


































Welfare for Profits' Sake

Review by Francisco Arqueros
University of Almería, Spain

Maggie, D. 2019. Feeding the Crisis: Care and Abandonment in America's Food 
Safety Net. University of California Press. 

The return to nearly full employment rates after the Great Recession (2008-
2009) has not palliated the need for mass food assistance in the United States. 
In 2012, over 40 million Americans received food assistance from Emergency 
Food Providers (EFPs) such as faith-based institutions, senior centers, 
grassroots community organizations and college campuses; 47 million received 
(public) Food Stamps. After the “recovery” of the economy those on food 
stamps were still numbered at over 42 million in 2017 and over 40 million 
received food from EFPs. Hunger is an everyday reality in the USA. 

Why has there been such a high number of people receiving food assistance in 
an expanding economy close to full employment? According to Feeding the 
Crisis, the role of the growing food safety net is “to create the optimal conditions 
for companies and individuals to act in ways that promote economic growth” 
(15). Large scale changes in the economy since the 1980s (not described in the 
book) have brought about the expansion of a low-wage labor force (18) and 
policies designed to push people into the labor market (16). In that context, 
public assistance has been reconfigured as “work support” to subsidize low-
wage workers (4). Therefore, increasing state support for food assistance 
programs helps to keep wages low as a basis for economic growth (32, 14). On 
the other hand, the unemployed have been cut off from public assistance 
programs and made dependent on charity thanks to the contracting out of social 
assistance to non-for-profit organizations (11). This second development implies 
a retreat from previously achieved entitlements and basic rights. The twenty-first 
century in the US is characterized by the emergence of a public-private 
partnership to govern hunger and food insecurity in new ways (4, 8), but this 
partnership is not concerned with dealing with the structural causes of 
precarious employment.



Feeding the Crisis is grounded in fieldwork carried out during two years in a 
non-for-profit organization, North Brooklyn Pantry (New York City), where the 
author worked delivering pantry bags and helped service users with (public 
assistance) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) applications. In 
the introductory chapter, the author characterizes social assistance (welfare for 
the poor) in the US as a two-tiered system: SNAP for the working poor and 
Emergency Food Programs for the officially unemployed. Both tiers are part of 
the state apparatus though only the latter is run by private, voluntary, non-for-
profit organizations (4). Here is also where the line is drawn between the 
deserving and undeserving poor, with (officially recognized) work as the marker 
of deservingness. 

Another point is that Welfare Programs in the US rather than being dismantled 
are expanding. However, their character has changed (3). We are shown in 
Chapter 2 that the Food Stamps Program was introduced and developed in the 
1960s and 1970s as part of the War on Poverty initiative. It was a universal 
entitlement as long as citizens met the income requirements and represented 
an attempt to extend economic citizenship rights (24). The first challenge, under 
Reagan’s administration, was framed as a war against the “culture of 
dependency,” with work as the path to independence and voluntarism as the 
solution to poverty, which was the forerunner of workfare. It was also at that 
time, the 1980s, when Emergency Food Providers started to proliferate. 
However, “work requirements first” (workfare) did not take off until 1996 under 
Clinton’s administration. 

Chapter 3 introduces the first informants from the food pantry, prototypes of the 
deserving and undeserving poor. For example, Nydia is a worker on maternity 
leave. When she applies for food stamps, she argues with conviction to the 
welfare officer, “I work. I pay taxes. I think I'm entitled to this.” Adwa, on the 
other hand, is unemployed and is asked to do a workfare assignment, part of 
the Work Experience Program, WEP, cleaning public parks. She ends up 
missing days, losing her food stamps and having to work informally to 
compensate. New York has one of the toughest work requirements in the US 
(64). Although initially intended for cash assistance, these have been extended 
to food-stamp-only cases. 

In Chapter 4, the focus turns to the under-researched topic of family support 
and men on welfare. Since well-paid work is not an option anymore for many as 
in the Fordist period, food assistance helps men on precarious employment to 
maintain family ties. 

Chapter 5 deals with volunteers who are also service users in the food pantry. 
We meet Fabiola, Diego, Angela, and Ana. Unlike the “truly” well-off volunteers 
of charity organizations, these volunteers-clients also receive help from the 
pantry. They work for food. This chapter also deals with the rise of EFPs. They 



receive funds from state institutions and constitute “a third rail of the 
contemporary welfare state” and a “direct response to cutbacks to federal 
entitlements” (100-101) in the name of “efficiency” (good, altruistic, wageless 
work). In 2012, EFPs mobilized 2 million volunteers in the US. However, as one 
of the informants illustrate, volunteers, particularly those who are also pantry 
clients, cannot present to welfare officials their free labor as a job to get 
exempted from work requirements in exchange for assistance (112).

Chapter 6 deals with the role of food stamps in promoting healthy eating among 
poor (deserving) workers. The question is a political economy one: unhealthy 
eating increases public health spending due to high rates of obesity and 
diabetes which also deteriorate the working capacity and efficiency of the 
working poor. For the underserving unemployed, on charity, there is no such 
consideration: New York local authorities do not care about them as they are of 
no use.

The book's main conclusions (Chapter 7) are that the huge growth of the food 
safety net has had very little impact on food security (139) and that addressing 
the interlocking issues of food insecurity, obesity, and diet-related disease 
among the poor would require a restoration of economic rights; that is, food and 
health as basic human rights (142), not in the form of charity (153), and 
expanding what counts as work (161).

This book is timely and important, particularly since the recent recession 
precipitated by the coronavirus SARS-CoV2 is consolidating the extension of 
inequality, poverty and destitution initiated in 2008-9 (the reversal of the 
tendency in the Fordist period). A question is how welfare states (on both sides 
of the Atlantic) will cope with the situation and how the poor will react. In that 
regard, the tendency appears to be towards increasing workfare and loss of 
rights and entitlements, particularly for immigrants. The author makes the point 
that this is particularly the case in the “Trump Era.” Therefore, she makes an 
appeal to Democrats “to admit that welfare reform was a mistake” (169) and to 
return to a right based approach to hunger and poverty. However, as the author 
admits workfare was introduced by Clinton’s administration and never 
challenged under Obama’s administration. Why would Democrats revert to a 
right based approach and challenge a status quo that they have built?

This paradox points at one of the gaps in the book. We see how informants 
struggle individually to survive by working informally or in low paid jobs, 
applying for food stamps and going to the food pantry. A number of them, the 
unemployed, refuse work requirements (workfare) because they are paid below 
minimum wage and lose their stamps. Informal jobs or working as volunteers for 
the pantry are their alternatives. There is no mentioning of any form of 
organized resistance to workfare whether through work centers, social 
movements or trade unions. We do not know anything about the grassroot 



pressure to which some sections of the Democratic Party, in the absence of a 
Labor Party, could be receptive. 

The book is also difficult to classify as an ethnography since it prioritizes the 
political economy of the US food security network, based on a review of 
literature, over ethnographic data, which seems to be brief and lacking depth. It 
does not engage either with anthropological debates on poverty or social 
exclusion. Its main strength lies in its clarity in characterizing America’s food 
safety net for a broad audience, making it an excellent text for those working in 
NGOs and policy making in the fields of social assistance, poverty and social 
exclusion.

Francisco Arqueros holds a PhD from Maynooth University (Ireland). At 
present he is a research associate in the Laboratory of Social and Cultural 
Anthropology (LASC) at the University of Almería, Spain. His two lines of 
research are industrial agriculture and the moral economy of social assistance 
(https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7084-9147).

© 2020 Francisco Arqueros


