Up through the 1960s, before the United States had robust nutrition assistance programs, there were children in the United States that were severely malnourished; some children were dying of starvation. Malnutrition is a term for many nutrition-related conditions. Three forms of malnutrition are kwashiorkor, a form of protein deficiency; marasmus, a protein and calorie deficiency; and stunting, truncated body and brain growth. In the present day, such malnutrition is seen in war-torn areas and regions of India, Africa, and Latin America where a majority of the population is low income. Malnutrition is rare in the United States—but does show up from time to time among children who have suffered extreme abuse and neglect as well as among neglected elderly. Up through the 1960s, such malnutrition was primarily occurring in the poorest sections of African American communities, in the hollers of Appalachia, on Indigenous reservations and lands, in the Mississippi Delta, and at the US border in the colonias (unincorporated towns without running water, sewage and garbage removal, or any other municipal services). Today, thanks to modern nutrition assistance programs in the United States, we rarely see such malnutrition.
The nutrition assistance programs, SNAP and WIC, owe their existence to leaders like Marion Wright Edelman, civil rights advocate, child defender, and longtime head of the national Children’s Defense Fund. A few years before she founded the Children’s Defense Fund in 1973, Edelman took US senators Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, and others to areas of the Mississippi Delta, introducing them to families that were suffering from malnutrition in the hopes of encouraging congressional leaders to take action.1
In the late 1960s, Senator McGovern traveled to Nevada and other locations to learn about Indigenous women who were pregnant and severely malnourished, and to understand how children being born on Indigenous reservations were dying of malnutrition. He and others in Congress also listened to the doctors and health professionals who advocated for specialized nutrition for pregnant and nursing mothers. As a result of that advocacy, WIC started with eighty thousand mothers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Presently, WIC is the most effective nutrition assistance program in the United States. Over seven million families participate, including almost half of all newborns.2 This magnitude of coverage shows great success in terms of reach, as WIC serves 80 to 90 percent of the families that are eligible. The fact, however, that 50 percent of newborns participate in WIC should make us deeply worried because these participation rates indicate that half the babies born in America today are born into poverty.
WIC supplements the cost of nutritious foods that are especially important for pregnant and lactating mothers and food for young children. Such items include but are not limited to whole wheat bread, peanut butter, milk, breast milk substitute (baby formula), and pureed baby foods. WIC also provides nutrition education, breastfeeding support, and referrals to social services agencies. Recommended by parents, doctors, nurses, and social workers, WIC tends to have broad support. Most members of Witnesses were positive about the program. It prevents preterm birth and infant mortality, improves growth patterns (greater height, weight, and head circumference) in infants and children, is associated with higher scores on children’s cognitive and behavior tests, and decreases anemia in women, infants, and children.3 Our children’s HealthWatch study found that it also was associated with reduced stress and depression for mothers.4
The positive health impacts of WIC participation are undeniable. For every dollar spent on WIC, the program generates $3.13 in savings to health care costs.5 Overall, it is considered by public health leaders to be an excellent program, in spite of the fact that in its first two decades, it failed to promote breastfeeding. WIC’s breastfeeding promotion has improved. Yet WIC currently provides “pouring rights” to Abbott, Nestlé, and Mead Johnson, the major companies that make baby formula. This means anyone who participates in WIC that uses formula can only get those formulas depending on their state residency. Companies reap profits, not just with formula but with their baby food that WIC subsidizes.6 This reliance on only a few formula companies had disastrous effects for low-income families especially when Abbott’s factory proved unsafe in 2021 and there was a widespread recall on formula, which caused devastating shortages.7
SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, is for food items only. Unlike WIC, it has no designated “menu.” Some items that a person cannot buy with SNAP are preprepared and ready-to-eat foods such as hot pizza or rotisserie chicken. People cannot purchase alcohol or tobacco with SNAP. Nor can they buy soap, tampons, diapers, cleaning supplies, masks, or hand sanitizer.
The founding Farm Bill enacted in 1933 was meant to provide subsidies to farmers during the Great Depression and to a lesser extent help supply commodity foods to people who were impoverished. Today, the Farm Bill authorizes most federal food and agriculture programs including SNAP, which constitutes 75 percent of the total funding of the bill. Along with WIC as well as school breakfasts and lunches, SNAP is the largest nutrition program and one of the primary defenses against food insecurity.
In 2022, in any given month, an average of 42 million people participate in SNAP. This is almost 13 percent of the US population. Approximately half of all people in the United States will have been on SNAP during some part of their childhood. As an entitlement program, SNAP is responsive to economic downturns on a national, regional, and household level through supporting low-wage, unemployed, and underemployed workers. SNAP also provides support for people who cannot work such as children, people with disabilities, elderly people, and low-income veterans. Nearly half of SNAP participants are children.
