My first marriage ended in divorce, and afterward, I was on food stamps, I had a state-funded medical card that gave me and my son access to medical care, and I was living in public housing. I was fortunate at the time that this particular set of social safety nets allowed me to leave my abusive ex and stay gone. I could raise my child in relative comfort and safety. Today, many of those safety nets have been greatly diminished, and in the case of public housing, it has nearly fallen away completely in many areas. We know in the abstract that poverty is a feminist issue. Indeed, we think of it as a feminist issue for other countries, and that we are in a place where bootstraps and grit can be enough to get anyone who wants it bad enough out of poverty. But the reality is that it takes a lot more than gumption. I was lucky: I’m educated. My grammar school and high school curricula prepared me for a college education. I joined the army to pay for my degree, and since I was in Illinois, a state that has a tuition-free Veteran Grant Program for state schools, it didn’t matter that I was doing this in the days before the GI Bill paid enough to be useful.
I was poor, and it wasn’t easy, but I had the handholds it can take to be upwardly mobile when you’re marginalized and life is working against you in other ways. A childcare subsidy meant that when my ex didn’t pay child support, my child was still able to attend the high-quality preschool on my college campus. I got a bachelor’s degree in four years, went on to work full-time, and took a host of other perfectly boring but necessary steps that brought me to where I am today, with an advanced education, a wonderful family, and a career that I enjoy. If this were the usual heartwarming, feel-good tale about single parenting and poverty, you might come away thinking, “Well if she could do it, why can’t everyone else?” And you might expect me to say, “It was hard, but I learned so much, and I remember that time fondly.”
What I remember is hunger. And crying when I couldn’t afford a Christmas tree. I remember being afraid that I couldn’t make it. That I would lose my child because I couldn’t provide. It’s hard to take a rich woman’s children; it is remarkably easy to take a poor woman’s, though. As a society, we tend to treat hunger as a moral failing, as a sign that someone is lacking in a fundamental way. We remember to combat hunger around the holidays, but we judge the mothers who have to rely on food banks, free or reduced lunches at school, or food stamps for not being able to stand against a problem that baffles governments around the world. Indeed, we treat poverty itself like a crime, like the women experiencing it are making bad choices for themselves and their children on purpose. We ignore that they don’t have a good choice available, that they’re making decisions in the space where the handholds are tenuous or nonexistent.
The women in these circumstances may not have a grocer that sells fresh produce, or at least not one that sells produce they can afford. They may be working too many hours to be able to prepare food, or they might be dealing with food storage issues. The story behind that pack of chips and soda at a bus stop is often far more complicated than any ideas of a lack of nutritional knowledge, laziness, or even neglect. Sometimes the food you can access comes from gas stations, liquor stores, and fast food restaurants and not a fully stocked grocery store, much less a kitchen.
We know that food deserts exist, areas where groceries are scarce and what is available may be unfit for human consumption. But food insecurity is more complicated than simply the ability to access food. There’s the question of what food costs versus what people can afford. If you live near a grocery store but you can’t afford to shop there, then it doesn’t matter that you’re not in a food desert. You’re still hungry. And hunger doesn’t have an age limit; there are food-insecure children, food-insecure college students, and food-insecure elders. Some forty-two million Americans are struggling with hunger. Statistically at least half of that number are women, but given gender bias in wages, the real percentage is something like 66 percent of American households struggling with hunger are headed by single mothers.
Women and children account for over 70 percent of the nation’s poor. Unfortunately, existing safety net programs have failed to take into account the reality of poor women’s lives. The money a household makes for many state and federal programs, like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), as well as childcare subsidies, leaves a wide gap between what is needed and what is available. Take Illinois, for example, where a single parent receiving TANF for one child is eligible for a maximum of $412 a month. Even the most ardent proponent of mandating independence should realize that that isn’t enough money to cover the basic needs of two people. As a culture, we don’t have sufficient provisions for helping women and families escape poverty. In fact, we often create artificial and unnecessary barriers, like limiting unemployment insurance to full-time workers, which leaves part-time workers with no assistance if they lose their jobs. We rely on charities to address acute hardships like hunger before the food stamps come in, and to respond to the homelessness crisis when HUD has a waiting list that can span decades in some areas.
We know that without a home, individual families suffer and fall further into poverty. Yet eviction rates and the price of food continue to rise all while wages remain stagnant, and the cycle gets even harder to navigate. Especially when work requirements are introduced, ones which ignore that childcare is a necessity for women with very young children. Is it possible to work a full-time job when you can’t even afford part-time childcare? Or is this a policy guaranteed to create even higher hurdles? Paid maternity leave is a wonderful cause, but what happens after the baby is born and you weren’t making enough money to support one person, much less navigate these new, higher expenses?
