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.