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One of the many ways the economic fallout from the pandemic has become legible to the public eye in the United States is through the rising visibility of hunger and food assistance. Early on, images of cars lined up for miles to collect food from food banks captured public attention. Demand at food banks across the country has been unrelenting. In October 2020, distributions from the not-for-profit organization Feeding America’s network of food banks and pantries were up by 52 per cent on the monthly average before the pandemic. This increase does not include the contributions of the mutual aid groups that sprang up in communities across the United States to get food to elderly people, immune-compromised people and those otherwise in need. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the available data suggest that between 6 and 7 million more people applied and were approved for SNAP (food stamp) benefits in the first six months of the pandemic. This rise is unprecedented: at the onset of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008, it took nearly a year and a half to add this number of people to SNAP. This outpouring of pandemic-related food assistance has stemmed the tide of increasing food insecurity. Overall, food insecurity rates held steady in 2020 at 10.5 per cent of the US population, thanks to the expansion of both food and cash assistance (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2021).

However, like so many aspects of the pandemic, not all residents experienced the economic fallout in the same way. Reporters and commentators celebrated the “good news” that government intervention kept food insecurity levels stable during the economic upheaval of the pandemic. But as Ashanté Reese points out, a closer look at the data exposes the role racism plays in determining who goes hungry in the United States (Reese, 2021). Prior to the pandemic, Black and Latinx households were more likely to experience food insufficiency than white residents. The fallout from the pandemic and the response to it exacerbated these disparities. Even with the increase in food assistance, levels of food insecurity for Black households increased from 19.1 per cent in 2019 to 21.7 per cent in 2020, while food insecurity rates for white residents fell from 3.3 per cent in 2019 to 3 per cent in 2020 (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2021). In this racially segregated country, hunger can be mapped geographically. The most acute need is in areas where the majority of residents are Black or Native American. Black residents living in the South saw a greater increase in food insecurity in 2020 than other regions of the country (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2021). Of the top 25 counties with the highest projected food insecurity rates, only four—all in Kentucky—are majority white (Strochlic, 2020).

The experience of food insecurity in the United States is also conditioned by gender. The people tasked with the socially reproductive labour of caring for and raising children are structurally more vulnerable to hunger. Households with children saw an increase in food insecurity in 2020 from 13.6 per cent to 14.8 per cent. Single mothers of children were hardest hit, with 27.7 per cent of these families experiencing food insecurity in 2020 (Coleman-Jensen et al., 2021).

And yet none of this is new—even before the pandemic, hunger was an intractable problem in the United States, despite a massive expansion of food assistance in the twenty-first century. Nearly 40 million Americans received SNAP in 2019. The level of distribution of food-stamp rolls never really fell after the Global Financial Crisis began. Significantly, the vast majority of non-disabled, working-age adults on the SNAP rolls were employed. Soaring unemployment has exacerbated food insecurity in the United States, but having a job was hardly a solution to hunger before the pandemic—in 2019, unemployment was at its lowest rate in generations, yet 46 million people were sourcing food from a food bank. Despite a vast, growing food safety net that has continually expanded through the twenty-first century, 35 million people in the United States were food insecure in 2019. What is now clear is that more food assistance has not led to less hunger. Furthermore, the food crisis associated with the pandemic is a continuation of pre-pandemic hunger politics in the United States.

This gets us to the crux of the matter: hunger and poverty are permanent features of capitalist society—even in so-called good economic times. Our systems for preventing hunger are intentionally fragile and have emerged from a set of contradictory social forces. Our food safety net is massive, complex and not up to the task of making sure everyone who lives in the United States has enough to eat.

Work attachment and enforcement are the guiding ethos behind the current configuration of the US welfare state, and they are also at the heart of the utter failure to prevent a spiralling hunger crisis during the pandemic, particularly in communities of colour and among women caring for children. There has been tremendous resistance to maintaining supplementary unemployment payments and general cash payments because employers were concerned that people might refuse jobs (and get in the way of profit making). However, one form of assistance has been swift, generous and uncontroversial and that is charitable food assistance. This is the other aspect of the food safety net that we need to think about.

