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.
CHAPTER TWO
Care and Abandonment in the
Food Safety Net
The expansion of food assistance in the twenty-first century—what I call today’s growing food safety net—differs radically from the expansion of food assistance that took place in the 1970s, when the basic architecture of the modern food stamp program was put in place. The expansion of food assistance in the 1970s was one of the last major achievements of the War on Poverty. Spurred by the civil rights movement, the goal of the War on Poverty was to extend economic citizenship rights to all Americans, including African Americans who had been excluded from many of the New Deal welfare state programs established in the 1930s (Katznelson 2005, Quadagno 1996). The modern food stamp program emerged out of a deep-seated belief that hunger in a wealthy nation like the United States was intolerable and that the federal government had an obligation to make sure that no one starved.
In the late 1960s, Robert Kennedy embarked on a poverty tour to bring attention to pockets of severe poverty across the United States. In the Deep South and Appalachia, he and his team met listless children with clear signs of clinical malnutrition, including swollen bellies, wounds that would not heal, and stunted growth. Following in their footsteps, a team of doctors and nurses funded by the Field Foundation visited these same areas, documenting the prevalence of hunger and its terrible physical effects on children and others. They reported seeing children “suffering from hunger and disease, and directly or indirectly, . . . dying from them—which is exactly what ‘starvation’ means” (Robertson 1967). A separate investigation by the labor-backed Citizens Crusade Against Poverty identified 256 “hunger counties” across the United States. Attention to “the hunger issue” exploded when a 1968 CBS documentary titled Hunger in America brought these findings to the American people (Levenstein 1993).
Images of visibly malnourished children shocked many Americans. There was a sense of disbelief that such severe hunger could exist in what, at the time, was broadly considered an affluent society. Just a few years earlier Michael Harrington, in his unflinching expose of poverty in a land of plenty, had written, “To be sure, the other America is not impoverished in the same sense as those poor nations where millions cling to hunger as a defense against starvation. This country has escaped such extremes” (Harrington 1962). And yet the images emerging from Appalachia and the Deep South in the late 1960s provided stark proof that this was not the case. Not everyone living in the United States had, in fact, escaped such extremes.
The political response to these findings and the public concern they generated was swift and dramatic, largely because they emerged in a moment of high social movement activity. Poverty politics in the late 1960s was dominated by social movements like the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) that were engaged in a national campaign to expand access to welfare and to institute a guaranteed income for all Americans (Nadasen 2004). By the late 1960s, leaders in the civil rights movement had shifted focus to winning economic rights through multiracial organizing efforts like the Poor People’s Campaign. In this context, groups across the political spectrum were galvanized to push for political action on the hunger issue, which seemed like an intolerable manifestation of poverty. Civil rights activists who had long been involved in antipoverty struggles and welfare rights campaigns demanded changes to the food stamp program so that families with little or no cash could more easily access food assistance (Robertson 1967, Kornbluh 2015). Grassroots activists like the Black Panther Party took matters into their own hands by organizing programs of free breakfast for children and free groceries, building community support for their revolutionary political agenda and embarrassing the federal government into taking action (Nelson 2012, Patel 2012, 3).1 Journalistic exposés on hunger proliferated and Congress quickly initiated its own investigations into the extent of the problem in the United States. Liberal advocacy groups formed and pushed Congress to take action. Hunger quickly emerged as an unavoidable political issue. Both Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey campaigned on promises to end hunger in the United States in the 1968 presidential election (Levenstein 1993, 150).
Under tremendous public pressure