Alleviating women’s poverty is a critical feminist issue. Yet when we talk about hunger and food insecurity, we rarely talk about it in these terms. Why? Because in many mainstream feminist circles, the people talking about these issues don’t know what it is to be food-insecure in the long term. Things like food stamp challenges, where someone lives on a budget similar to that of someone living on food stamps for a week or a month, make good stunts, but they don’t influence public policy. If anything, people who engage in those stunts are more likely to pat themselves on the back for making it through and perhaps donate to their local food bank, and then forget that the problem exists.
Hunger has a lifelong impact, shaping not only someone’s relationship with food but also their health and the health of their community. Hunger, real hunger, provokes desperation and leads to choices that might otherwise be unfathomable. Survival instincts drive us all, but perhaps none so strongly as that gnawing emptiness of hunger. Whether we call it being hangry or something else, hunger is painful even in the short term. And yet we rarely speak of it as something for feminism to combat, much less as something that is uniquely devastating for women.
Consider the way that we handle programs like SNAP or WIC in America. We place myriad restrictions at the federal and state levels on how those funds can be used. As a society, we then try to rationalize the limits by pointing to cases of fraud, which, aside from constituting less than 1 percent of all public welfare cases, are usually the kinds of things that can best be explained by the ways you have to manipulate your life to get through poverty. It’s easy to say no one should ever sell food stamps, harder to justify that stance when you remember that people need things like pots and pans to prepare their food. They need working refrigerators, stoves, and storage solutions to keep out the vermin so commonly found in the subpar housing that is often the only option for those living at or below the poverty line. Food stamps don’t even cover basic household cleaning and hygiene products, much less things like diapers and menstrual pads.
You can be very comfortable asserting that poor people don’t know anything about nutrition if you ignore the fact that perishable fresh foods require not just the space to store and prepare them, but the time. Boycotts of terrible retailers are a wonderful idea until you realize that they are the only option in some areas. The question that the would-be protester should then ask themselves is, who is being hurt more? The corporation, or the people who rely on it for access to food? These are questions without easy answers, to be sure. But that’s life in the hood. That’s being poor not just in America, but around the world.
Mainstream feminism pays excellent lip service to the idea that poor women are supported, but in practice, it often fails to interrogate what constitutes support. Hood feminism as a concept is not only about the ways we challenge these narratives, it is about recognizing that the solutions to many problems—in this case hunger—can be messy and sometimes even illegal. Poverty can mean turning to everything from sex work to selling drugs in order to survive, because you can’t “lean in” when you can’t earn a legal living wage and you still need to feed yourself and those who depend on you. When mainstream feminism fails to consider these options as viable, when it relies on the same old tropes rooted in respectability, it ignores that for many, a choice between starvation and crime isn’t a choice. Feminism has to be aware enough, flexible enough to encompass the solutions that arise in a crisis. When feminists fail to recognize the impact of hunger, they can unwittingly contribute to the harm done by failing to offer the slightest bit of compassion or grace to those who are facing only bad choices. But hunger is devastating, its impact painful in the short term and horrifying if it endures over time or across generations. If we’re going to say that this is a movement that cares for all women, it has to be one that not only listens to all women but advocates for their basic needs to be met. You can’t be a feminist who ignores hunger. Especially not when you have the power and the connections to make it an issue for politicians in a meaningful way. Fight against hunger as hard as you fight for abortion rights or equal pay. Understand that this isn’t a problem that can be addressed later.
As income inequality increases and the wealth gap widens across racial lines, there is no question that for some women, for some communities, hunger is going to move past bad nutrition into outright malnutrition. If we don’t make combating hunger a priority now, it will make itself a priority when far too many women and their families are suffering from it.
WHY IS IT that we’re more inclined to create programs to combat obesity than ones that meaningfully address hunger? Proponents of things like a soda tax hold their plans up proudly, but never talk about why soda is such a staple in homes where food insecurity is a problem. They don’t talk about the fact that soda is shelf stable, is cheaper than juice, and it tastes good. They don’t consider the fact that low-income consumers don’t have to worry about it going bad, about it containing mold like Capri Sun products did before their most recent packaging changes, or fungicides like some orange juice brands did before the FDA increased testing. And they would never acknowledge that consumers don’t have to worry about soda manufacturers facing the same risk of lead-tainted water like residents in Flint, Chicago, and so many other cities, because those companies can and do buy the filtration systems needed for clean water in creating their products in any setting.