Charitable Food

Often called emergency food providers, soup kitchens and food pantries have evolved to become a permanent feature of the sprawling food safety net in the United States. These seemingly voluntary efforts have been summoned into being by federal funding over the last 40 years. Prior to the passage of The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) in the early 1980s, food banks were small, rare, shoestring operations. Federal funding gave communities an incentive to establish food banks. And it was a very successful incentive. In 1979, there were 30 emergency food providers across New York City. Today there are over 1100. From March 2020 until the election of the Biden administration, the federal government dedicated $4.5 billion to emergency food providers while refusing to increase the value of SNAP or—better yet—provide people with sufficient cash assistance to enable them to stay home in order to help contain the pandemic. These public–private partnerships are staffed by volunteers—typically women—who do the hard work of keeping their communities fed. But the institutions operate primarily as sites for absorbing agricultural surplus and corporate food waste. Charitable food has become a safety valve for large agri-food industries, where overproduction and waste are part of the business model. These efforts also cheaply provide food for the most excluded, such as undocumented immigrants who are structurally barred from accessing social programmes and are particularly vulnerable to economic exploitation due to their legal status, and informally employed or unemployed people who cannot access wage supports.

Rather than employers absorbing the costs of social reproduction by offering time off, decent wages and flexibility for caretakers, or the state providing a social wage, either through direct cash support or expanded public services, the state offers economically insecure people food assistance. This assistance is geared towards staving off the worst effects of an exploitative capitalist system that demands more paid and unpaid labour from poor people, including engaging in time-consuming efforts to meet their basic needs, like waiting in long lines for food boxes (Elliott et al., 2021). As the working class absorbs these costs associated with social reproduction, wealth continues to accrue to the very richest in our society. Our food safety net is entirely compatible with systems of capitalist accumulation, and that is why food assistance has become one of the go-to solutions to increased poverty and insecurity. It is the most thinkable solution because it is being used to grease the wheels of labour exploitation, not only by cutting assistance to poor families but also by effectively subsidizing low-wage work and encouraging community organizations to take responsibility for poverty and hunger by raising an army of voluntary labour to repurpose agribusiness food waste (Dickinson, 2020).

Social Reproduction and the Devaluation of Labour

The speed-up that women experienced during the pandemic, continuing to absorb socially reproductive labour alongside the push into low-paid employment, captures the unitary nature of the contemporary capitalist system. In a capitalist economy, there is a tendency for the wage relationship to shape all other relationships, including relations between spouses, children, parents, extended families and fictive kin. The labour associated with life-making, life-sustaining work in the home—such as caring for children, making meals, grocery shopping—are typically obscured through the ideology of the private family and the dogma of personal responsibility (Fraser, 2016). The situation many women and caretakers found themselves in during the pandemic—caught between a collapsing labour market, the demands of caring for children and a system of social supports that fails to adequately provide for people’s basic needs—was simply an intensification of the pre-pandemic conditions they had endured. The federal government’s absolute refusal to provide people with supports, such as regular cash payments and rent cancellation, and its bowing to pressure to keep the economy running by forcing people back to work despite an out-of-control, deadly virus have exposed the conditions low-income caretakers have been living with for a very long time, both in the home and in the workplace. The commitment to work enforcement on the part of the state in the face of the pandemic has intensified a long-standing hunger crisis for the racialized groups who have disproportionately struggled with food insecurity for decades.

The disproportionate impact of hunger on women with children, and on Black and Latinx households is unsurprising given the ways the pandemic has decimated the sectors of the economy dominated by these groups. Job losses have been concentrated in low-wage sectors such as leisure and hospitality, education and health services, and retail. Employers cut 140,000 jobs in December 2020. Stunningly, women accounted for all the job losses, losing 156,000 jobs, while men gained 16,000. Another survey found that Black women and Latinas lost jobs in December, while white women made significant gains. The instability and insecurity of the low-wage labour market has only become more insecure and unstable, as job losses have been concentrated in low-wage industries.

Food workers are some of the lowest-paid, least secure workers in the economy. They are more likely than workers in any other industry to rely on public benefits like SNAP because their wages are so low. In large part, this is because work that makes life possible, such as growing and cooking food, has long been relegated to women and racialized groups of people—from immigrants working in the fields, and enslaved people before them, to domestic workers and restaurant staff. These workers, viewed as cheap and disposable before the crisis, are now deemed essential—which, as others have noted, really means they are being treated as sacrificial (Gidla, 2020). They are being asked to risk their lives for paltry wages and with few protections so that the rest of the community can eat. Food workers are making terrible choices between going to work and risking illness or quitting the job that pays the bills and puts food on the table. A Long Beach grocery-store worker, profiled in an article on grocery chains closing stores in order to avoid paying locally mandated pay increases for these frontline workers, was quoted as saying she considered quitting out of fear of the virus but ultimately realized it was impossible because “I needed the money” (Bravo, 2021).

