Food Politics

When my grandfather was dying of cancer in the early 1960s, a benevolent church down the street saved his family from starvation, through the two years it took him to die, with no treatment but morphine, at home. A heroic college recruiter drove 2 hours into the Tennessee hills to find my Mom and offer her the opportunity to go to college- she did not know she could refuse! Half her siblings did not graduate high school.
I grew up in a falling-down house on a dying farm. Water froze in the bathtub in winter, but no government official offered us housing. Mom’s friends bought us electric blankets, and Christmas presents when her medical bills were high. The ministry of friends in a close-knit community is far more powerful than a government check. The government check on the other hand, makes that ministry redundant, and seems to loosen the community ties that used to bind us in mutual dependence. I see the need for food stamps and welfare every day in the city in which I live. I also see the broken society littered with abandoned buildings, shuttered factories, and dying churches that no longer have the membership to fulfill their mission. Their ministries were rendered irrelevant, so they shrank. Now a city in desperate need drowns without them, sustained half-alive by government services. Government can supply food and shelter, but it cannot keep the spirit of a community alive. It cannot make people love each other. It has limited ability to inspire them to aim higher, or even eat better food. This is what is missing from the polarized Democrat-big gov’t -Republican-big business argument. Neither can solve our problems. Neither gives us what we need, long-term. We need our communities back, and that means we have to take up the hard work ourselves. We have to build the networks to sustain us when our bond-holders figure out that the government is bankrupt, and the businesses turn to other nations for fresh consumers. Ain’t nobody else going to do it for us.

This is slightly off the topic of access to food, but if anyone hasn’t read Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol, you really should (or any of his books for that matter). This book marked a huge turning point in my understanding of the cycle of poverty that too few escape. I had grown up believing that if you couldn’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps then you were a lazy pathetic person who deserves to be hungry. But now I have an appreciation of the barriers that the poor, especially children, must overcome to obtain the necessities many of us take for granted. The social safety net may be flawed but it is literally keeping thousands from living in Dickensian squalor. I don’t think anyone would prefer that scenario.

Amen Mitzi!!

Adri, I don’t think anyone who’s thought seriously about poverty believes that all poor people are lazy and pathetic because they can’t pull themselves up their bootstraps… some of us are just pretty skeptical of the idea that government aid (which can come with some pretty unpleasant strings attached) is always the best way to give folks a hand up. Mitzi’s story was pretty moving to me; “the community” truly is a different, better thing than “taxpayers” or “the government”. From what I understand, the Amish don’t accept food stamps, and I’ve never heard of anyone in a contemporary Amish community starving, though some of them certainly have incomes below the poverty line. That’s at least one example (though an admittedly exceptional one) in history of private charity meeting the needs of the poor, in addition to Mitzi’s beautiful example. Though of course the social unrest among the Amish poor is legendary…. Private charity’s not perfect, but neither is government aid.

NYC has many private soup kitchens and food banks picking up slack for families; if government aid was fully adequate, they’d be empty. The study Dr. Nestle points to factors aid from food stamps as income in their city poverty rate calculation, but doesn’t take into account aid from those sources into account.

Income equity isn’t a core feature of democratic society. Being sure everyone’s basic needs are met is a core feature of a morally decent society, though, certainly. I’d just rather those needs be met by someone other than politicians.

Matt, now that you’ve seriously insulted me without furthering your argument (except with an occassional slam to my credibility), here’s my back story. I grew up in a working class family, and my parents were barely able to afford to put me in private school through the 9th grade. My final 3 years of high school were in a failing school in an urban area. I worked about 30 hours per week while in high school and was actively involved in church. It took me 7 years to complete college, because I had that old school notion that it was better to pay for something like that than to finance it your entire life. I also received great, free advice from radio personality Dave Ramsey’s show. I then caught on to people who were successful and asked them why they were so. I wanted to get into finance, so I asked one such gentleman out to dinner so I could pick his mind. That is how I changed the cycle.

