to theoretical insights because it can uncover how power works in everyday interactions. Starting from the assumption that poverty and food insecurity are not natural conditions but the product of political choices, I wanted to understand the barriers people encountered in their attempts to secure food. As Phillipe Bourgois has argued, “the best way to document the inadequacy of social services is to . . . assist, accompany and document”(Bourgois 2011, 4).
The core of my ethnographic work was as an advocate and resource for individuals in their dealings with the welfare office. But unlike Bourgois in his study of homeless heroin addicts, I did not confine my research to people who are often perceived as the most abject residents of the city. Though many of the people I met and interviewed were homeless and struggled with addiction, others were barely clinging to a middle-class lifestyle. Because I conducted interviews and participant observation with a range of community residents, my findings are essentially comparative. I was able to detect patterns in people’s treatment, their ability to access welfare benefits, and their access to food assistance. In doing so, I document not only the inadequacy of social services, but also the adequacy—the people for whom social services work quite well.
What I found was that the growing food safety net is entirely compatible with, and even enforces, large-scale changes in the economy, including the expansion of the low-wage labor force and the abandonment of a growing class of socially and economically marginal citizens. Welfare and work are often portrayed as polar opposites in contemporary popular discourse, with work being revered as dignified and worthy and welfare being scorned as it’s opposite, breeding dependency and sloth. However, ethnographers have long demonstrated the interdependence of work and welfare in the lives and economic survival strategies of the poor, blurring stark distinctions between welfare “dependents” and those who work (Lein and Edin 1997, Newman 1999, Stack 1974, Scharff 1987). Though the welfare reforms of 1996 promised to end welfare as we knew it, they did not, in fact, end welfare. These reforms did, however, significantly reshape the relationship between work, welfare, citizens, and the state.
The people I met over the course of this research navigated a complicated system of welfare programs, formal jobs, informal employment, and charity to make ends meet. Changes in their circumstances had profound effects on whether and what they could eat. Tracking these changing circumstances over time revealed the new contours of deservingness and abandonment that shape the twenty-first-century welfare state. Poor New Yorkers like Nigel, Fabiola, and Angela navigated this complicated patchwork of resources day in and day out. Their very lives depend on the kinds of resources they can cobble together out of what’s left of the safety net, a labor market that provides little in the way of security or sufficiency, and an enormous network of charitable food programs that provide resources without rights. What emerged as I accompanied them and assisted them in their efforts to feed themselves and their families, was a safety net designed to manage poverty and hunger—not to end it.
This book tells the stories of eight families living in North Brooklyn who turn to food assistance to make ends meet. I chose to carry out this research in New York City because it was one of the only places in the country that imposed food stamp work requirements in the wake of the Great Recession. In New York, the Bloomberg administration chose to enforce a rule that food stamp recipients who are not elderly, disabled, or caring for a child prove that they are working at least twenty hours a week or risk being cut off from their SNAP benefits. At the time, New York was an outlier in terms of food assistance policy. However, as the unemployment rate has fallen across the nation, many states have either opted in or been required by the USDA to enforce SNAP work requirements. Congressional Republicans have attempted to tighten work requirements for SNAP since the 2012 Farm Bill negotiations. The Trump administration has recently encouraged states and federal agencies to expand work requirements for Medicaid, and housing assistance as well, making New York City an important test case for what will happen across the country as these policies continue to be pursued at the national level.
Though areas in New York like the South Bronx have some of the highest rates of food insecurity in the nation, I was not interested in telling an exceptional story. Instead, I wanted to see what food insecurity looks like in an average community. Like the majority of food stamp recipients in the United States, the majority of residents in North Brooklyn are white. Given the ways welfare programs have been associated with people of color and poor single mothers and deployed as racist dog whistles (Haney-Lopez 2014, Gilens 1999), it was important to me to do this research in a community that matched the racial demographics of the nation as a whole.5 The clients at the North Brooklyn Pantry and the residents I worked closely with came from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Race and class certainly