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.
OF #FASTTAILEDGIRLS AND FREEDOM
Like a lot of others, I was a fast-tailed girl before I really understood what those words meant. It’s one of those colloquialisms you hear as a child in certain communities that is half-warning, half-pejorative. To be a “fast-tailed girl” is to be sexually precocious in some way. You are warned both not to be a fast-tailed girl, and also not to associate with “those fast-tailed girls.” Sometimes it is shortened to “fast,” but either way, it is presented as a bad thing. The elders who typically use it are often attempting to protect young women from being perceived as Jezebels. When I started the #FastTailedGirls tag on Twitter with my friend journalist Jamie Nesbitt Golden in December 2013, thousands of women came together in an outpouring of emotion. When you consider the long history of sexual violence perpetrated against Black women in America, the roots of this particular aspect of respectability politics are easy to grasp. Here respectability politics are not just about clothes or speech, they are about governing how young Black women engage with their own sexuality as it is developing. This is meant to be protective, but it is often oppressive.