SNAP participants say the best thing about the program is that there are few restrictions on the type of food one can purchase. Thomas Ptacek, one of the 1.5 million veterans who receives SNAP benefits, gave testimony in 2015 to the National Commission on Hunger at a public hearing in Portland, Maine. After he described his experiences with the trauma of war and resultant homelessness in the United States, he explained,
The most beneficial aspect of the SNAP program is that it allows for choice in the purchase of food that can be prepared in the home. This extra piece, that I personally benefited from greatly, is the sense of normalcy and stability that comes from going to the grocery store and choosing your food.8
Tianna Gaines-Turner, longtime member of Witnesses, also relies on that freedom to choose:
[SNAP] helps me to put a quality, healthy meal on the table. I can choose foods at my own liberty. This is important since three of my four children have life-threatening health issues that demand specific nutritional supports and choices.9
SNAP reduces food insecurity among children, improves birth weight among infants, and promotes child health while reducing child hospitalizations.10 It has also been found to reduce problems with childhood asthma.11 Among adults, SNAP helps people with diabetes manage their illness—at least for the first two to three weeks out of the month. Research shows that when comparing diabetes complications between SNAP participants and those who are eligible and do not participate, SNAP participants have better overall health and diabetes management.12 Clearly, SNAP has tremendous health benefits.
But that is only half the story.
Most SNAP research before 2021 demonstrated that benefits often do not last beyond week two. In the second half of the month, diabetics show increased hospitalizations and rising levels of HbA1c, or glycated hemoglobin, a measure that assesses a person’s average blood sugar levels.13 This is because families frequently run out of SNAP funds to buy adequate food. Clearly, US policies are inscribed in the bodies and brains of children. In the case of SNAP, such policies land in the metabolism and bloodstream of adults. The result? They are more likely to lose a toe, have diminished eyesight, or die.
The calculation for how much money a person receives is based on a variety of factors. A person’s current income, assets, and expenses are calculated. Then these costs are juxtaposed with a blunt instrument used to calculate the “cost of food” without attention to region (though benefits are higher for Hawaii and Alaska, and lower and slightly different in Puerto Rico and American Samoa) to create a dollar amount that potentially “supplements” income that people already have to buy food. This is where major problems occur.
A caseworker identifies how much a SNAP applicant pays for housing and other expenses. They then weigh that number against income to verify if a person earns less than a livable wage, warranting the receipt of SNAP and determining how much. In the SNAP calculation, there is a “shelter deduction” currently capped at $624 per month. But many people pay more than 50 percent of their monthly income on rent or mortgage, meaning they are rent burdened. Remember Maria’s rent was $750, which at the time was market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in one of the neighborhoods with the lowest incomes in Philadelphia. So if a person’s rent exceeds the cap amount, then the SNAP calculation blatantly undermines a person’s true expenses (by undervaluing their housing costs). This lowers the amount of SNAP dollars a family receives.
The standardized calculation for SNAP benefits is based on the supposed cost of food in a calculation called the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP). The USDA’s TFP is used as the national standard for a “nutritious diet at a minimal cost.”
In summer 2021, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Services (FNS) administrators reached out to me to inquire if members of Witnesses and the Building Wealth and Health Network, almost all of whom are SNAP participants, would share insights on the TFP. Several women participated in a focus group with the FNS administrators and followed up with the SNAP collaborative report.14 After reviewing decades of nutrition science, SNAP research, and speaking with stakeholders like members of Witnesses, the FNS increased the TFP calculation by over 20 percent, marking the most significant effort to date by the USDA to catch up to the reality of food insecurity and cost of a healthy diet. This TFP increase is an example of how administrators can do the right thing if they base their decisions on long-standing science and the wisdom of SNAP recipients. While hardly noticed by the news media, this improvement in the calculation was one of the greatest achievements by the FNS to address hunger and health.
I wish more positive illustrations were ahead in this book. Alas, there are still big problems with SNAP and our political and economic systems that sustain it.
