Can America Ever Solve Its Hunger Crisis?

The ubiquity of hunger has become an unremarkable fact of 21st-century America. Like homelessness and the ceaselessly mutating drug crisis, it is duly registered in the media to little effect. Stories of hardship that magnify worrisome trends routinely circulate and undoubtedly evoke distress that is less and less alien to middle-class American families or their relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Such proximity to hunger is not an exaggeration. According to the USDA and Feeding America, the country’s largest food bank network, one in seven Americans are food insecure, meaning they are regularly skipping meals and have diets deficient in healthy options due to cost. When narrowed to children and adolescents, the severity of the problem is even more damning: approximately 13.8 million youths, or one in five, experience some degree of food insecurity.

For needy families, the challenge of providing nourishing food has become a source of existential dread. Lashed by the recent government shutdown and the temporary delay in SNAP transfers, many recipients of federal food assistance were reportedly frightened by how close they felt their lives were to unraveling. Still, a bizarre resignation defines the national mood in this era of protracted inflation and lowered hopes. Though the alarm is occasionally sounded by workhorse liberals in Congress, and progressives broadcast their food drive volunteer efforts on social media, food insecurity has become yet one more problem for the administrative state, voluntarist networks, and the private sector to merely manage, not eradicate for good.

This shameful trajectory is not one most members of either political party would have deemed probable in the “golden age” of capitalism. Back then, innovation, state capacity, and rising incomes assured there would be no return to the condition of acute hunger, which many middle-aged and older Americans had experienced or witnessed in their lifetime. Hunger amid affluence, in turn, was understood as an impermanent social ill that primarily stemmed from untreated poverty, underdevelopment, and the cruelties of Jim Crow. All that was needed to remedy it was a little more political courage, sparked by a reawakened civil society.

To be sure, the depth of the problem was grossly underestimated in postwar America. In the mid-late 1960s, liberal Democrats such as President Lyndon Johnson, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings commanded public attention over the issue of modern hunger, highlighting Depression-like conditions, child malnutrition, and disease from upper Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta. Such destitution startled a middle-class electorate accustomed to believing that the engines of postwar production and the cheap cost of food had ensured that even the poor could afford to eat. But this was still an era of resolve and optimism, invigorated by JFK’s calls to public service and Johnson’s Great Society vision. The solution, then, was to combine new federal programs with the efforts of fledgling community action agencies and other nonprofits, an approach backed by the assumption that the continuance of postwar development would help prevent the circumstances that gave rise to hunger in the first place.

Conditions, as it turned out, would not prove so auspicious. After a period of gradual expansion, full implementation of the means-tested Food Stamp Program (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on a national level amid the harsh 1974-1975 recession quickly found unmet need exceeded original projections. According to the USDA, the first participation milestone was reached in 1976, when 18.5 million qualifying people, or roughly 8.5 percent of the population (according to my calculations), received food stamps. This was a genuine lifeline in a time of high unemployment and rampant plant closures, but it also bespoke a crutch future liberals would struggle to shake.

The shortcoming of midcentury liberals is they did not foresee how their plans to end hunger could be hindered by larger economic trends, including financialization, trade shocks, and the transition to a “postindustrial” economy. And their successors became susceptible to the very complacency they had taken great pains to discourage. Throughout the ensuing ideological skirmishes over how generous federal food assistance should be, well-intentioned liberals (as well as many begrudging conservatives) came to quietly accept that food stamps were part of the permanent architecture of adjusting to “jobless” economic recoveries.

Whatever its original design and ends, food stamps came to exemplify the “compensating the losers” strategy of political economy. Although enrollment contracted in the late 1990s, food stamp usage once again steadily climbed during the mid-Aughts. This growth belied the Beltway obsession with welfare reform and balanced budgets, but it served an unspoken purpose: it was a social program that helped smoothen the processes of globalization and subdue grassroots opposition. Similar to the expanded earned income tax credit and the first glut of Chinese imports, food stamps, while quite modest, stabilized the purchasing power of working-class and low-income households contending with stagnant wages and the loss of full-time jobs with benefits.

