Kristen, a friend of mine here in Louisville, KY, struggles to provide enough food for herself and her son and daughter, despite working full-time at a big box supermarket. She is one of more than 20 million food chain workers nationwide, the majority of whom are food insecure despite their proximity to massive amounts of food – thirty percent of which goes to waste. For Kristen, the food is there in abundance, but the money to buy it comes up short each month.
A central part of my faith is the belief that all of God’s children have a right to life in its fullness, which includes the right to ample, healthy food. As God’s hands and feet, we are collectively responsible to ensure this right. The collective system we have devised to provide the conditions for a dignified life we call government, and governments must guarantee the right to food.
For the past several decades our U.S. government has spent billions trying to provide a safety net with food stamps and nutrition programs that met some of the need but failed to end hunger even in the richest country in the history of the world.
In the rich and powerful U.S., our racialized and class-stratified economic system has increasingly enriched a small elite, now led by several dozen billionaires, and it has impoverished working class people and BIPOC.
While public discourse often frames hunger as a persistent, if regrettable, reality in the U.S., this acceptance masks a deeper truth: emergency food systems have become the default answer to a problem rooted in racial and economic inequity. Despite the proliferation of food pantries and charitable meals, the underlying structures that generate hunger remain largely unchallenged. It’s at this point that voices from food justice movements, like Blain Snipstal, force us to confront a more uncomfortable reality—one that compels us to question whether current systems are actually perpetuating the problem rather than solving it.
“SNAP is the opium of the people,” said Blain Snipstal, while working in 2011 with the Hunger Program as one of the Food Justice VISTA Americorps workers. Why would he say that about a program that keeps millions of Americans out of abject poverty? And why would I remember him saying it fourteen years later? Because he is right. Riffing from Karl Marx’s quote, which in his case was a jab at religion, Snipstal explained that the government has been failing people of color and poor people for decades, and now government nutrition programs provide only enough calories to keep them from revolting. People are pacified just enough so that the need to change the conditions that create hunger and poverty is bypassed.
Getting enough food to people – through government programs and the charity of individuals, religious groups, and nonprofits – becomes the focus rather than the unjust structures that underlie hunger.
Don’t get me wrong. Given widespread poverty in the U.S. and the systemic injustices in our economic system, SNAP is critical for keeping people from going hungry. But the non-governmental hunger relief industry – food banks, pantries, and meal programs – can’t come close to feeding the hungry in our country. Case in point, SNAP provides about nine meals for every one meal provided by food banks, says Vince Hall, the chief government relations officer with Feeding America.
Could the ‘Hunger Industrial Complex’ be undermining the solutions we desire?
If people are food insecure and malnourished because they can’t afford sufficient and healthy food, then low wages and poverty emerging from an inequitable economic system is the real problem.
Supplementing food becomes merely a bandage and distracts from the root cause – a racialized, capitalist system that rewards the greedy, powerful and already rich at the expense of everyone else. The solution requires changing the economic system to one that guarantees people’s right to food.
Take Feeding America, which comprises a network of more than 200 food banks and 60,000 charitable partners across the country. An estimated $15-18 billion dollars are needed to run the feeding industry despite its origin in the 1960s as a temporary emergency hunger relief effort during the War on Poverty. Churches, religious groups, nonprofits and tens of millions of volunteers are needed to run this machine. All this only distracts and diverts energy and money from solving the structural issues underlying perpetual hunger in the United States.
Andy Fisher, who may have coined the phrase, Hunger Industrial Complex, in his Big Hunger book, critiques how corporate donations, such as those from Walmart, enhance corporate reputations while masking their role in perpetuating low wages and food insecurity. Fisher demonstrates how many food banks, influenced by corporate donors, avoid advocating for systemic solutions like higher wages, affordable housing, or healthcare, which are crucial to addressing poverty at its source.
At the personal, psychological level, food pantries, meal programs, and donated food provide a convenient and emotionally comforting response to hunger, as Janet Poppendieck explains in Sweet Charity. However, food banks function as a ‘moral safety valve,’ giving people a sense of having done their duty while reassuring the public that hunger is being addressed. This visible band-aid, however, weakens the critical drive to confront the systemic injustices that create the very need for food banks.
Donating food is akin to a gift, dependent on the whims of people and the deservedness of the recipient. This approach makes survival an option contingent on the goodwill of others rather than a guaranteed right. Over time, this mindset weakens the public’s expectation that governments should ensure basic needs are met. Consequently, food banks and food programs become accepted as a default solution to poverty—missing the point that we have failed as a society. In a functional, humane society meeting basic needs would be guaranteed and universal.
Ending Hunger for Good
I envision a dignified solution where SNAP and other federal nutrition programs are phased out completely – except for programs needed by the small percentage of disabled, sick, or elderly people who require sustained support. Then, the roughly $140 billion annual dollars not spent on those benefits and their administration are distributed to every one of the 42 million people currently receiving SNAP benefits. This would translate into about $278 per month of universal guaranteed income for 42 million children and adults. Double or triple that by collecting a small portion of the “tax gap” – taxes owed but not collected each year, or quadruple the amount by shaving off a small portion of the military budget and we’d eliminate hunger and poverty in the United States!
Unfortunately, when hunger relief is the primary focus, the dollars spent on food are dollars not spent on making the systemic changes needed to end hunger once and for all.
Instead, let’s hold the government accountable for ensuring the right to food, call for more direct support to people in need, and lend your support to your Hunger Program and to other groups working to eliminate the causes of hunger. We can do it!
Take action now on the Food Research and Action Center webpage.
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