Ten-year-old Zachary Maxwell, a fourth grader, made a movie in 2014 about improvements to the school lunch program soon after the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, where Congress stole funds from SNAP to add six cents per school meal. The name of the movie? YUCK!15
Improving school lunch is challenging. Parent groups and the School Nutrition Association have worked hard to undo national and local efforts to improve school lunches. Many people insisted it was impossible to improve lunches with more vegetables and less fried foods even though many school districts were already figuring it out. In 2019, the USDA unceremoniously released a study showing that, contrary to popular belief, food waste did not increase because of the changes. Also, student diets improved after the new guidelines were implemented.16
Compared to children who were eligible for school meals but did not participate, those who did participate had better test scores in math and reading and were more likely to stay in school.17 So like all nutrition assistance programs, school lunch provides many improvements in health and cognition.
Universal school lunch got its start thanks to the US government’s penchant for war. Just as the US government was trying to ramp up its military to enter World War II, young people reporting for the draft were emaciated and too weak for combat. School lunch was not widespread. Well-off students were the only ones able to afford school lunches. In response, the USDA made school lunches more broadly available—all the better to make kids military ready.
Currently, school nutrition programs provide meals to thirty million children every school day. There are three tiers to the school meal program: free, reduced cost, and full price. Janet Poppendieck, in her book Free for All, explains how to improve the quality and administration of school meals: make it universal and free for all; there would be no means test to see whether children are worthy (or low income enough).18 In 2024, these ideas are not so radical. After the temporary successes of free school breakfast and lunch for all children across the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, California, Maine, and Minnesota chose to permanently offer free breakfasts and lunches for all children. Other states are joining in or poised to follow suit.19
The administrative oversight of student eligibility wastes the money and time of administrators, school lunch providers, and parents who must fill out all the forms—not to mention the kids who are waiting in line to pay. If school meals were universal, the federal and state governments would save on administrative funds, children would have more time to eat because they would not have to contend with underpaid lunch staff calculating the costs, and everyone could avoid the scourge of school lunch shaming, a coordinated effort to publicly call out children with school lunch debt.
More than three-quarters of school districts nationwide have some level of student meal debt.20 Before they expanded to universal free breakfast and lunch, and in order to retrieve lost revenue, Minnesota schools made children wear wristbands to shame students and their parents into paying overdue lunch fees. In some high schools, they would not let kids graduate until their lunch debt was paid. Alabama had its own special shaming where it stamped children’s hands with “I need lunch money.” Lunch monitors often reported that they allowed kids to get lunch anyway because they couldn’t bear telling the kids they could not eat.
This is the kindness that Philando Castile would show in Minneapolis. Castile was a lunch monitor and often helped to pay off children’s debts until, one day, he was shot by a cop point-blank during a routine traffic stop while he was seated in the driver’s seat with his hands on the wheel. Who was there to witnesses this? His girlfriend, her four-year-old daughter who was in the back screaming, and many people among the American public on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The cop was later acquitted.
Castile’s mother, Valerie, received a settlement from the League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust, and in her son’s name, she uses those funds to not only help victims of gun violence and police brutality but also pay off children’s lunch debts in Minnesota.
In 2014–2015, people were so nervous about lunch shaming that in New Mexico, even the governor, Susanna Martinez (who was not generally a friend to people who are poor), introduced a Student’s Bill of Rights to prohibit lunch shaming. More recently, the US representative from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, proposed legislation to end lunch shaming nationally.
Meanwhile, Valerie Castile, along with many others, asks the simple question, “Why can’t school lunch be free for all children everywhere?”
In 1965, there was a school breakfast program for about eighty thousand children in a few places scattered throughout the United States.
The Black Panther Party (BPP), a political movement that emerged in protest to police brutality and the militarization of the police in the 1960s, focused on basic needs too. In 1967, it launched the school breakfast program in Oakland, California, and it spread to many cities across the country, including Philadelphia in 1968. Providing school breakfast was mandatory for all BPP chapters. In offering breakfast, the party knew it helped to make the kids alert and ready for school. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver explained, “Breakfast for children pulls people out of the system and organizes them into an alternative. Black children who go to school hungry each morning have been organized into their poverty, and the Panther program liberates them, frees them from that aspect of poverty. This is liberation in practice.”21 Many forget that the modern-day USDA-funded school breakfast program emerged from this very practical approach.
But the road to get there was violent in the extreme.