Instead, proponents of policies like soda taxes insist it is about health, and they point to dubious claims that obesity is a disease that can be cured by taxing soda. Messages declaring “Soda is so bad for children” play out with images of kids going to a soda machine and receiving diabetes instead of a ginger ale. If sugar was a toxic chemical guaranteed to bring about illness in all who consumed it, then these images might make sense. But the hyperbolic assertions that obesity can be cured by taxing soda ignore studies published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that prove that numbers on a scale have very little to do with health outcomes.
Politicians use fatphobia and make obesity a scapegoat to deflect attention away from the policies that have adversely affected the health of low-income communities. Fitness is a much better measure of health, and one that requires a multipronged approach that’s much more labor intensive than a tax. It includes children having access not just to recess at school, but to safe neighborhoods where playing outside doesn’t put them at a greater risk of violence. It requires them to have access to food on a regular basis. Research shows that things like exercise, fresh produce, clean water, clean air, and access to health care are all major factors in good health. Midnight basketball and other after-school, weekend, and summer programs didn’t just reduce violence by giving at-risk youth an outlet, they also created patterns of healthy behavior. They made it easier for families to be active and to feel comfortable sending their kids to play outside without fear. These programs and others like them provided food, nutrition classes, and more without judgment—and they have largely been shuttered.
In the end, soda taxes have very little to do with health. It’s an easy platform for politicians and their backers, but if the concern were really public health, the focus wouldn’t be on regressive taxes as a solution. Nor would the counties that adopt such taxes be using revenue from it to fund everything but measures that would bring healthy, affordable food options into low-income communities. What’s more, if the aim is to lower overall sugar consumption, it hardly makes sense to target only one form of it. A can of regular soda has 39 grams of sugar, but a cup of cocoa has 49 grams of sugar. Frappuccinos? Some can have as much as 102 grams of sugar. Those other options are socially acceptable, and the dairy is a source of protein and vitamins, but the amount of sugar consumed is significantly more. Socially acceptable sugar isn’t healthier simply because it costs more than a can of Pepsi. It’s clear that the concern here is less about the healthfulness of sugar and more about finding another revenue source for cash-strapped municipalities.
Soda taxes hit the people with the fewest options the hardest, because in a food desert, too often the “healthy” options are also the most expensive. Low-income parents already struggling with food insecurity and neighborhood violence are now being told that their children’s health problems (symbolized by weight) are their fault for having only hard choices available. Which option is healthiest when your choices are tap water with lead in it, bottled water that already carries an additional tax, overpriced juice, milk being sold past the sell-by date, and soda? What problems are solved by putting one more tax burden on the backs of those least able to afford it? Policies that serve as “food police” tend to raise stigma rather than help families and individuals who need better access to food.
And this isn’t just a problem in the inner city. Indeed, grocery prices on a reservation or the lack of options in many rural areas with only one or two stores are a testament to how difficult it is to keep food on the table. Hunger is a problem in every country and in every county for those who lack the resources to feed themselves or their families.
A WOMAN STOPPED ME one day years after I was done with hunger as something to manage in my personal life, and she asked for help buying groceries. I gave her what I could and went on with my day. It cost me some money that I could afford to lose, and we parted ways pretty quickly. I almost forgot about it, to be completely honest—I subscribe to my own internal version of the butterfly theory when it comes to kindness. One day, I was in the same area, and a woman I didn’t recognize paid for my groceries. She wouldn’t take my money and looked at me when I tried to argue and said, “I didn’t argue with you now, did I?”
It hit me then that she was the same woman who had asked for my help with groceries. She had been my neighbor the whole time. And while I didn’t remember her, she remembered me very well. This isn’t a story about how great I am. You see, when I bought those groceries, I said something offhanded about remembering how hard it can be at the end of the month when stamps run out. I assumed she was there because she was getting inadequate help. Actually, she wasn’t getting any help; she’d lost her job and her spouse, and her life was just crumbling, and I had insulted her somewhat by suggesting she was on food stamps. It hadn’t been intentional, and when she mentioned it, I apologized. She laughed at me and said she’d eventually gotten over it, that being able to eat and feed her kids for those few weeks got her to get some help.
It worked out, she got back on her feet, and she was doing fine when I saw her, but she had been both grateful and angry at me for a while. It’s a funny place to be, and I understand it, but I might not be able to explain it to anyone who has never experienced that loss of pride, that shame that you simply cannot do it all on your own no matter how hard you work. What she needed was the food, the cash. What she didn’t need was my assumptions. Or to have to feel grateful, or that there was something to be ashamed of in seeking help. And maybe if we could admit that most women are poor, that many are struggling to feed themselves and their children or their other family members, we could start addressing this issue that affects most women with all the power it requires. We could stop acting like food insecurity is a sin or a shame for any individual and treat it rightfully like an indictment of our society.
