How Hunger Persists in a Rich Country Like America
By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc for The New York Times Magazine.
In March, the photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally was visiting Troy, N.Y., when the coronavirus pandemic hit the East Coast. She grew up in the area, bouncing among friends and group homes after her mother kicked her out when she was 12. Kenneally has spent decades immersed in the intimate lives of a group of upstate families who share her legacy, using images to explore the way economic forces ravage people’s lives for generations. “I knew every single layer of disadvantage they lived on a daily basis would be exacerbated by Covid,” she says.
As April unfolded, Kenneally checked on friends in crowded apartments and shelters in and around Troy, and for weeks she was the only person wearing a mask. Stressors were so common — evictions, unemployment, isolation — that Covid-19 hadn’t yet struck many of them as particularly significant. But as jobs continued to disappear in New York and around the country, Kenneally knew that millions of Americans were now being thrown into the kind of precarity that the people she knew had long endured. “It was the moment to connect the root causes of all the things that people could be shamed for with what you see in front of the camera,” she says. “The situations that define a life of scarcity were becoming democratized.”
She returned to Queens, where she lives, packed up her pull camper and enlisted Rafael Gonzalez, the father of her 26-year-old son, beginning what would become a 92-day trip across the country documenting food insecurity. She and Gonzalez met as homeless teenagers working for a carnival, so they knew the road.
The highways were quiet as they headed north. They visited Salvation Armys and food pantries in Canandaigua, Utica and Buffalo. Kenneally knocked on car windows and walked the lines. Every postindustrial town and city they passed through looked abandoned. “You couldn’t tell if they had been closed down because of globalization three decades ago or Covid,” she says.
They made a brief return to Troy before heading west. On Mother’s Day, Kenneally joined the Stocklas family for a meal. Family members had pooled their benefits from SNAP (the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food stamps) to buy the food. “I’ve been watching the Stocklases struggle to put dinner on the table for 15 years,” Kenneally says. Kenneally’s mother was aided by food stamps after her father left, and she used federal food benefits, too, especially when raising her own son as a single mother.
Then Kenneally and Gonzalez left for Pennsylvania. From there to Gary, Ind., to Chicago, charities and nonprofits were adjusting to new safety protocols to deliver food. The Salvation Army has more than 7,600 centers of operation, and many waived eligibility requirements. Food banks distribute to local pantries, which in turn get groceries directly to people or to organizations that serve hot meals. Volunteers — many of them senior citizens — were now at risk, so staff was scrambling to find help while converting to curbside pickup. In Parma, Ohio, the school district, like so many across the country, had essentially become its own food bank. In Memphis, a woman became a distribution point for her condominium complex, giving away boxed lunches that she retrieved from her niece’s school.
Precarity wasn’t new to Kenneally, but what was striking now was the astonishing scale. Lines at food banks stretched to hundreds of cars, some carrying people who had never sought food assistance before. In Houston, Catholic Charities was providing food to as many as 2,000 people every six hours. The Mamie George Community Center there gave out 567,000 pounds of food in 2019; between March 18, 2020, and July 6, when Kenneally arrived, the M.G.C.C. had already distributed 528,437 pounds.
At a time when the heat and the fear were rising, when Americans were urged to keep distance from loved ones, when protesters — outdoors — were risking their safety, strangers let Kenneally and Gonzalez, wearing masks, into their homes and kitchens to watch them prepare their food and eat. “They understood that telling their food-struggle story now and even pre-Covid was important,” Kenneally says. She moved in close, photographing this ordinary intimacy under extraordinary circumstances. “I want you to feel like you are there, to go in there, to be vulnerable and to honor the fact that these people are making themselves vulnerable.”
