Charity vs. State: Exploring the Impact of State Programs and Charity on Food Insecurity
by Caleb Culhane, Brian Goldsmith, and Julia Stout
Our Case Study
The status of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits and NGO charitable food programs in the states of Connecticut and Kentucky reveal through comparison some of the most salient issues regarding food insecurity and policy in the United State
While residents suffering from food insecurity may rely upon SNAP as one of their principal sources of food for themselves and their families, this national program fails to adequately sustain the entire food-insecure population on a state-by-state basis. As a result, millions of Americans must turn to non-governmental and non-profit food institutions such as soup kitchens or homeless shelters to supplement their needs.
Yet these private charities struggle to fill in the gaps left by an unequal economy and woefully inadequate social welfare system. There is a great irony that so many civilians struggle to meet their basic food needs in the richest country in the world, and analyses of these failing SNAP programs across states reveal the inescapable reality that charity is not a viable solution to food insecurity.
Research strongly supports that the state must enact serious reforms in their social welfare programs such as SNAP to foster successful food security and uphold people’s inalienable rights to life. This case study compares the state of Connecticut and the rest of the United States in terms of food insecurity, SNAP programs, charitable food services, poverty level, and other important population demographics such as race and disability status.
Our goal in sharing our study’s findings in an online format is to educate the general public about the complex concept of food insecurity, critique the inequitable and inadequate social welfare programs like SNAP, and propose potentially viable solutions to the hunger crisis that exists across the United States.
Keywords
Food Insecurity/Food Injustice
Food insecurity of an individual or a community to access the proper quantity or quality of foods necessary to satisfy their dietary needs. Food insecurity, in the United States, is most commonly found in impoverished communities in rural regions or urban environments.
Causes of food insecurity/food injustice include, but are not limited to lack of transportation ability, lack of education, discrimination, and lack of healthy food options.
Environmental Racism
Environmental racism is the disproportionate impacts on communities in which people of color reside, caused by health hazards put in place by a system of power
An example of environmental racism took place in Flint, Michigan. The government altered the water supply in Flint with a cheaper alternative, without proper testing. This led to negative impacts on the overall health of Flint's residents.
Climate Justice
Climate justice is The recognition of the disproportional impacts climate change has on people of color and low-income communities.
Examples of actions that are methods of climate justice include, carpooling, cutting down the usage of fossil fuels, and recycling.
Mutual Aid
Mutual aid is the support or assistance for a group or community to alleviate struggles they may have, done through voluntary or governmental programs.
Direct Action
Direct Action is The actions used to achieve the desired results as immediately as possible.
Examples of direct action include blockades, civil disobedience, and boycotts.
Urban Gardening/Agriculture
Urban agriculture is the method of producing and distributing agricultural products within urban communities.
Types of urban agriculture include vertical gardening, greenhouses, and rooftop farms.
Urban agriculture is used to provide urban communities with fresh produce, that does not have to be transported from far distances. Additionally, urban agriculture is used to combat food deserts which are often located in urban areas.
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism has dominated both economic and political philosophy in many Western governments and international institutions beginning in the 1970s.
Bagshaw outlines the three core strategies of neoliberalism as “privati[z]ation and competitive markets; reduced public expenditure on social services and infrastructure; and deregulation to enhance economic activity and ensure freedom of ‘choice’”.
The term “neoliberalism”, however, has multiple definitions and did not gain much popular usage until the 1990s during which “it was adopted principally by the critics of a perceived free market orthodoxy which was spreading around the world under the auspices of the ‘Washington Consensus’”.
The anti-globalization movement further propelled neoliberalism as a pejorative word to describe the forcible imposition of so-called free market policies upon developing nations by Western forces, creating inherently competitive and unequal power structures.
Impoverishment/Poverty Line/Living Wage
One must understand the dynamics of impoverishment, the concept of a living wage, and the purported poverty line to grasp the current state of food insecurity in the United States and how to ameliorate this situation. Generally defined, poverty is the status of when one has little or no wealth or material possessions while impoverishment is the process of one’s decline into a state of poverty. Spencer-Wood and Matthews clarify that “while the economic inability to afford food, shelter, clothing, and health care is foundational to being poor, [there are other] important additional social and political meanings of impoverishment”.
Throughout history, poverty has meant more than a mere lack of economic or material wealth as “a social position, created by political economic relations, that situates and contains populations within larger social and cultural systems. Poverty is a way of positioning some at a disadvantage that simultaneously enriches the few, impoverishes others, and marks the poor with symbols of marginality, failure, and Otherness”.
Policymakers and scholars may use the “poverty line” to measure the scale and scope of poverty in a given nation or region. A 2023 article in the Bulletin of Economic Research found that “when measuring poverty in developed countries, the poverty line used to identify the poor is usually relative and set as a percentage of the median (or of the mean) of the total income. In consequence, when poverty is analyzed over a period of time, changes in the poverty level depend on the impact of evolving standards,” and while there are methods to mitigate this effect, setting and then utilizing a “poverty line” are frequently inaccurate and inconsistent with other studies on the same or similar data.
The poverty line as a measurement tool for impoverishment is especially problematic as “the poverty line should represent the estimated level of income needed to secure the necessities of life, but there is no normative procedure for establishing this income threshold”; thus, governments miscalculate the actual qualifications of impoverishment in their given society and ultimately harm struggling populations who are excluded from consideration for aid.
Related to poverty, impoverishment, and the poverty line is the notion of a “living wage”. Arrowsmith, et al. reported that most countries, including America and each of its states, “regulate pay through ‘minimum wages’, usually by law but also through collective bargaining. Wage minima may vary by sector, region or individual criteria such as age but the arrangements are usually designed both to provide a degree of income protection for workers, in combination with transferable benefit, and to prohibit ‘unfair’ competition based on lab[o]r exploitation”.