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Washington was nevertheless unprepared for the lasting increase catalyzed by the Great Recession. SNAP enrollment jumped from 28.2 million in 2008 to 47.8 million by 2013, and though it subsequently fell by around 12 million in the years before Covid, this decade augurs no comparable decline. Today approximately 41.7 million people, or about one in eight Americans, are enrolled in the program, despite four consecutive years of unemployment below five percent. Enrollment could fall by over a million in the next few years due to enhanced work requirements and eligibility restrictions imposed by the GOP Congress and the Trump administration in their signature budget legislation of last summer. But these ostensible efforts to root out “fraud” and “waste” following the Biden administration’s 2021 increase in SNAP benefits fail to obfuscate that millions of Americans are no longer able to live off their labor. Obsessed with curbing “dependency,” parsimonious conservatives ignore the fundamental ignominy that hunger is pervasive, rising, and now afflicting Americans who work full-time.

The question of dependence, however, cannot be entirely dismissed by conscientious reformers intent on treating the root causes of poverty. Democrats roused to defend SNAP emphasize that it is among the nation’s most effective anti-poverty programs. Yet the net increase in participation over the last two decades is best understood as a story of amelioration in a larger context of policy failure. The efforts of a vast public-private network to combat hunger notwithstanding, food insecurity has failed to abate by every core metric. To make lasting reductions—indeed, to make hunger truly rare—Democrats must dare to probe why so many Americans now count on aid.

Unfortunately, addressing hunger in America has evolved into an overly reactive, not preventative, approach. One reason is straightforward politics: opening up SNAP to critique from the liberal-left could embolden anti-government fanatics on the right. A graver explanation is that without SNAP the basic social order would buckle. Setting aside concerns about its mixed impact on public health—supporters aren’t even in agreement over whether it should be thought of as a nutrition program—SNAP undeniably prevents hard-up Americans from losing control of their lives. It keeps low-income families less distracted by painful and desperate choices, ensuring that fed children have energy to learn at school and that struggling parents can make it through the workweek or afford clothes and transportation for job interviews. And to the extent SNAP recipients can make healthy choices and maximize their benefits—factors that depend greatly on access to greengrocers as well as nutrition guidance from pediatricians and other healthcare professionals—they are better equipped to instill good habits in otherwise disadvantaged kids.

SNAP growth, however, has also correlated with market trends that have been a distinct drag on social and economic development. Environmental factors beyond household stability determine whether growing children have enough proper food to thrive, and many caring parents who qualify for SNAP simply lack solid community resources to limit their stress over food. In the poorest urban neighborhoods, rural counties, and hollowed-out factory towns—areas likely to be designated as food deserts—the rate of food insecurity among children ranges between 25 and 50 percent. These are places where quality produce and other nutritious food are harder to get and more expensive, in large part due to disinvestment, consolidated supply chains, and a loss of competitive local markets. Participation in SNAP doesn’t remove these barriers. Although it may help keep fridges and pantries from running empty, the program doesn’t guarantee struggling parents have access to provisions that lead to markedly better health outcomes for themselves and their children.

SNAP, of course, was never meant to counter the regional decline in diversified markets and deconcentrated market power. Yet the persistence of food insecurity in places where SNAP enrollment is high illustrates the program’s limits. Defenders of the program, naturally keen to counter the distortion that SNAP is “government charity” without any attendant economic benefits, emphasize that it isn’t just a pivotal anti-poverty tool but a countercyclical “fiscal multiplier” that boosts demand during downturns. In an economy that hadn’t been transformed by the twin ills of offshoring and unfettered mergers—trends that concentrate pricing power and inhibit market entry, with downstream effects for local food production and distribution—that argument could be taken at face value. But SNAP purchases aren’t distributed evenly among tens of thousands of independent and family grocers; as with people’s meager incomes, a disproportionate share of SNAP spending gets vacuumed up by a shrinking pool of dominant food companies with a record of various anticompetitive practices.