Then director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), J. Edgar Hoover, labeled the BPP as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” Eager to undermine the growing influence of the Panthers, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) sought to dismantle and discredit the Black Panthers through coordinated smear campaigns. For instance, throughout the neighborhoods where the party was serving breakfasts, the FBI spread rumors that the breakfasts were laced with sexually transmitted diseases. Despite such ridiculous claims, COINTELPRO sowed distrust. The FBI also used tactics to increase factionalism and disrupt coalitions among not only the Black Panthers but also the Nation of Islam, the women’s liberation movement, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano labor movement, and the movement for Puerto Rican independence.22 These tactics are still in use today as the FBI surveils and seeks to discredit the Black Lives Matters movement.23
The FBI viewed the breakfast program not as a social or community good, as it was intended, but instead as a way for the Black Panthers to spread their power (which was for community good). An FBI memo from 1969 signed by Hoover addressed to operatives in San Francisco asserted,
You state that the bureau should not attack programs of community interest such as the BPP “Breakfast for Children Program.” You have obviously missed the point. The BPP is not engaged in the program for humanitarian reasons. This program was formed by the BPP … to create an image of civility, assume community control of Negroes, and fill adolescent children with their insidious poison.24
This racist language of white violence was the trigger for coordinated state violence. Chicago was a flash point for school breakfast and BPP leadership. Panther leader Fred Hampton, chapter head in Chicago, commanded great respect and was deeply anticapitalist and anticop. The more the FBI tried to stop Hampton and others who ran the program, the more people became interested in the breakfast program. The night before the BPP was getting ready to serve its first meal, FBI operatives broke into the Chicago warehouse where the food was stored and ransacked the next morning’s breakfast stash. They also urinated on the food. This put the party on notice, but only held it back a week from starting up again. Another major setback to the BPP and school breakfast happened when the FBI and Chicago police orchestrated the assassination of Hampton at 4:30 a.m. on December 4, 1969. They broke into his home and murdered him as he was sleeping in bed.25
Undeterred, the BPP continued the school breakfast program. By 1971, the program was in thirty-six cities. Through its success in feeding tens of thousands of children, the BPP drew attention to the widespread need for school breakfasts.
In 1975, the BPP was decimated by COINTELPRO and its propaganda tactics. It is important to note that the FBI was violent and murderous because people wanted to feed their children and their classmates breakfast so they could be nourished and learn well.
The USDA picked up the mantle for expanding and running school breakfasts. Now school breakfasts help feed over fourteen million children before school. Without the organized actions of the Black Panthers, it might never have happened.
Ha- haaaiii eeeeee
Eeeee—— iii ahhh!
iiii aa!
Sam, our infant daughter, screamed high-pitched as she sat up. She had been asleep in our bed between her father and me when we lived in Oklahoma. It was two in the morning in 1999, and we were exhausted from a long drive, after a ceremony and dinner with Cheyenne friends. I bolted upright at the sound. After turning on the light, I started to pick up Sam. She looked into my eyes, gave a deep groan, and threw up all over me. It was clearish liquid with little bits of commodity cheese.
What is commodity cheese?
It’s about that gross. A vomitous stain on American soil.
Commodity cheese would be distributed as giant orange bricks in boxes with other nonperishable items such as canned corn, peanut butter, flour, and cans of vegetable shortening on reservations and at tailgate food distribution programs for many years. I had put some on Sam’s plate that night because my friend Edwina had some in the fridge. She only used commodity cheese as a last resort. She chuckled when I asked for it. At the time, Sam only had four teeth and could not eat what the rest of us were having. I carefully ripped the cheese into little pieces. What Sam threw up several hours later was still in the same shapes and just a little paler.
My Cheyenne friends would never refer to it as “cheese.” It was commodity cheese. Commodity cheese is the special detritus of US government–controlled dairy subsidies developed from surplus milk to help keep dairy prices from dropping. It was created under the Carter administration to provide price supports to ensure that farmers get their “fair” share of income by removing milk from the commercial market. The milk products like commodity cheese would then be redistributed through school lunches and sent to Indigenous reservations. Sometimes it would arrive moldy.
In the 1980s’ Reagan era, the warehoused commodity cheese scandal came to light. While hunger was on the rise—due to Reagan administration cuts to food stamp benefits and other antipoverty programs—the federal government stockpiled over 550 million pounds of commodity cheese. Reagan officials wanted to give it away to people who would otherwise not be able to purchase cheese. But in a news article in 1981, a USDA official said it would have been more efficient to dump those millions of pounds of commodity cheese in the ocean.26
The dairy industry is not slowing down. Currently, 73 percent of revenue in the dairy industry comes from the US government.27 While people are going vegan, and recognizing how eating meat and cheese harms human health and ecosystems, the US government keeps subsidizing factory farms as well as the meat and dairy industry. Now millions of pounds of cheese taken off the market are being stored in round blocks in caves in Missouri.28
Commodity cheese serves as a noxious entrée into understanding the troubled history of food assistance among Indigenous communities. Talking about food “assistance” brings up complex emotions among people from Indigenous communities and nations, as it is fraught with the traumatic history of the relationship of domination of Indigenous nations by the US government.