This method of regulation evidently falls short of providing citizens with enough money to sustain adequate lifestyles, as demonstrated by the wide-scale crises of impoverishment and food insecurity in developed, wealthy nations such as the United States. As inequality, decreased wage shares, and increased costs of living abound, many have grown concerned with the inadequacy of the minimum wage and demand that the state ensure a true livable wage.
Arrowsmith, et al. write that “this broader notion relates to quality-of-life and the ILO’s conception of ‘decent work’, which is also linked to work intensification and insecurity. In this context, a ‘living wage’ (LW) is usually defined in terms of enabling meaningful participation in society beyond mere survival…Implicit in this notion of a LW [as well as] above a certain threshold, there should be a qualitative upward shift in human freedom and capability”.
Sustainable Development
Most understand sustainable development as creating and implementing conscious policies that provide for the needs of humanity today while safeguarding the lives of future generations of humans and the rest of the natural world as well. The Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future defines sustainable development on a global scale, writing: “humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits-not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities. But technology and social organization can be both managed and improved to make way for a new era of economic growth”.
Proponents of sustainable development argue that the large-scale impoverishment, oppression, and environmental suffering experienced across humanity are not inevitable phenomena but products of unsustainable development that can be remedied by sustainable development. A common aspect of sustainable development is that more privileged nations and peoples “adopt life-styles within the planet’s ecological means-in their use of energy, for example,” while also accepting their responsibility in the current climate crisis and unequal state of the world by assisting in development processes in struggling areas.
Food Deserts/Food Swamps
Food deserts are one of the largest causes of food insecurities in the United States, food desserts designate census tracts which contain both poverty rates exceeding 20% as well as 33% of the tract being over one mile from a supermarket.
Food swamps are areas in which the food options are disproportionately weighed down by nutrient poor foods(corner stores, gas stations, fast food) at a higher rate than nutritious foods/grocery stores. This disproportionately affects Black communities as well as other communities of color.
Charitable Food Programs
A charitable food program is any non-governmental organization or collective effort that provides at either a reduced price or no cost food and drink to individuals suffering from food insecurity. An article in BMC Public Health focuses on the charitable food system in the United States, describing it as “a complex network that includes food banks (organizations responsible for sourcing, warehousing, and distributing food to community agencies); food pantries (community agencies where individuals can pick up groceries at no cost); and congregate meal sites (community agencies where individuals are served free meals for on-site consumption, such as free dining rooms and ‘soup kitchens’)”.
Every year, these charitable food institutions provide critical support to millions of people living in the United States; many of these households suffer from food insecurity on a chronic basis, so many would simply not be able to survive without this system in place. A reported sixty percent or more of the food that circulates through this national charitable food system comes from donations sourced from “local and national retailers; local, regional, and national growers, manufacturers, and distributors; and community food drives” while twenty-three percent of the total food comes from federal programs under the purview of the United States Department of Agriculture such as TEFAP and CSFP” and the remaining nineteen or so percent of food is purchased by respective organizations using funds or grants provided by individuals and corporations.
On average nationally, food pantries obtain about seventy percent of their inventory from food banks, yet this proportion varies from pantry-to-pantry, and many sites supplement their stock with local donations or purchases.
The reality of these charitable food programs is they rely largely upon a volunteer base for their operations, many of their workers may lack the proper training and experience for their positions, they are often understaffed, they are always severely under-funded so they are unable to provide every single individual with enough food or nutritious food, and they fail to truly address the systemic problems that lead to and perpetuate food insecurity in the country.
Agribusiness
Agribusiness is the total processes necessary for producing and distributing foods. Essentially this term covers everything involved including, farms, ranches, fertilizers, food processing, climate, crop production, and food transportation.
Food Sovereignty
Food sovereignty is a concept of food production, and supply that puts a heavy emphasis on local authority. Food sovereignty promotes the local control of the necessary resources required for food production including water supply, livestock, and seeds. Food sovereignty promotes the local communities to have the ability to decide on the qualities and quantities of the food distributed within their community. It is often forgotten and unenforced when considering Indigenous communities, as the right to their own land for cultivation and the promotion of Indigenous foods and agriculture is not but needs to be respected by state governments in their considerations.
Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) and Pandemic Electronic Transfer (PEBT)
EBT is the issuance program in which SNAP benefits are distributed electronically. It is further used to provide additional benefits(in the cases of disasters/emergencies) as well as timing benefits for distribution periods.
P-EBT is the pandemic extension of EBT for the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. It was established by the FFCRA (Families First Coronavirus Response Act) to provide free meals to school aged children who were previously on the free/reduced lunch program.
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
A core tenant of the Farm Bill and one of the largest/most funded pieces of legislation aimed at reducing hunger among impoverished individuals(but not necessarily food insecurity). It is the rebrand of ‘Food Stamps’ and offers paycards for individuals to buy groceries, diapers, and other essential goods. It is funded by roughly 111 billion USD from the USDA, as well as additional funding by the states. It is distributed and regulated on a state by state basis.
Social Welfare Programs
Social welfare programs are government-provided assistance programs that provide citizens in need with the proper support needed for a stable living environment.
Examples of social welfare programs include SNAPS benefits, medicare, and student loan forgiveness.
Food Apartheid
Food Apartheid is the more common terminology for food deserts and swamps due to their disproportionate impact on communities of color. It is often used to display that the access to nutritious food is dependent not only on location but on one’s status as a minority, as it, in a broader sense, explains a lot of the variance in quality of foods.