Deborah Saylor, one of the dozen women who became known this spring as the Lunch Lady Legends in Parma, Ohio. The local school district was passing out a week’s worth of bagged breakfasts and lunches to about 1,500 children. Credit...Brenda Ann Kenneally for The New York Times
In 1936, Dorothea Lange took what would become a world-famous photograph of 32-year-old Florence Owens Thompson, in Nipomo, Calif. It was early March, and Lange was speeding home to Berkeley, where she lived. She glimpsed a handwritten sign that read “Pea-Pickers Camp,” but at first she drove right past it.
She had spent that bitter cold February following migrant workers who had fled the Dust Bowl and were following crops. Many were starving. By 1936, thousands were flooding into California every month, and police officers were stationed at the state’s borders to turn back anyone deemed a “transient.” Lange was taking photographs for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency that would soon change its name to the Farm Security Administration, which relocated poor urban and rural people into government-planned communities. The government’s goal was to educate voters who hadn’t been so hard hit by the Great Depression and didn’t know much about the degrees of suffering in their midst.
After Lange passed the pea-pickers sign, she drove for another 20 miles, wanting to believe, she later wrote in an article, that she already had enough evidence of hardship, but she had an argument with herself: “Dorothea, how about that camp back there? … Nobody could ask this of you, now could they? … To turn back certainly is not necessary. Isn’t this just one more of the same?” She turned back to see for herself.
She found Thompson and three of her children huddled under a tattered, dirty tent. “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed,” Lange wrote. “She seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me.”
Lange’s photographs of Thompson ran in The San Francisco News shortly afterward. The public reaction to the image of an attractive mother and her daughters was immediate: letters of concern, calls to action, donations. The government assembled 20,000 pounds of emergency food, but by the time it was shipped to that particular migrant camp, the woman had already packed up her seven hungry children and pressed on. The image, which eventually came to be titled “Migrant Mother,” circulated widely and increased popular support for the New Deal programs that evolved into what remains of our social safety net today. Until 1978, her name — and that she was of Cherokee descent — remained unknown.
Our treatment of hunger as an emergency, rather than a symptom of systemic inequities, has long informed our response to it, and as a result, government programs have been designed to alleviate each peak rather than to address the factors that produce them. “Hunger becoming public is the start of a struggle, but it’s only the beginning of what’s required for change,” says Laurie B. Green, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, whose research looks at the moment in the 1960s when public health commissions, politicians and the media “discovered” hunger.
The severing of hunger from its socioeconomic context minimized the relationship between the restructuring of land, labor and industrial farming and its effect on diets and access to healthful food. Federal surplus-commodity programs grew out of the Great Depression, providing hungry people with leftover staples like flour, rice and lard. But their priority was to subsidize white farmers; the starchy diet did little to alleviate malnutrition. In the early 1960s, some areas began to offer food stamps instead. But because the coupons needed to be purchased every month, and values were set by local counties, they were inaccessible to the poorest — especially Southern Black residents — who were now unable to get any food at all. Activists like Fannie Lou Hamer organized against the program. The purchase requirement remained in place until 1977.
The first food bank opened in 1967. That December, Look magazine published photographs by Al Clayton, part of an exposé about a destitute family living in a windowless shack on no more than “coffee, flour and an inch of rice in a cellophane bag.” The next year, a CBS documentary, “Hunger in America,” featured a baby in an American hospital crib dying of starvation onscreen. Public pressure led to legislation that improved access to food stamps and created the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) in 1972.
But those programs weren’t designed to eliminate need. WIC limits the age of child recipients; SNAP meets roughly two-thirds of a household’s food needs, and recipients run out of food by the end of the month. “Our whole safety net is based on the premise that all able-bodied adults can get a job, and every kind of assistance is temporary,” says the Princeton sociologist Kathryn Edin.
In the 1980s, in response to cuts to food benefits during the Reagan administration, hunger was discovered again with commissions and reports. The underlying problem was bound up with the increasingly punishing nature of the American economy, especially for people of color. Food banks were supposed to fill in the gaps. But today more than 37 million Americans are food insecure, according to the U.S.D.A. “We call it an emergency food system, but it’s a 50-year emergency,” says Noreen Springstead, executive director of WhyHunger, which supports grass-roots organizations that approach food insecurity systemically.