Food assistance was part of the arsenal in US government warfare against Indigenous people. After the US government had stolen Indigenous-stewarded lands through massacres, forced removal, upheaval, and other forms of violence and destroyed their foodways through the mass killings of four million bison, Indigenous people were starving. This is how they could be dominated, forced off their lands, and terrorized to give up their children.
The US military would then provide rations—which often consisted of rancid beef, old bags of flour riddled with pests, and lard. Lots of lard.
This is how fry bread came to be.
Fry bread is made with flour, water, a bit of powdered milk if you have it, and some baking soda. You put spoonfuls of vegetable shortening (or Crisco), real pig fat, or other kinds of lard in your deep pan, and fry up your dough on both sides. The bread accompanies ceremonial and everyday meals among the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations in western Oklahoma. It is also common among the Tewa (Pueblo) and Diné (Navajo) nations, and can take the form of “Indian tacos”—a larger piece of fry bread covered in kidney beans, shredded cheese, iceberg lettuce, and maybe some hamburger meat. Indian tacos are frequently sold throughout the powwow dance and gathering circuit, where hundreds of powwows happen every summer throughout Indian Country.
Fry bread can be a divisive topic. Some writers call it a symbol of perseverance and survival against all kinds of horror and trouble. Others, like Nephi Craig, of the White Mountain Apache and Diné nations, say fry bread is a food born out of colonialism; to eat it is to taste “confinement and oppression.”29 Embracing both flavors at once, Dana Vantrease, who studied how commodity food is associated with Indigenous identity and bodies, explains how fry bread and many other commodity foods in Indian Country evoke simultaneous ethnic pride and deep sorrow.30 Most people recognize that fry bread and many foods received through food assistance are associated with the long history of colonization, genocide, war, oppression, and high rates of diabetes and early death.
Indigenous people have the highest rates of food insecurity and shortest life span among all people in the United States. In this light, it seems reasonable to view the commodity food distribution program as a weapon that continues the genocide.
Sometimes nutritionists use fry bread on the side of the plate to get people to try traditional foods such as chokecherry, bison, venison, maize, wild rice, squash, beans, turtle, and rabbit. These traditional foods are still available and utilized, though sparsely. They make appearances during ceremonies. But they are not widely available to most Indigenous people, not only because the vast majority of Indigenous peoples were forced off their ancestral lands and had their hunting, gathering, and fishing rights taken away or severely restricted, but because they have to get to work, or they live in city apartments and may have little choice but to feed their families on low budgets.
Between 25 to 80 percent of Indigenous people receive government food assistance. About half live in sparsely populated rural areas. This means that they are also hundreds of miles away from standard jobs to earn an adequate income if they cannot generate income at home. Even if they were originally forced off their own lands, Indigenous people living in rural areas or on reservations and grant lands have told USDA officials that they prefer to receive foods from the US government that they can find on their own land, or in the forests, rivers, streams, and oceans near where they live. But federal food assistance programs do not allow for that, despite decades of lobbying from Indigenous leaders and traditionalists.
American Indians and Alaskan Natives (as they are referred to by the USDA) have two major options for food assistance: SNAP or the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR). People living near grocery stores prefer SNAP because they can choose what to purchase. But tens of thousands of others who do not live close to a store, or who would have to drive many miles to an overpriced, under-resourced grocery store, prefer FDPIR because it can be delivered in bulk to Indigenous nation headquarters or community centers. The FDPIR provides about a hundred types of food, most of which are nontraditional to Indigenous peoples’ heritage.
As part of the National Commission on Hunger, we visited Acoma Pueblo and learned about its experiences with food insecurity. The people there expressed a desire for more local and culturally appropriate foods in the FDPIR. Multiple USDA-funded researchers have stated that support for local and culturally appropriate foods would not only help local economies but improve health and well-being too. Yet the FDPIR remains the same.