One study found that working-age adults in California had a 22 per cent increased risk of dying. But for agriculture and restaurant workers, that risk doubled to 40 per cent and for Latinx workers in those industries it was 60 per cent. In the food sector, restaurant and agricultural workers have been hit hardest, but warehouse, delivery, grocery and retail workers are also dying at higher rates (Chen et al., 2021). Outbreaks of coronavirus have been concentrated in meat-packing plants, as plant owners have lobbied the federal government to absolve them of any liability when workers fall ill or die due to conditions in these plants. Of course, the families of food workers are also at higher risk. Only 13 states have included frontline food workers in the first wave of people eligible for the vaccine. In the face of mass unemployment and life-threatening risks for frontline food workers, hunger is once again being used as a tool to prod the people who do this life-sustaining work into unsafe jobs. Work enforcement politics—which dominates our approach to hunger and poverty in the United States—is aimed at making sure that the only way people can get money is by working for wages (Peck, 2001). This political commitment has turned the emergence of a dangerous novel virus into a protracted catastrophe on multiple fronts, including an escalating hunger crisis.

There is more than enough food for everyone living in the United States today—we throw away 30−40 per cent of the food we produce. People go hungry because they cannot lay claim to the food that exists. Most often, it is because they are un- or underemployed or their pay is too low (Dickinson, 2020). SNAP benefits help, but they are based on the thrifty food plan and do not provide enough to cover the costs of an entire month’s worth of food. Most people run out of food stamps by the second or third week of the month. Food banks do what they can, but they are not designed to fulfil people’s entire food needs either. The efforts made to get food to people in this moment are important, but they are not enough, because the food safety net is designed to manage a racialized labour force, not to decisively end hunger.

Cultivating Callousness

What the pandemic has unmasked is the centrality of death to the functioning of capitalism. The push to keep the economy open in the United States has clearly demonstrated that our economic system is premised on putting some people in danger and accepting their deaths as the price of doing business. We knew that opening restaurants and bars, and keeping meat-processing plants pumping out supply with no protections, meant that some of the people doing that work would die (Douglas, 2020). The prevalence of food insecurity among these same groups, racialized workers engaged in life-making labour, is part and parcel of an extractive economic system dependent on the vulnerability of food workers.

The fact that capitalism produces excess and unnecessary death is not new. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” is useful here (Gilmore, 2007). But the exposure to premature death is typically only visible to those directly affected by it—people who can see, every day, the physical, mental and emotional costs of a labour system that hastens death. For people higher up the income scale, and for policymakers in particular, these impacts often remain inchoate, subject to the need for investigation, requiring data and statistical picturing to confirm the truth of the matter. These techniques allow both callousness and indifference to flourish.

What have also been revealed are instances of concrete attempts to cultivate callousness about these inevitable deaths, particularly as the toll mounted. White supremacist small-business owners storming state capitols demanding an end to public health restrictions left no mystery as to the risks they were willing to take with their employees’ lives. We were all asked to not care as policymakers refused to extend supplementary unemployment benefits in an attempt to force people back to work as the pandemic raged on.

There was a heightening of the contradictions under these circumstances. All of the reliable tropes that typically inure us to violence and death—whether fast or slow, structural or more immediate—didn’t work in the same way in the face of a global pandemic. Characterizations of people as criminal or lazy that have been deployed to justify repressive policies from police murders to welfare reforms fell away in the face of the very real health risks we were all experiencing. Rather, we were confronted with the risks others were asked to take each time we ventured out to the grocery store.

In the absence of well-worn racialized tropes justifying why people needed to be disciplined into waged labour, we saw a rise in consciousness around the relative value of people’s lives and well-being under an exploitative capitalist system. There was a countervailing rise in disgust at the naked appeals to accept preventable death as the price of doing business. There was a rejection of callousness, as there often is when economic pain is understood as occurring through no fault of your own (Dauber, 2013). We are beginning to see the fruits of this countervailing rejection of callousness. From the uprisings in summer 2020 that demanded recognition that Black lives matter to the resistance of workers refusing to return to exploitative, dangerous and unforgiving low-wage jobs, we are seeing an emergent consciousness around the value of life and life-making. How these nascent shifts in consciousness might shape the politics of hunger remains to be seen.