Food insecurity no longer looks like a skinny mother in a tent or children with rickets and kwashiorkor; it looks like fast food at the end of the month when SNAP runs out, or rural “food deserts,” where few food banks reach. Its legacy is diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.
The pandemic has revealed the fragility of a highly centralized industrial food system and has given us a glimpse of the tenuous lives of the workers who farm, process, deliver and ring up the food we need. It also has shown, as Springstead points out, just “how close people are to the edge of the abyss. They can’t keep their apartment and can’t pay for their groceries; they are one paycheck away from, ‘What am I going to do?’”
Rosy Romero, 26, and her three children: Alexander, 7; Azly, 2; and Cristina, 9 months. Romero, who lost her babysitting job when the pandemic hit, gets food from her church and a food pantry. Credit...Brenda Ann Kenneally for The New York Times
Programs created to help the poorest Americans now supplement the working poor. More than half of all SNAP recipients work. The pandemic has heightened food insecurity. The Salvation Army reported an 84 percent increase since last year in the number of boxes handed out at their drive-through pantries. Meals on Wheels has seen a 47 percent increase in the number of people it serves. In addition to federal subsidies, food banks rely on private donations, which historically decline during economic downturns. Corporate donors are selling more of the food they would ordinarily donate because it’s no longer expiring on the shelves.
Even before the pandemic, food insecurity was entangled with unaffordable housing, health care costs, unreliable transportation. In Troy, before she traveled across the country, Kenneally met with her friend Barbara Broomall. Three days before the eviction moratorium, federal marshals put Broomall, her three children and their belongings on the street. With the pandemic lockdown, it became clear that her only option was a room in the Schuyler Inn, a homeless shelter that was once a hotel. Broomall and her son both received S.S.I. for mental health issues, and the $1,457 rent ate up the checks. She had no car to reach her children’s schools to collect the food they were distributing, though before the school kitchens were up and running, they were offering only snacks — Ritz crackers, chips, granola bars — so it wasn’t worth bus fare. The Schuyler Inn didn’t provide Wi-Fi, so her daughter tried to connect to her schoolwork in a Burger King parking lot.
If they go on for too long, temporary solutions become permanent. Food banks become bureaucracies; hotels meant to hold the overflow of shelters, like the Schuyler Inn, become homes. Public schools, which have never reconciled their hours with the actual schedules of working people, become essential hubs for entire communities.
Rene Lopez, 46, helped open a food bank on the Pascua Yaqui reservation in Tucson last year. “I know how it is on the reservation,” said Lopez, who is half Native American. “When you’re out there, it’s far, there’s no grocery stores nearby.” Credit...Brenda Ann Kenneally for The New York Times
On July 16, toward the end of her travels, Kenneally pulled up to the fields of Hatch, N.M. Teodula Portillo, 47, had been up since 4 a.m. She had allowed her teenage sons 20 more minutes to sleep and didn’t wake her 11-year-old twin daughters because they cannot work legally until they are 12. By 5:30 a.m., Portillo and her boys were bent over picking onions, for which they are paid by the bushel. Employers are required to pay minimum wage only for certain tasks that are part of agricultural work. Portillo receives SNAP intermittently — if she earns too much, they are not eligible. Kenneally knelt on the dirt and began shooting, some 900 miles from Nipomo, where Lange took her iconic photograph, which helped Americans discover the hunger that both she and Kenneally knew too much about. The attachment to this discovering is as persistent as the underlying social problems — which to this day remain ignored.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, an independent journalist and MacArthur fellow, was embedded in an assisted-living facility as Kenneally began her trip for this issue. They have worked together since 2003. Brenda Ann Kenneally is a multimedia journalist who, over 30 years, has produced participatory media projects with families from her home community, including “Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City.” She is currently assembling a multimedia autobiography, charting her experience from being a disenfranchised youth to becoming a Guggenheim fellow and frequent contributor to the magazine.