The commission sought expert insight from Oglala Lakota communities from Pine Ridge and Sicangu Oyate of Rosebud in South Dakota. In joint testimony from Kathleen Pickering, Benjamin McShane-Jewell, Michael Brydge, Marcella Gilbert, and Linda Black Elk, they stated,
The USDA has tremendous potential to improve food security and the relationship with health on reservations. The FDPIR and SNAP programs together represent 45 percent of the sources of food for reservation residents in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. In contrast, only 3 percent of the total food consumed is wild food, although 65 percent of households still hunt, fish, and gather wild plants. The Lakota people often mention the idea of restoring access to wild plants instead of using land for other purposes, such as leasing it for cattle production.…
Food insecurity is a direct result of colonization. Hunting and gathering was declared illegal, and eventually it was considered a shameful act, practiced by savages and heathens. Boarding schools reinforced these ideas and served small children daily meals of bread and coffee, altering the Indigenous pallet and mindset for decades to come. Food insecurity has not just impacted us physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually as well. The food industry has become a new tool of colonization, as we must contend with a lack of access to healthy foods in our grocery stores and corner gas stations. Those of us who wish to “decolonize our diets” must deal with decreased access to traditional hunting and gathering places, as well as the complete disappearance of traditional foods due to corporate agriculture, soil and water pollution, and climate change.31
As a part of my National Commission on Hunger work, I spoke with USDA officials who insisted that it is too expensive to support locally grown agriculture because what keeps the FDPIR affordable for the government is the utilization of several big warehouses at strategic points across the country that are easily accessible by truckers who can then deliver the commodities to the reservations, trust lands, and other locations for monthly distribution. In recent years, the USDA has minimally expanded the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program for states, Indigenous nations, and territories, but these funds are small and quite restricted. Additionally, the USDA spends administrative time and money ensuring that Indigenous people are not participating in both programs at the same time. Families experience confusion and frustration when they decide to go off SNAP and switch to FDPIR, or vice versa. The administration of these programs is never smooth in Indian Country, and commission members heard about people going for months without any assistance as a result. Knowing what we know about the inadequacy of SNAP, it seems more reasonable and supportive to Indigenous people to ensure that they can participate in both programs. But the US government spends administrative dollars for surveillance and separation. So food pantries are there to fill the gap when SNAP and the FDIPR are not enough.
When an Indigenous family runs out of food, it can sometimes rely on friends and neighbors or other nation members for support. Among the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, sharing food is culturally compulsory. It is a matter of Indigenous sovereignty and identity. Sometimes this food sharing is in the form of extra fry bread. Sometimes, families may have to rely on a food pantry, which may be located at the same site where the FDPIR is distributed, summer meals occur, and more.
Such was the case at Acoma Pueblo. Walking through its storefront and food storage area, we could see that with the FDPIR foods there was some choice among fruits, vegetables, and cereals. But it felt like an almost-empty supermarket. There were onions, generic white boxes of cornflakes, raisins, and cans with a plain white paper label with large black letters saying “PEANUT BUTTER” or “BEEF WITH JUICES.”
The USDA does not just control the quality of food Indigenous people eat through the FDPIR. SNAP also has compliance rules. Most SNAP participants are not meant to work to receive SNAP benefits. But people who are labeled able-bodied adults without dependents, meaning they have no children and are not disabled, must start working at least twenty hours a week within three months of receiving SNAP benefits. If they do not, they lose SNAP altogether. There are some exceptions for certain areas with high unemployment, as a work requirement would be impossible if there are no jobs to be had. During the Great Recession in 2008, the work requirement was loosened for many areas around the country because unemployment was high and jobs were scarce. This was the case in New Mexico, where many Indigenous and Spanish-speaking people of the colonias had no internet nor transportation to even look for a job.
In 2014, the USDA was starting to tighten its screws, however. On paper it seemed as if jobs were returning, though the recovery has been sporadic and inconsistent. New Mexico’s Republican governor at the time, Susana Martinez, not only wanted to reinstate SNAP work requirements for people aged eighteen to fifty but also wanted to lower the age minimum for required work to sixteen years and expand it to adults as old as sixty. Parents with children older than six years would be required to work to receive SNAP benefits as well. At the time, New Mexico had the highest unemployment rate in the country and fourth-highest rate of child food insecurity—behind Arkansas, Maine, and Mississippi. The governor’s proposed rules to reinstate and broaden work requirements did not pass. In the meantime, other states were reinstating work requirements potentially affecting over 1.2 million people.32 In early 2020, the Trump administration succeeded in allowing the enforcement of strict work requirements for everyone despite a lack of job availability. Now many states are pushing back in class action lawsuits.
Most people who receive SNAP—that is, over two-thirds—are unable to work or not meant to work. They are children, elderly, or disabled. Among SNAP participants who can work, over 50 percent had worked in the same month they applied for SNAP, and 74 percent worked within the year.33 SNAP recipients who are not disabled see SNAP as a temporary support that carries them through to a time when they might find a better job. But when a person’s wages are so low, it is practically impossible to patch together the uncoordinated array of resources such as SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, and childcare.
