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ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
Feeding the Crisis
Nigel walked into the North Brooklyn Pantry on a hot summer day in the middle of July.1 I was happy to see him. He was not happy to be back. I had been volunteering at the pantry every week for over a year. I had become part of a motley crew, made up mostly of older women who had lived in the neighborhood for decades. Fabiola, Angela, Katherine, and Ada had welcomed me into the fold, and together we did most of the day-to-day work of the pantry. We carried boxes of cans up the narrow, wooden steps from the basement to the pews upstairs and packed blue plastic bags with a random assortment of food from the food bank each week. We registered several hundred neighborhood residents, gave them each a bag of groceries, and managed conflicts as residents waiting on the line grew restless. We returned leftover food to the basement at the end of the day and cleaned up all the boxes and bits of packaging from the sanctuary floor so the church would be ready for services on Sunday.
Nigel had joined our ragtag crew in February. He lived a few blocks away in a run-down single room that he shared with a roommate. He started coming to dinner at the North Brooklyn Pantry’s soup kitchen on Tuesday nights and soon after began helping out at the pantry each week. Like Angela and Fabiola, two of the most dedicated and consistent volunteers, he relied heavily on the food he took with him from the pantry. All three had started out as pantry clients struggling with deep poverty before they became regular volunteers. Everyone appreciated Nigel. He worked hard, had a good sense of humor, and didn’t mind lifting heavy boxes that the rest of us could barely manage. But we had not seen him for the past two months because he had started working as a bus boy at a diner in Manhattan. I could track his economic fortunes based on whether or not he showed up to volunteer. When he was working, he disappeared. When he lost a job, he came back.
Food assistance has become the leading edge of the twenty-first-century response to growing poverty and economic insecurity. Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an unprecedented outpouring of food assistance across the United States, encompassing both federally funded food programs like SNAP (formerly referred to as food stamps) and emergency food providers like soup kitchens and food pantries.2 During the George W. Bush administration, national food stamp rolls rose from just above eighteen million in 2001 to twenty-seven million in 2008. This growth gained even more momentum as a deep recession took hold. By the end of 2012, the rolls reached a record forty-seven million Americans, or around 15 percent of the US population. Despite an official economic recovery, SNAP rolls remain near this historic high, serving over forty-two million people in 2017 (United States Department of Agriculture 2018). The number of people served by soup kitchens and food pantries in this same period has also risen, from twenty-five million in 2005 to 46.5 million in 2012 (Wienfield et al. 2014, Malbi et al. 2010). Millions of American households rely on these forms of food assistance to make ends meet each month. In pantries and soup kitchens across the country, thousands of volunteers show up week after week to cook meals and serve groceries to people in need. And yet, despite a massively expanded food safety net, more than forty-one million Americans experienced food insecurity in 2016 (Coleman-Jensen et al. 2017).
The conventional wisdom is that welfare programs have been continually cut back and systematically dismantled both in the United States and globally since the 1980s. But the expansion of food assistance tells a different story—and a more accurate one. In fact, welfare state spending in the United States—and especially programs targeted to poor households—has been growing since the mid-1980s (Moffitt 2015). The growth of the food safety net mirrors larger transitions in the ways policy makers have chosen to address poverty and economic insecurity. The twenty-first-century safety net in the United States has expanded to manage growing poverty and insecurity but does little to alter the political and economic realities that create these conditions in the first place. Since the 1980s, wages for middle- and working-class workers have stagnated, low-wage jobs have proliferated, and work has become more insecure. In what Jacob Hacker has termed “the great risk shift,” employers have walked away from their obligations—from providing full-time work and regular schedules to offering health care, pensions, and other protections to the people who work for them (Hacker 2006, Lambert 2008). Families across the United States have experienced an ongoing housing crisis, marked by foreclosures and evictions (Desmond 2016), adding to a sense of instability and uncertainty for many Americans. As jobs have become more insecure and the cost of living has increased, food assistance has quietly expanded to meet a growing need.
Instead of fixing the crisis of growing economic precarity and insecurity, we are feeding it. Pantry clients and volunteers, like Nigel, Angela, and Fabiola, are on the front lines of a new kind of safety net made up of a complicated patchwork of generosity and withholding, care and abandonment. Programs like SNAP have been reconfigured to subsidize low-wage workers who do not earn enough at their jobs to afford basic necessities like food. SNAP is a federal program that provides funds to low-income households that can be used to purchase food at grocery stores and other retailers. The program has been rebranded as a “work support,” and low-wage workers are encouraged to enroll in the program by policy makers as well as sometimes even their employers (Adad-Santos 2013). At the same time, federal funding for public-private partnerships has unleashed a massive expansion of community groups and nonprofits working to address hunger. The growing network of emergency food providers (EFPs) is comprised of regional food banks that distribute food to small, local community organizations like soup kitchens and food pantries that primarily operate out of faith-based organizations. As Jan Poppendieck points out, EFPs distribute food as charity and, unlike SNAP, offer clients “no enforceable rights whatsoever” (Poppendieck 1994). Both forms of food assistance have expanded dramatically since the turn of the millennium and have become an interlocking system governing hunger and food insecurity in new ways. People like Nigel rely on both forms of food assistance, turning from one to the other depending on changes in their circumstances.