Is this the same for everyone? No. However, I started with virtually nothing and now I am comfortable in life. What I see is a great emotional argument for “spreading the wealth,” as Mr. Obama liked to say, and little real foundation for ending the cycle of poverty. Income assistance programs merely make poverty easy for people. It sounds noble, but it’s not garnering any results. Instead, families on government income are having children at alarming rates because there’s not much financial concern. The government will support them. The government has no business in the wealth distribution system. America was and should be a nation of true freedom. Where you reap what you sow. Your argument is that The Man is constantly oppressing the poor. My arguments is the the poor are not always doing enough to not be poor anymore.

I have to agree with Mitzi. We are our brother’s keeper and it is our moral (and spiritual) obligation to help our neighbors in need. True charity is born of love and to love is to be charitable and gracious. The problem is, we don’t do it, at least not in so consistent a way that we manage to keep poverty at bay in our communities. And that’s why we have government assistance programs. We know poverty is bad for society all around, but if the folks in the local communities won’t help out, then what’s a government to do if it’s main responsibility is to promote and sustain healthy (in all senses of the word) society? I’ve always believed that real change in our country needs to begin at a grassroots level. The values we embrace and live by will shape our communities, which will in turn shape our country and our public policies. What would our communities look like if all those that had enough food, clothing, education, etc. shared with those that didn’t? Sadly, we often don’t even know our neighbors in any meaningful sense of the word, certainly not well enough where we can share each other’s burdens, especially the heavier ones that come with poverty, illness, tragedy or loss. My suggestion is that we change our public policies where poverty (or anything else for that matter) is concerned by first saying hello to our neighbors and asking how their day was.

I agree with Mitzi to the extent that it seems to be something missing from mainstream United States politics. In many other countries, however, government fosters strong communities.

Kemp, do you have any examples of other governments building strong communities where there were none before? Other than, say, the middle east right now, where of course we’re watching the governments inspire communities to come together for a common purpose….

Hello Ellen, not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but just comparing the United States to Australia (where we have had a strong welfare state since the early twentieth century) and where in our two-party system one is a workers party (ie. socialist):

Small government ideologues often say government assistance to the disadvantaged creates disincentives for voluntary work but in Australia, with our strong welfare system, we have higher volunteer rates then the United States. 26.3% versus 34% overall, and in the 35 to 44 age group which is most likely to volunteer in both countries – USA: 32.2% versus Australia: 43%.

You could take murder rates per 100,000 people as an indicator of fractured social relations: USA 8.55 and Australia 1.57.

In Australia we believe our strong society is only possible with a comprehensive welfare system. The problem with the USA is that it doesn’t have a genuine welfare system. We love the USA, but we wouldn’t want your government or welfare system.

Hi, Kemp, I’ll cop to not having been at all familiar with Australian social policies, and you don’t provide any info on what Australian communities looked like before the growth of Australia’s welfare state, but I googled around, looking for comparisions between Australian regions by crime rate and wefare dependence rate, and I was frankly shocked at the things I stumbled across– the effect of the well-meaning policies of the “strong welfare state” on the strength of Aboriginal communities was a lot worse than even I would have imagined. Dependence on social spending has opened the door for even more government control over Aboriginal communities, seen in the your right-leaning party’s Northern Territory Emergency Response, which I think we’d both agree is absolutely unconsionable. One of the articles I found this morning, in a publication called “Green Left Weekly,” which I’ve got to assume comes from the left politically, describes an Aboriginal leader talking about “the silencing of the Aboriginal community by creating dependency on the colonial state through welfare payments.” I’m not seeing an example of government fostering strong communities in all that.

Hello Ellen – touche on the treatment of Aboriginal Australians. Touche. (Although, I wouldn’t say that this is a problem that arose just because of welfare – it’s part of a long history of maltreatment of Aboriginal people. When we had a laissez-faire land settlement policy colonisers just used to shoot Aboriginal people up until the 1930s…so, it’s been even worse…)

Originally the post was about who should have responsibility for dealing with poverty.

