his own. After wearing out his welcome on a friend’s couch, he went into the New York City shelter system, which placed him in a housing facility in the Bronx. It was a two-hour commute to his job in Brooklyn, and his late-night work hours conflicted with the curfew at the housing facility. Eventually, he was fired for leaving work early one too many times in order to make it back to the Bronx to have a bed to sleep in. The restaurant had been paying him off the books, so he couldn’t apply for unemployment insurance when he lost his job. He found himself with no home, no money, and no way to get back on his feet.
Nigel was miserable in the shelter. He was living in an unfamiliar neighborhood under strict rules that he found constraining. After nearly six months, his counselor there managed to get him transferred to a single-room-occupancy building near the North Brooklyn Pantry. There was no curfew, so he would be able to come and go as he pleased and set his own schedule. One of the requirements of his new housing was that he open a public assistance case so he could qualify for the $215 rent subsidy, a small cash allowance, and food stamps. Nigel had never applied for food stamps or public assistance before. He was grateful to have the help while he looked for work, but he was also uneasy. “Sure, I paid my taxes, I did service for the country, but a year ago, I wasn’t in the system. I didn’t know I could apply for . . . I never even knew about this stuff. How to get SNAP and all this stuff. And my eyes are still being opened. It’s an education, but I’m not quite sure I want the degree. I want to start working again. I want to be regular again. I want to be a regular guy. I really do. But I’m here and I can’t really pull that off quite yet.” Between public assistance, food stamps, soup kitchens, and food from the pantry, Nigel made ends meet while he looked for work. He eventually landed a job at a diner, which paid minimum wage. He was happy to be working again. The other volunteers at the pantry hoped he would finally be able to get back on his feet. However, the job did not pay enough to really change his situation. He still qualified for food stamps, and saving for an apartment would be a challenge. But it was a job, and it meant at least he no longer needed food from the pantry.
Then, after two months, Nigel’s boss decided to take him off the books and pay him $5 an hour plus tips. Nigel, an experienced restaurant worker, balked at the request. “He wanted to take me off the books because I was making too much on minimum wage.” It wasn’t just the pay cut that bothered Nigel. It was also the fact that he would no longer receive paystubs or tax forms. Working under the table would mean he would no longer qualify for the wage subsidies provided to low-wage workers, including the earned income tax credit, credit toward unemployment, and social security. Being paid off the books meant he would lose his food stamp benefits as well. Single adults are required to show they work twenty hours a week in exchange for food assistance—something that is hard to prove without documentation. As Nigel put it, “I need something on paper. I want a paper trail now. I need my taxes. I need my refund. I really do.” Nigel was dejected by the whole situation. He quit, hoping he could find something better. “I’m walking home (from work) with forty, fifty bucks, which is something, but I thought I should be treated better. So, I left. I walked out. In retrospect, perhaps I should have at least stayed to see how that would have played out. But I didn’t. What’s the saying? Pride before fall? So therefore, I fell.”
When Nigel left his job, he lost his food stamps because he could no longer show that he was working. He returned to the food pantry and the soup kitchen as his main source of sustenance. He was frustrated by his lack of work, low pay, and unstable housing. We worked side by side that afternoon, and after several hours of sorting cans and packing bags, he left, taking rice, canned peas, apple juice, and some day-old bread from a local bakery with him. Like many of the people who came to the pantry, Nigel needed help finding a job and stable, affordable housing, but what he found instead was food. Every crisis was met with a bag of groceries or a hot meal.
Nigel’s experience raises some important questions about the contemporary response to poverty in the United States. Why have these entangled economic crises been met with the outpouring of food? What is the particular historical and political climate that has made expanding food assistance the preferred remedy for stagnating wages, widespread un- and underemployment, and growing precarity and insecurity for the working class? And what does this expansion of food assistance in the twenty-first century mean for the ways we can, collectively, imagine addressing the economic crises and insecurities of the present moment?
WHY FOOD?
Understanding the growth of the food safety net requires an understanding of the broader political context in which food has become the go-to solution to poverty in the twenty-first century. The growth in the food safety net is linked to three major developments, which I lay out in more detail below and in the chapters that follow: a fundamental transformation of the US welfare state in the late twentieth century, the emergence of public-private partnerships as a primary solution to issues of poverty, and growing concerns about obesity and diet-related disease.
Welfare reforms passed in the mid-1990s garnered a tremendous amount of scholarly and political attention. These reforms sharply restricted access to cash assistance for poor families with children in the United States, giving rise to the political common sense that both political parties in the United States were committed to shrinking the size and scope of the welfare state as a whole. Mainstream political analysts have largely celebrated the reduction in cash assistance as an unqualified success, reducing both spending and the role of government in the lives of the poor. On the left, analysts have linked welfare reforms with a broader process of impoverishment and growing income inequality through restricted access to aid, including a startling rise in extreme poverty in the United States (Maskovsky and Morgen 2003, Piven 2001, Edin and Shaefer 2016). Social theorists have argued that cuts to cash assistance represent “the continual contraction of welfare in the age of hypermobile capital and flexible work”(Wacquant 2009). Others show how politicians built support for cuts to cash assistance for poor families by mobilizing thinly veiled racial stereotypes about welfare recipients. In the process, they successfully inflamed racial divisions over the role of the social safety net in society, making racism the single most important factor driving white Americans’ opposition to welfare (Gilens 1999).
What has been largely overlooked in much of this analysis is the degree to which social spending targeted to the poor has, in fact, grown. While unemployed single-parent households have less access to public benefits, employed, two-parent households have much more access to assistance today (Ben-Shalom, Moffitt, and Scholz 2011; Moffitt 2015). In the early 2000s, policy makers at the federal, state, and local levels began to ease access to food stamp benefits. These efforts were largely motivated by a new attitude among administrators and policy makers that reframed food stamps as a “work support” for low-wage workers. The expansion of food stamps fit the mold of safety-net programs, such as the earned income tax credit, that subsidize wages and exclude non-workers from assistance. Politicians no longer rely on overt racial stereotypes like the infamous welfare queen to argue for cuts to social programs. Instead, they have redesigned the social safety net to benefit low-income workers, who are framed as deserving because they work. At the same time, these policies exclude a growing population of unemployed or informally employed residents, associating them with the long-standing racialized stereotype of the lazy, undeserving poor. Non-workers are fast becoming a distinct group who can be cut out of the social compact and excluded from social protections.
This new welfare state configuration, subsidizing low-wage workers and excluding the unemployed or informally employed, is the template on which future budget decisions will likely be made. As the Trump administration’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, recently put it, “If you are on food stamps and you are able bodied, we need you to go to work. There is a dignity to work and there’s a necessity to work to help the country succeed”(Purser and Hennigan 2017). The Trump administration’s push to tighten the links between SNAP assistance and work is part of a broader project to link all forms of public assistance, including Medicaid, to participation in the labor force. Nigel’s experience is typical. Losing his job meant losing his SNAP benefits because he could no longer show that he was employed. By tying food stamps to work, these benefits have become a key incentive and a key punishment, encouraging working people to accept the increasingly poor terms employers are offering them. At a political level, distinctions between the working poor and the non-working poor have become