Nigel was forty years old when we met—an African American Marine veteran who had worked in restaurants for most of his adult life. His easy-going outlook made him the black sheep in his family. He grew up in a middle-class home in Brooklyn. His dad was an office worker in a large corporation. His sister had a law degree. Nigel chose a different path, but it wasn’t a particularly troubled one. He had no criminal record and no complicated family life. He never married, had no children, and expressed no regrets about these choices. As a self-described free spirit, Nigel wasn’t rich, but he had always managed to hold down an apartment and a job. He saw himself as “a regular guy” who liked to work and was satisfied with life.
His regular life began to unravel in 2011, when his Brooklyn apartment building was condemned and he was forced to move. This was the first in a series of crises that would plague Nigel for the next three years. At the time, he was working as a sous chef in a small Brooklyn restaurant. He realized it would be a long time until he would be able to save enough to get a place of 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 a racializing discourse, justifying the exclusion 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 families (Piven 2001, Peck 2001), 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 played a role in shaping both my relationship with community residents and people’s experiences within the labor market, housing market, and their interactions with welfare offices (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011; Massey and Denton 1993; DiTomaso 2013). White clients at the North Brooklyn Pantry were more likely to have family networks and resources they could draw on in the face of a personal economic crisis. They often had advantages built up over generations of access to better jobs, education, and housing that insulated them from some of the more degrading aspects of engaging with the welfare system and the housing and labor markets.
Ethnographers have long debated the impact of race, gender, and class on their ability to carry out research (Narayan 1993, Jacobs-Huey 2008). My role as a researcher and an educated white woman were moderated somewhat by two factors. The first was the connections I built with the regular volunteers at the pantry. As a mother of two young children and a poorly funded graduate student from a working-class background, I often had to bring my children with me to volunteer at the pantry. The women who ran the North Brooklyn Pantry doted on my children, and we built close relationships around our identities as mothers. Katherine, one of the regular volunteers, lived on the same block as my family. She took me under her wing, putting aside food from the pantry that she thought my children would like and keeping an eye on them while I conducted interviews and helped pantry clients with their SNAP applications. The second was my role as an advocate, which helped me to build trust with pantry clients and community residents who came to me in search of help with their benefits. Through the process of advocating on their behalf, I was able to corroborate their accounts with official documentation from the welfare office and in my everyday interactions with them at the food pantry.
Like any place, there are particularities unique to the North Brooklyn Pantry and the surrounding community. One of the primary factors impacting residents in North Brooklyn was gentrification and the skyrocketing price of housing. Though rising housing costs and housing insecurity are often causes of food insecurity, the rapid gentrification of North Brooklyn made housing a particularly acute problem for residents. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, real estate developers converted the affordable—though often dilapidated—housing in the neighborhood into high-end apartments for wealthier tenants. As a result, many local residents experienced housing instability. They lost apartments to rent increases, harassment by landlords interested in renting to higher-income tenants, or the sale of buildings to developers for renovation. The housing crisis in North Brooklyn has pushed many low-income households into substandard living situations: doubled up in overcrowded apartments to make rent, relegated to homeless shelters, or living in rented rooms with little or no access to cooking facilities. These conditions significantly impact people’s ability to prepare and store food, making them more likely to experience food insecurity. For many clients at the North Brooklyn Pantry, their struggles with food were intimately linked with their struggles for housing.
However, many of the barriers to economic security that the men and women at the North Brooklyn Pantry encountered were rooted in policies and decisions made at the national level and in broader economic trends that effect working-class residents across the United States. The ideology of work and reward has been enormously important for regulating the American labor market and American society in general. Its breakdown—the idea that work will no longer bring material rewards—is a tremendously unsettling force. Workers have been displaced en masse through the loss of manufacturing jobs, and this surplus labor force has been pushed into informal and entrepreneurial labor, with intense competition for the jobs that remain. In an era of economic restructuring and downward mobility, with falling wages and an increasing atmosphere of insecurity and doom, food assistance programs retooled as work supports and public health interventions do important political work. They buttress ideas of work and reward in ways that continue to divide the working class in the United States into a deserving poor worthy of care and an undeserving poor at risk of abandonment. The growing food safety net is redefining who deserves help and what form that help should come in—either as federal food assistance used to procure food at the grocery store or as charity from a soup kitchen or food pantry. Taken together, the expansion of this two-pronged food safety net helps to justify and further entrench the changes in the labor market that are driving the need for more food in the first place.