In recent years, reformers alert to this weakness pushed to integrate more farmers markets and cooperatives into SNAP, school lunch, and food pantry programs, an effort the Trump administration’s USDA cuts have since compromised. But the larger point stands: in countless locales that have become utterly reliant on dollar store chains and oligopolistic monoliths such as Walmart, SNAP inadvertently furnishes a captive customer base, thereby perpetuating a cycle of underdevelopment. This is an overlooked aspect of the dependency debate, voiced by critics of “corporate welfare” who observe the safety net effectively subsidizes regional and national monopolies. Such companies typically lack full-time positions and pay low wages, but because of their size and market leverage, they are able to periodically offer enticing deals on so-called convenience foods, many of which are ultra-processed and lacking in real sustenance. That practice, in turn, virtually assures that the multinationals behind “Big Sugar” and artificial ingredients, whose addictive properties are frequently blamed for the epidemic of childhood obesity, diabetes, and similar maladies, enjoy steady sales (and may even see their market share increase during recession).

The challenges that have stunted left-behind America underscore that SNAP is primarily a bulwark against dysfunction, its developmental benefits contingent on the impossible demand that recipients make flawless choices amid suboptimal conditions. Only in tandem with stronger competition policies and place-based industrial policies can its potential to do more than manage poverty be realized.

Ultimately, though, the efficacy of federal food assistance and voluntary efforts to alleviate hunger must be judged within the context of the broader cost-of-living crisis. Here, too, public policy has proved wanting. Grocery prices are up by 30 percent since 2020, far outpacing the modest wage gains some low-income workers saw at the start of the pandemic. While Democrats beat the drum of “affordability,” squeezed Americans are urged to mistrust their own eyes by the mainstream economics profession. Food prices still aren’t reflected in core inflation measures, even though Americans’ ability to eat well determines virtually every other metric of economic well-being and productivity.

The “new normal” of unbounded food prices, soon to be exacerbated by the spread of “dynamic pricing,” is a radical and destabilizing deviation from the historical trend. In the early 20th century, popular belief in an “American standard of living” rested on the ability of working Americans to spend less on food and have more of their paychecks left over for small comforts, new consumer durables, and family recreation. Far-sighted market governance and market-crafting, as well as strong unions, eventually made this promise a reality. By 1970, food-at-home as a share of household expenditures had fallen to 10 percent and reached under six percent in the mid-Aughts. In hindsight, that was no small triumph. In an era otherwise shadowed by rising inequality and diverging regional outcomes, it was proof living standards could still rise from one generation to the next.

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The spiraling cost of groceries in post-Covid America crystallizes why so many feel the economic system is broken. Wages no longer cover the basics, even in municipalities that have phased in minimum wage increases more than double the woefully outdated federal minimum wage. The damage is at once economic and psychological: dreams of upward mobility are considered naïve, if not wholly disconnected from reality.

Inevitably, Scrooge-like voices will respond that in a culture that has elevated food into a status symbol, ordinary Americans hold an unrealistic view of what they should be able to eat on a regular basis. But the gap between what working people need and what they can afford isn’t because the majority are making frivolous decisions. It is because economic trends have steadily eroded the last pillar of middle-class expansion: access to inexpensive but decent food. This access—an implicit part of America’s social contract since the Second Industrial Revolution and Progressive Era public health reforms—no longer describes what the typical working family faces.

As paycheck-to-paycheck America warily eyes the cost of staples this Thanksgiving, the ramifications for long-term economic development couldn’t be clearer. When families are taking on debt to meet the government’s own middling food plans, they don’t have disposable income leftover for local businesses, parent-teacher associations, and community fundraisers, let alone college savings or home improvements. Businesses subsequently cut back on inventory, reinvestment, and payroll, with all the cascading effects that implies. Simply put, the indignity and burdens of food insecurity sap the economy’s lifeblood.

Policymakers hoping to do better than the Trump administration’s broken promises must reject the apathy that has allowed food insecurity and food inflation to become entrenched. Its origins long preceded Covid, the bitter fruit of a changing political narrative that concluded preventing hunger in the world’s most prosperous nation is somehow utopian. What this moment thus calls for, which the War on Poverty’s crusading architects could not anticipate, is the resolve to confront the rent-seeking that has subverted the fight against privation and made it one without end. Perhaps then our politics will transform the underlying conditions that have made food insecurity omnipresent in American life.