As people increase their incomes, SNAP, in theory, is meant to gradually reduce until the household is no longer eligible for the program. In practice, however, this does not happen. The cutoffs and reductions have negative health effects, especially for families with children. Our Children’s HealthWatch research demonstrated that, compared to their counterparts whose benefits were untouched because they had not increased their income, families with young children whose SNAP benefits were reduced or cut off due to increased earned income were at greater risk of child hunger, poor parent and child health, child developmental delays, maternal depressive symptoms, and household and child food insecurity.34 In our study, we showed what has been obvious to SNAP participants and food insecurity researchers for years: reductions or loss of support have negative ripple effects, despite increased earned income.
When families weigh options for improving income, they see how they can be debilitated. Simultaneously, they see how corporations benefit from both SNAP and low wages.
The grocery industry supports SNAP because families shop at its stores, contributing to grocers’ income and profits. The corporate food industry is also dependent on government programs like SNAP to supplement notoriously low wages. People on SNAP understand this dynamic. The refusal by large companies such as Walmart and Kroger to pay livable wages that value skills and a person’s right to meet basic needs forces parents into applying for SNAP benefits. In turn, SNAP participants get blamed for being on SNAP while companies and the rest of society appear blameless.
There is a racist, sexist trope that many have heard thanks to President Reagan, who referred to women participating in welfare as “welfare queens” to stigmatize and make fun of people who needed extra help to get through hard times. This created a toxic dialogue that portrayed people participating in public assistance as slumming off the government to live the high life. In his recent book The Queen: The Forgotten Life behind an American Myth, Josh Levin provides background on Linda Taylor, the woman cast by Reagan as the original welfare queen. The person whom Reagan singled out in order to start a racialized and misogynist campaign against people participating in welfare turned out to be exceptionally unique. Yes, she was one of the few people who abused the welfare system through creating dozens of aliases and managed to bilk state coffers to buy herself a nice car with the money. But Levin explains that she was not at all emblematic of a pattern among welfare beneficiaries, nor was she representative of people with low incomes. Taylor was a one-of-a-kind criminal who abused many other systems in addition to the cash assistance program.35 What was important, however, is that her case gave Reagan the fodder he and his administration needed to justify cutting welfare programs en masse and generalizing this harmful trope to refer to all people on welfare. Welfare fraud is negligible in the scheme of things, and the concept of the welfare queen is a lie.
The USDA carries out strict quality control, and the most cited fraud rate for SNAP benefits is 1.5 percent. So fraud is negligible, and SNAP is touted as the federal assistance program that has the lowest rate of fraud.36 Frankly, the fraud lies with the large corporations that leach off such public assistance. The Farm Bill that mandates how Congress funds the SNAP program is a pact between rural white conservatives and metropolitan progressives, most of whom have many constituents in need of assistance and large populations of people who are Black and Latinx. Stakeholders seeking to protect SNAP rely on this dysfunctional marriage. People in Congress from rural counties rely on agricultural subsidies to support big agriculture and small farmers. SNAP benefits keep the grocery industry in business, especially in small towns. So the grocery industry wants to ensure it can stay afloat. This brings in the big agricultural companies along with the food and beverage giants. They are the oversized corporate welfare queens.
Queen number one: Walmart, the largest redeemer of SNAP.
Put together the next five largest supermarket chains, and Walmart’s share of America’s grocery budget is still larger. A few years ago, Walmart was encouraging customers to contribute food items they bought at Walmart for their employees over the holidays. This backfired, as its attempt to brag about “helping” its employees turned into an indictment that Walmart did not pay workers fair wages, which in turn kept them food insecure.37 Walmart’s average wage in 2022 was $10.50 an hour. Even at this wage, Walmart store workers, most of whom are limited to part time and therefore ineligible for health insurance, remain eligible for SNAP and Medicaid.
Lobbyists paid by Walmart walk the halls of Congress just as members of Witnesses and other antihunger advocates do. We are all seeking to defend SNAP, but for different reasons. What else do those lobbyists advocate for? To keep the minimum wage low.38
Here is Walmart’s special: quadruple dipping.
In 2020, the Walton family’s combined wealth was $210 billion.41 During COVID-19 and the ensuing food insecurity crisis, the Walton family, whose fortune comes from Walmart, raked in between 26 and 55 percent more wealth—topping off its wealth to almost $70 billion each for Alice, Jim, and Rob Walton. While it has varied a bit since then, the family’s earnings are astronomical, and their hoarding is exemplary of a pathological society that celebrates them for it.
The Walmart welfare queen’s ladies-in-waiting consist of the rest of the grocery industry such as Kroger, Albertsons, Stop & Shop, and Piggly Wiggly—all of which belong to C&S Wholesale Grocers Association, the tenth-largest company in the United States.
