the Nixon administration and Congress moved swiftly to expand access to food assistance. By 1974, the food stamp program was available in all fifty states and the school lunch program had also been expanded (Levenstein 1993). The Food Stamp Act of 1977 finally eliminated the food stamp purchase requirement, which meant poor families no longer needed to have cash up front to purchase food stamps (Poppendieck 1998). The effect of these policy changes on hunger in the United States was dramatic. Enrollment in the food stamp program jumped from three million in 1969 to eighteen million in 1976 (United States Department of Agriculture 2018). Doctors who had documented the effects of severe hunger in the late 1960s revisited those same communities a decade later and found that clinical malnutrition had been virtually wiped out in the United States. The swollen bellies that were so prevalent a decade before were nowhere to be found. Researchers reported, “Where visitors ten years ago could quickly see large numbers of stunted, apathetic children with swollen stomachs and the dull eyes and poorly healing wounds characteristic of malnutrition—such children are not to be seen in such numbers. . . . Many poor people now have food”(Kotz 1979). These researchers were clear in their assessment that it was public policy—the expansion of food stamps, school lunch, and school breakfast that made the difference.
By the mid-1970s food stamps were a universal entitlement available to all citizens as long as they met the income requirements, regardless of whether they worked or not. As such, food stamps were the closest thing we have ever had to a universal floor under wages in the United States. The degree to which the public and policy makers across the political spectrum were galvanized to take action in the face of visible malnutrition speaks to the success of social movements in pushing the state to guarantee a basic level of economic security. The food safety net of the 1970s was explicitly intended to protect citizens against the worst ravages and hardships associated with poverty. However, expanding food assistance succeeded precisely because it remained a partial, supplemental solution. Even with food assistance, poor people still need to work to pay for shelter, clothing, and other necessities. More transformative demands like the NWRO’s campaign for a guaranteed income failed precisely because they challenged the idea that poor people must go to work to meet their basic needs.
The expansion of the food stamp program in the 1970s was rooted in demands for care that were enacted through the welfare state. Social movements, advocates, and citizens offered a clear response to the question, “how should care happen in an inclusive democracy?” (Tronto 2013, 10). To be a citizen in a land of plenty meant to be able to have enough food to sustain oneself, and a broad range of Americans insisted that it was the role of the state to ensure that everyone had access to sufficient food. The modern food stamp program was a tremendous policy and public health achievement, virtually eliminating clinical malnutrition in the United States. But the program’s success in eliminating severe hunger was quickly overshadowed by a political backlash against the War on Poverty and the gains of the civil rights movement more generally (Quadagno 1996, Neubuck and Cazenave 2001). The paradoxes of the growing food safety net in the twenty-first century are rooted in this backlash.
ORGANIZED ABANDONMENT
The tone of the debate around food assistance changed dramatically by the early 1980s. In the 1970s, social movements pushing to expand social and economic rights for poor people began to wane for a number of reasons, including direct infiltration and disruption of movements by the police and the FBI (Blackstock 1975). At the same time, economic elites in the US began to organize politically through new institutions like the Business Roundtable. Their goal was to “restructure state agencies that had been designed under the enormous emergency of the Great Depression (the New Deal) and its aftermath (loosely, the Great Society) to promote the general welfare” (Gilmore 2009), including welfare state programs like cash assistance to poor families, food stamps, Medicaid, and social security. By 1980, the ideas promoted by these business elites had gained national prominence in the figure of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan perfected the use of coded racial language meant to conjure an image of welfare users as Black—despite the fact that the majority of both welfare and food stamp recipients have always been white (Haney-Lopez 2014). He used thinly veiled racist terms like the welfare queen to build support for a political agenda aimed at dismantling and undermining state agencies that business leaders saw as problematic, including social protections for poor and working-class people. He defined care as the problem, asserting that the state was providing too much care to the poor at the expense of aggrieved tax payers (Edsall and Edsall 1992). Drawing on thinkers like Charles Murray, Reagan reframed welfare programs as harmful to poor people, arguing that assistance to the poor encouraged a culture of dependency (Murray 1984). He valorized work as the primary path to independence and voluntarism as the solution to poverty. By repeatedly portraying welfare dependents as living in luxury and contrasting them with economically struggling tax payers, Reagan successfully vilified welfare state programs among many white voters. He successfully pushed through cuts to welfare state spending in the early 1980s, including cuts to the food stamp program, in the midst of a deep recession (Poppendieck 2014, 263).
Alongside his attacks on welfare state programs, like food stamps, Reagan argued that the private sector and voluntary organizations were better equipped to address many of the nation’s ills (Germani 1981). He popularized the idea that care should come from the local community, not the state. Efforts to reinvigorate the American tradition of voluntarism emerged alongside growing food insecurity due to welfare program cuts and a deep recession. People in struggling communities, hit by factory shut downs and cuts to social services, scrambled to respond to the rising needs of newly unemployed and insecure workers (Walley 2010, Pappas 1989). The efforts of faith-based organizations and community groups to respond to the early effects of deindustrialization gave rise to the modern food bank movement in the early 1980s and established the two-pronged approach to hunger we see today in the United States (Poppendieck 1998). Emergency food providers proliferated to fill in the gaps left by cuts to public programs like food stamps to meet the needs of hungry families.
One of the key welfare policy innovations Reagan championed was adding work requirements for public benefits like food stamps and cash assistance. Though some modest pilot welfare-to-work programs were put in place in the 1980s, these efforts were limited. The first meaningful work requirements for food stamps were instituted in 1996 as part of the federal welfare reforms passed under Bill Clinton’s administration.
Clinton’s campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it” set him apart from other Democratic leaders. It signaled a willingness to abandon a Keynesian approach to the welfare state that would protect programs that redistribute resources to people when the market fails them. Instead, Clinton’s ascendency marked the consolidation of a brand of market triumphalism, often referred to as neoliberalism, that saw free, unregulated markets as the solution to a whole range of social issues—including poverty and hunger (Maskovsky and Goode 2001). From a policy perspective, Clinton defined the solution to poverty as participating in the market as a worker, particularly for poor women with children who were the primary beneficiaries of cash and food assistance. Citizenship itself was redefined as both the right and the obligation to participate in markets.
Welfare reforms in the Clinton era directly undermined the gendered exemption from work for poor mothers caring for young children. Millions of poor women left the welfare rolls after the passage of welfare reform in the late 1990s, and when they did, they often lost their food stamp benefits. The diversionary tactics local welfare offices employed to discourage families from applying for cash assistance after the passage of welfare reform were also employed to discourage them from applying for food stamps (Davis 2002, Independent Budget Office 2008). Food stamp rolls plummeted after 1996, falling from twenty-five million in 1995 to just below seventeen million in 2000 (Wolkwitz 2007). The steep drop in the food stamp rolls set the stage for the revival of food assistance as a strategic policy intervention designed to meet the needs of the working poor.
SELECTIVE CARE
If the face of a starving child motivated the expansion of food stamps in the 1970s, it was the face of the working mom who could not afford healthy food that inspired the expansion of food assistance at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the wake of welfare reform, women entered the work force, but found they often could not move out of poverty, despite working full time (Lein 2007, Newman 2001).