Sweden probably has the strongest welfare state out of any of the developed countries, look at the percentage of their population who have incomes below 50% of the median (as an indicator of poverty):

6.5% versus 17.0% in the USA. Obviously their strong welfare program has better outcomes on the problem of poverty.

Hi, again, Kemp, I actually wouldn’t argue with you at all about the success of Sweden, although I think it’s hard to find evidence that their welfare state has strengthened communities. I suspect Swedish communities were already pretty strong before government aid increased. Interestingly, the Swedish crime rate (while definitely lower than the U.S.’s) has increased much more since 1950 than the U.S. crime rate has.

And of course I’m going to take issue with your measure of poverty. If “below 50% of the median income” is the measure, a secretary in Atlanta making $22,000 a year is closer to poverty than a farmer in Guatemala making $3,000 a year; that doesn’t seem very accurate to me.

One of the problems with making the government responsible for dealing with poverty (and I’m not totally against government programs to deal with poverty, I just think it’s important to recognize their drawbacks and proceed with lots of caution) is that it gives the government lots of control over the lives of poor people, which can have awful consequences, even when the programs mean well and sound great. Australia’s a great example– who could be against a program to protect Aboriginal children? Well, most people see the Stolen Generations as a mistake now.

The post frames it as a Republican/Democrat issue, and I’m not sure it is. Gov. Rick Scott in Florida probably couldn’t be further away from Dr. Nestle on the political spectrum, but they’re surprisingly close on trying to control how welfare payments are spent: Gov. Scott wants to introduce drug testing for welfare recipients, and Dr. Nestle (though, admirably, she’s aware that it’s a thorny issue and hasn’t lent it full support) is fairly sympathetic to an NYC proposal to stop food stamps being used on soda. Giving the government a monopoly on relief for the poor can have unexpected, nasty consequences. I think it’s better to be sure there are other avenues for poor people to get help. Help from the community doesn’t always show up in statistics– I bet the folks who gave Mitzi’s family blankets didn’t declare it as a charitable donation on their tax return– but it’s almost always more sensitive to individuals than a government check.

Good comment Ellen. I think we’ve found a lot of common ground. Yes, we should be wary about control. I don’t know much about food stamps versus regular welfare payments, but I’m guessing the idea behind food stamps is that the reduction in choice helps contribute towards better health outcomes, whereas drug testing just seems punitive – if you consume drugs you lose your payment and then have to find other means of getting money to survive and support your family and your habit (and often that’s not going to be with a job). I really like your idea about incentives for community help.

By the way Ellen, I just wanted to mention why I chose that way of indicating poverty – it’s a relative measure of poverty. It’s useful for comparisons across countries because individuals in different countries have different purchasing power. For example, $20 can buy you a lot of fruit and veg and other groceries in Vietnam, but not much in the US or Australia.

Thanks, Kemp! I expect we’d still find a lot to disagree about, but you’re right to emphasize that we’ve also got a lot of common ground. We both want to maximize freedom/autonomy and safety/health for everyone, including people in poverty– it’s how to balance those sometimes-conflicting values that causes the difficulty.

Dr. Nestle’s original post, the one that this post was responding to, included the line, “The curiosity here is why people [red-staters] who lack access to education, health care, and, for that matter, healthful diets would vote for candidates who don’t want them to have those things, but that’s American politics for you.” I hope I’ve shown that someone can be very, very reluctant to make the government/taxpayers responsible for providing those things, and still truly want people to have them. I don’t think it’s at all curious that people who lack access to education, health care, and healthful diets, would oppose giving anyone, including the government, the sort of control over their lives and choices that are usually demanded in order to provide them those things– though they might be more amenable to accepting that potentially limiting help from neighbors who understand their individual situations than from an impersonal bureaucracy. To me, it takes a curious lack of empathy not to see that.

But, again, you’re right, we’re mostly coming from the same place, looking for the same good outcomes– which I think was the point the commenter Dr. Nestle quotes in this post was trying to make.