Joining into this exploitation frenzy is the American Beverage Association, which includes Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Dr. Pepper, and Ocean Spray. PepsiCo now has profitable contracts with the USDA to run school breakfasts and summer meals. The company is an ardent supporter of keeping “choice” in the SNAP program. It has joined forces with antihunger advocates such as the Food Research and Action Center, Emerson Hunger Fellows, and others that insist that the US government should not “regulate the poor” by restricting access to sugar-sweetened beverages in the SNAP program.
I knew soda was bad, but I did not know how bad until I testified next to Kelly Brownell, director of the World Food Policy Center at Duke University, during a 2007 congressional hearing. In his testimony, he described how the liquid delivery of sugar tricks the body. Sugar is absorbed faster as a liquid than it is in food form, glutting the body’s systems all at once. When that happens, the body uses the same pathways that are used with opioid addiction.42 This suggests that Coke and Pepsi drinks have addictive properties. At that time, soda was prevalent in public schools. For years, public schools were strapped for cash, and their deals with Coke and PepsiCo to place soda and snack machines in schools brought in needed revenue. Beyond weight gain, routinely drinking sugar-loaded beverages increases the risk of type II diabetes and heart disease as well as harms the life chances of children.
As a result of the massive growth in sugary beverages, corn syrup, and many other harmful substances in the food system in the 1990s, young people showing up for military duty were overweight and incapable of training for combat. Only then did the US government become significantly concerned about the quality of food in schools.43 Remember that during World War II, the federal government was concerned about young people showing up too emaciated for combat.
Scientists understand that sugar-sweetened beverages including soda, sports drinks, and Starbucks’s syrup-laden drinks lead to premature death. It took a long time for the research to come out, as the industry was working hard to deflect attention from sugar by demonizing fat.44 Despite this newfound knowledge, targeted advertising to Black and Brown people as well as pouring rights contracts in schools and universities continue.45
Through tenderfooted internal negotiations among the commissioners, the National Commission on Hunger supported restricting the purchase of sugar-sweetened beverages in SNAP if this restriction was coupled with incentivizing the purchase of fresh fruits and vegetables. Tying the two together, we used science that backed up the idea that restrictions and incentives would simultaneously work to improve health. It was a feat that we all agreed to this along with many other potential improvements to health and food security.
We heard that legislators and advocates read our recommendations with “pleasant surprise.” But not one congressperson publicly endorsed the report in full. Consensus or not, the report managed to upset many members of Congress on the Left and Right, many of whom are influenced or funded by the corporate welfare queens above. Even the legislators who had been the staunchest supporters of antihunger efforts backed away when we wanted to hold the American Beverage Association to account for harms to public health.
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12. Seth A. Berkowitz et al., “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Participation and Health Care Expenditures among Low-Income Adults,” JAMA Internal Medicine 177, no. 11 (2017): 1642–1649; Hilary K. Seligman, “Food Insecurity and Hypoglycemia among Safety Net Patients with Diabetes,” Archives of Internal Medicine 171, no. 13 (July 11, 2011): 1204, https://
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17. Kinderknecht, Harris, and Jones-Smith, “Association of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act with Dietary Quality among Children in the US National School Lunch Program”; Landon Evans, “The Effect of Free and Reduced Lunch on Reading and Math Achievement” (master’s thesis, Marshall University, 2015).
18. Janet Poppendieck, Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
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23. Mike German, “The FBI Has a History of Targeting Black Activists. That’s Still True Today,” Guardian, June 26, 2020, Opinion, https://
24. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Dissent in the United States, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 45.
25. Heynen, “Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival.”
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35. Josh Levin, The Queen: The Forgotten Life behind an American Myth (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019).
36. Randy Alison Aussenberg, “Errors and Fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)” (Congressional Research Service, September 28, 2018), https://
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38. “Walmart’s Fight against a $15 Minimum Wage Could Thrust It into the Inequality Debate,” Bloomberg, April 27, 2021, https://
39. Andy Fisher, Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
40. Hannah Miao, “Walmart and McDonald’s Are among Top Employers of Medicaid and Food Stamp Beneficiaries, Report Says,” CNBC, November 19, 2020, https://
41. Tom Metcalf, “These Are the World’s Richest Families,” Bloomberg, August 1, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/tosv2.html?vid=&uuid=33b7d301-9410-11ec-aab0-7346496f7341&url=L2ZlYXR1cmVzL3JpY2hlc3QtZmFtaWxpZXMtaW4tdGhlLXdvcmxkLw==.
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