This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Congress passed legislation that, among other things, allowed all participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known more popularly as the food stamp program, to "receive the maximum monthly benefit, regardless of income." That put extra food on the tables of so many poor families in this country and, as the New York Times reported, "helped keep food insecurity at bay and cut poverty rates to a record low."
But ho-hum, as far as Congress is concerned, that's history. Crisis over and done with. (No matter, by the way, that more than 300 Americans are still dying daily of Covid-19.) Tens of millions of low-income families are no longer getting those additional food-stamp benefits. Today, TomDispatch regular and novelist Beverly Gologorsky puts that sad reality in both a personal and a far larger context as she explores why hunger itself isn't considered a kind of pandemic in this country.
Let me just offer one other bit of context for the congressional canceling of those extra SNAP benefits. Late last year, as the pandemic was "ending" and Congress was planning to cut those benefits, it noticed another truly needy place to put our taxpayer dollars. In fact, Congress found that institution so desperately needy that the representatives of the people offered $45 billion more than it even requested for 2023. And yes, I'm thinking about the Pentagon (as well, of course, as the military-industrial-congressional complex it's part of). Its budget is now soaring toward what, in the years to come, will undoubtedly be a trillion dollars annually. In addition, in a time of inflation, members of Congress were so worried about how the giant weapons-making corporations might suffer that, as Pentagon expert Julia Gledhill reports, they "authorized potential sweeping price increases to Pentagon contracts" to deal with any pain such companies experienced "due solely to economic inflation." (And they don't even have to actually prove that they're suffering!)
Keeping in mind just how empathetic Congress can be, consider what it meant to Gologorsky to grow up hungry and what it now means to so many young Americans to do so. (Oh, and by the way, while you're at it pick up a copy of her remarkable new novel about the Vietnam War era, Can You See the Wind?.) Tom
Empty Tables
How It Feels to Be Hungry
My long-dead father used to say, "Every human being deserves to taste a piece of cake." Though at the time his words meant little to me, as I grew older I realized both what they meant, symbolically speaking, and the grim reality they disguised so charmingly. That saying of his arose from a basic reality of our lives then -- the eternal scarcity of food in our household, just as in so many other homes in New York City's South Bronx where I grew up. This was during the 1940s and 1950s, but hunger still haunts millions of American households more than three-quarters of a century later.
In our South Bronx apartment, given the lack of food, there was no breakfast. It was simply a missing meal, so my sisters, brother, and I never expected it. Lunch was usually a sandwich and sometimes a can of juice, though none of us used the whole can. We knew enough to just put a little juice in our glass and then fill it with water. Dinner, which one of my sisters called the "real food," would invariably be cheap and starchy servings meant to fill us. There wasn't any cooked fish, salad, or fresh fruit. Rarely was anything left over. Most of our neighbors faced similar food scarcity and many suffered physical problems at relatively young ages: dizziness, fatigue, loss of strength, and other maladies, including asthma and diabetes.
Why Food Should Be a Basic Right
Food is to health as air is to breathing. One thing I learned from the world I grew up in was that if you get little or no food for long periods of time, medical attention is likely to be needed. Children, in particular, must have enough food to thrive, grow, think, and perform then as well as later in life.
Only recently, we saw how a pandemic of unwellness -- thanks to Covid-19 -- could overwhelm a hospital system, leaving doctors, nurses, and health services in general overworked and in danger of collapse. Think of hunger as another kind of pandemic that, however little noticed, can also overwhelm a health-care system (or at least that modest part of ours devoted to the neediest among us). Without enough nutritious food, emotional and physical needs only continue to proliferate along with a growing demand for ever more health care.
For working poor and uninsured people, however, health services are often difficult to come by or afford. Should you pay for a prescription or an ER visit or much-needed new glasses or buy the necessary food for the next two or three days? In Black and Brown communities, in particular, where racism, poverty, and under-employment continue to be realities of daily life, food deprivation regularly sends people into a cycle of illnesses that only make working more difficult and disability more likely.
Whether the term used is food insecurity or food inequity, the result is simple enough: hunger. And hunger has continued to be an all-American reality decade after decade, in good economies and bad, even though food should be a basic right. It's a problem that, in possibly the world's richest country, no one has been able to solve. Why is that?
Food is certainly plentiful in the United States. And yet enough of it never reaches the tables of those who struggle to make ends meet. Worse yet, by almost any measure, income inequality has only increased in the past 30 years. And as succinctly demonstrated by the all-too-long-ago protesters of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, high wages have been and continue to be concentrated among the top earners. In fact, as of 2019, three Americans had more wealth than the bottom 50% of American society and things have not gotten better since.
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