The Return of American Hunger

July 20, 2016 5:44 AM

"...in one of the richest countries that has ever existed, about 15 percent of the population faces down bare cupboards and empty refrigerators on a routine basis." (slTheAtlantic)
posted by Kitteh (23 comments total)

Here in Minnesota they cut food stamps for able bodied childless adults to three months out of every three years - and that's when people in my social circle started to go hungry.

A few years ago, everyone was squeaking by working whatever they could get and getting food stamps. Not any more. Which goes to show you how "liberal" Minnesotans can be.

I mean, I literally have several friends who go hungry off and on, and while I'm glad to offer/share/buy food for them, honestly, they don't always want to recontextualize our friendship into "you are the person who gives me food", for which I don't blame them.
posted by Frowner at 6:22 AM on July 20, 2016 [16 favorites]

The college where I work recently set up a food pantry for students who don't have enough to eat. This is part of a trend: colleges all over the country are trying to provide food assistance for growing numbers of hungry students. Yay for compassion, I guess?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:32 AM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

By a handful of indicators—unemployment rates, overall economic growth, even average hourly earnings—the U.S. economy isn’t doing so badly right now.

And yet, when it comes to the number of Americans who go hungry, it’s almost like the recovery never happened. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food security as "access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life,” and in 2006, the year before the housing market stumbled, the USDA estimated that fewer than 10.9 percent of American households were food insecure. By 2009, that figure had spiked to 14.7 percent. And now? As of 2014, the most recent year on record, 14 percent of all American households are not food secure. That’s approximately 17.4 million homes across the United States, populated with more than 48 million hungry people. By the time the USDA reports its 2016 figures in September 2017, new food-stamp restrictions could make that number higher.

Hunger remains persistent because millions of Americans are still struggling financially as a result of the crash. Post-recession wage growth, though real, has been wildly unequal. A recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that "between 2000 and 2015, wages for the bottom 60 percent of male workers were flat or declined” and that wage gains have been largely concentrated among high earners.

Ah ... the sweet smell of economic recovery!
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:38 AM on July 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

Don't read the comments, but I read the comments, and people are actually arguing over whether "food insecurity" is "hunger," because it's not important to give people food unless they are literally starving to death.

I'm beginning to think that America should close up shop. It was a fine experiment, but it failed.
posted by xingcat at 7:05 AM on July 20, 2016 [19 favorites]

Well, we're here, we're talking about it, a lot of people are fairly educated, we have smart friends, and maybe someone will come up with an inspiring and effective idea.
posted by amtho at 7:25 AM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

• Winners/losers.
• Market will solve this problem, if left alone by government.
• Pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
• Welfare is a trap.

Did I miss any?
posted by Thorzdad at 7:40 AM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

    "There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

posted by [expletive deleted] at 7:47 AM on July 20, 2016 [31 favorites]

Scott Walker is my governor, and he's determined to keep as many people hungry as possible.

"The additional burdens of Walker’s food stamps decision are therefore falling on about one in four of his citizens, but one of every two people of color in his state."

Hunger is a dreadful problem at the root of many of our social inequalities. And Scott Walker is somebody people think should run for president again!
posted by TigerB at 8:21 AM on July 20, 2016

I see no reason for these restrictions on food stamps outside of an impulse to cruelty and meanness. I weep for this country.
posted by happyroach at 8:23 AM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

colleges all over the country are trying to provide food assistance for growing numbers of hungry students

If only there were some sort of hyperinflated fee we could reduce so that students could keep their food money to begin with.
posted by gimonca at 8:47 AM on July 20, 2016 [14 favorites]

Also, my standard response to people to who complain about "government regulations" is that yes, we should get rid of the silly, arbitrary BS that we pile upon food stamp recipients.
posted by gimonca at 8:53 AM on July 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm beginning to think that America unbridled free-market capitalism without social support programs should close up shop. It was a fine experiment, but it failed.

America has a lot of potential. The "I got mine, fuck you" that has become central to the culture since the 80s is the poison in the well. The retraction/death of unions coupled with the stripping of social programs is what is causing the experiment to fail. We had a bit of a golden age between Johnson's declaration of the War On Poverty ("unconditional", if I remember my history) and Reagan's inauguration. After that, it's all been a slow avalanche of shit slowing engulfing all but the 1%.
posted by hippybear at 9:55 AM on July 20, 2016 [11 favorites]

Ah, it's donate-to-local-food-bank o'clock again, I see.

(I know that this is the bandaid "solution." It's also quite literally the only thing I can do that's going to reach even a little bit farther from the reach of my own arms, though. So I try to do it regularly.)
posted by seyirci at 10:14 AM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

"I got mine, fuck you" that has become central to the culture since the 80s is the poison in the well.

The thing is, I don't think most people feel this way. This voice is so horrifying that people feel it's important to show it -- they hope to provoke a reaction to it, to prevent its growing stronger -- but there's a fundamental drive in people to take care of their community. Sure, it's stronger in some than in others, and it's predicated on having enough for one's own family first, but the drive to help others is strong in people.

It gets frustrated when people think there's nothing substantial they _can_ do, or when they think they're the only ones helping so everyone else is going to get ahead of them and there's no way they can alleviate enough suffering alone. This frustration leads to all kinds of bad things.