The good news is that women in these communities are working to combat hunger with everything from community gardens to food cooperatives. Whether it is transportation for those who lack access to well-stocked stores or pooling resources à la Stone Soup to feed kids in the summer when school is out, there is no shortage of grassroots initiatives devoted to bringing food to those who need it the most.
The bad news is that none of those programs are enough to effectively combat hunger on their own. They need more. More resources, more employees, more efforts by the government to solve the problem across the country. And they don’t have the connections, resources, or time to lobby politicians and provide services. Charity may begin at home, but it is fundamentally incapable of solving a societal ill without some measure of government-funded programs that are less focused on being restrictive or punitive and more focused on making sure that the most vulnerable are cared for regardless of income.
Attempts to tie access to food programs to labor, to respectability, to anything but being a human in need are ultimately less about solving the problem of hunger and more about shame. While proposed cuts to SNAP or other government food security programs are often justified by the perceived prevalence of private programs, it is incredibly unlikely that food banks or charities would be able to fill the gap should food assistance programs be reduced or dissolved in the coming years. SNAP provides approximately twelve meals to every one meal provided by charities. Programs like WIC and SNAP exist because prior administrations have understood the massive disparity between what private charities and the government can do.
We know what happens when charities can’t make up the difference: the pictures of bread and soup lines in history books and the stories from our grandparents about starvation and the Great Depression are easy to mine. Despite conservative narratives about “lazy people,” roughly 40 percent of SNAP recipients are already working, and simply using food stamps to supplement their salaries and keep themselves capable of being in the workplace. Many of the remaining 60 percent can’t work because they are minor children, elderly, or caregivers for vulnerable family members. Even if the working poor who make up the SNAP population are able to pick up a second job, get a raise, or find another way to cut living costs to afford food, there’s still the question of the effect on the children and seniors who may depend on those working relatives for caregiving.
Because issues around affording childcare, elder care, or other services bring about other difficulties for those people who are already struggling, the addition of proposed work requirements would move people into the workforce who are not prepared and can’t afford to be there. And then there’s the question of what jobs they will be able to access. After all, if you don’t have the skills, need more education, have health issues, and so on, then losing SNAP benefits would only make your chances of staying employed nearly nonexistent. It’s a no-win situation that hinges on bootstrap rhetoric instead of logic or facts. Food stamp recipients are mostly children and elderly or disabled people, in households where at least one adult is working but doesn’t make enough to pay for all of the household expenses. There is a very small percentage of recipients without dependents, and among that group of able-bodied adults without dependents, most already work or are seeking work. They’re cycling in and out of low-paying jobs that have a lot of turnover: seasonal employment, retail, or other industries that regularly experience lulls in demand for labor. These recipients are on SNAP on a temporary basis and rely on the program when they’re unemployed or underemployed. The myth that they are somehow a burden ignores decades of job statistics that show that combating hunger is a boon to the economy.
Increasing access to food should not be a controversial topic, but apparently we live in a culture that begrudges children, elders, unemployed people, and the working poor full, nutritious meals. Even though marginalized people who need help with food security are seen as second-class citizens, they are a key part of the food economy. In rural areas, migrant workers cultivate and collect the food that ends up on the tables of the people who want to write policies that would starve them. Despite the fact that seasonal labor is the bulk of the workforce for our food supply, their access to resources is severely curtailed. And once the food reaches the market, workers in grocery stores are often underpaid and among those who have issues with food security.
Women in the workforce are a key part of the food processing and preparation that makes feeding families possible, but at every level, they are at risk of exploitation and deep discrimination. Between low wages and a higher-than-average risk of sexual harassment and assault, marginalized workers in rural and urban areas are responsible for unpaid and low-paid work only to be excluded from decision making and leadership positions around food security. The people responsible for making sure that food is safe, accessible, and palatable are some of the lowest paid.
For families headed by women and by other marginalized people, feminism has to come through to combat food insecurity, from higher prices for fresh foods to insufficient government funding for programs that address hunger on a systemic level. Without support from feminists with privilege and access, families facing food insecurity will suffer despite their best efforts. Hunger saps your energy, your will; it eats up the space that you might have used to achieve with the need to survive. As feminist issues go, there are none that span more women and their families than this one.
Food is a human right. Access to adequate food and nutrition allows communities to thrive; it allows women to fight for all their rights. Food security allows for marginalized women’s participation in political and other organizational spaces, key for defending their interests against other forms of structural oppression.
Bringing about feminist changes will only be truly possible if mainstream feminism works to combat discrimination in all its forms, from gender to class and race. True equity starts with ensuring that everyone has access to the most basic of needs.