However, most people aren't that selfish. They just don't know what they can really do.

And then, there's that time I tried to give food to someone and got scolded for assuming he was homeless...
posted by amtho at 11:32 AM on July 20, 2016

The thing that really gets me is that almost without exception, the people behind these laws claim to be Christians and love Jesus. And then they do exactly the opposite of what he would do. Oftentimes in his name.
posted by overhauser at 12:08 PM on July 20, 2016 [5 favorites]

Why the Very Poor Have Become Poorer
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:23 PM on July 20, 2016

I don't see too much of a disconnect between people calling themselves Christians and being against food stamps. A lot of people think that welfare programs aren't something the government should be involved in and instead should be taken care of by churches or other charitable organizations. There is a lot wrong with that kind of thinking but I don't think it all comes from a place of greed or meanness.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:41 PM on July 20, 2016

As I emptied the remnants of a bottle of maple syrup on my waffles this morning I thought about how we (Canadians) should have some kind of subsidy or ration program so that people on low/no-income can have maple syrup without hardship instead of that terrible "pancake syrup". I recognize that there are much bigger problems here with respect to poverty and food security but I consider access to maple syrup to be part of a Canadian's birthright and probably not something very difficult or expensive to implement.

I think I've just talked myself into buying some extra maple syrup to donate to the food bank when I get groceries this weekend.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:42 PM on July 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think it was 1976, the first time I heard a boss condense his labor management philosophy down to the phrase "keep them hungry, don't let them starve." The SOB owned a few restaurants.
posted by ridgerunner at 1:00 PM on July 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

The first commenter on the thread asserts that "hunger only exists in cases of drugs or child abuse." It's hard to be reminded that people think like that.
posted by bendy at 2:15 PM on July 20, 2016 [3 favorites]

I spent some time last Xmas and spring working for a dear friend doing pickup small-good warehouse work for an indie catalog retailer (yes, catalog - they have a website but their consumer base is older and not very internet oriented). It was fulfilment labor, a factory making boxes with things in them, and it was very interesting to meet my fellow warehousemen er persons.

They were a mix of older bohemians (that would be me) and kids trying to get a leg up in 21st century Seattle. The older folks mostly lived in Seattle proper, but north and south, Columbia City and Northgate or further. The kids uniformly lived literal hours away, Everett, Edmonds, Olympia, unless they were UW students. Their daily commutes were 5 to 10 bucks, anecdotally, as they crossed multiple transit authority boundaries. They mostly did not take the transit time into account when estimating profit and loss versus time.

Social bonding occurred during the (to my surprise) strictly enforced paid breaks and lunches. Smokers retained a social advantage because smoking created a self-defined social minority that had social exposure to one another outside the literal physical confines of the workplace.

Among my coworkers of my age and younger, a specific commonality emerged as a basis of discussion: food, where the good food is, how much it costs, and how interesting it is. I never overheard or participated in a discussion about cooking, even with people who were working as chefs.

The constraint is time: even among my co-workers who were stove-literate, they just did not have 45 minutes at home or 30 minutes at the grocery, given their multi-job, half-day commutes. So empty cupboards and refrigerators are indeed a signature of the American economy in the 21st century and that includes both hungry and fed working-class people.
posted by mwhybark at 4:10 PM on July 20, 2016 [9 favorites]

There is a lot wrong with that kind of thinking but I don't think it all comes from a place of greed or meanness.

I don't think there is a single time and place in history where strictly private relief efforts have successfully addressed a significant long-term hunger problem, even to the unsatisfactory level it's addressed in the U.S. today. If you have the audacity to make the argument that they will somehow magically work now, then you deserve all the charges of greed or meanness that come your way. You believe that fairy story for a reason.
posted by praemunire at 8:30 PM on July 20, 2016 [4 favorites]

The thing is, I don't think most people feel this way. This voice is so horrifying that people feel it's important to show it -- they hope to provoke a reaction to it, to prevent its growing stronger -- but there's a fundamental drive in people to take care of their community. Sure, it's stronger in some than in others, and it's predicated on having enough for one's own family first, but the drive to help others is strong in people.

It gets frustrated when people think there's nothing substantial they _can_ do, or when they think they're the only ones helping so everyone else is going to get ahead of them and there's no way they can alleviate enough suffering alone. This frustration leads to all kinds of bad things.

However, most people aren't that selfish. They just don't know what they can really do.

I see the continual chant about lower taxes and fewer government programs and punitive steps required to receive social services as evidence of this being central to the culture. If our culture at large valued helping others in ways that actually make a difference, these things would not have become central to most of our political process over the past 35 years.

Personally, I see paying taxes as payments for services rendered. And I expect those services to be rendered across society, not to me personally on a 1:1, dollar for dollar basis. But that is not the attitude that most take. So food stamps get cut, job training programs get cut, states cut funding to upper education which results in an entire generation being saddled with giant levels of debt that cripple their lives... And those who are making the policy and who are voting for the policy-makers (and who are mostly likely to be the exact tax base that could change the course of this downward slide) are chanting "fuck you, I got mine" the entire time. Not in those words, but they might as well be.
posted by hippybear at 12:22 AM on July 21, 2016 [5 favorites]