Learn from history: Hunger is preventable

This month, Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley and 39 co-sponsors introduced a bill in the Iowa House that would dramatically limit the foods available to impoverished children, people with disabilities, and vulnerable seniors scraping by on a fixed income. If passed as it had been presented, those who rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dollars to buy groceries would no longer be able to purchase milk, meat, flour, oil, spices, cheese, butter, several types of beans, soup, canned vegetables, and canned fruit.

The bill didn’t stop at simply limiting the types of food for which SNAP may be accepted; there are also adjustments to the level of poverty warranting access to the remaining permissible grocery items. A family may not have possession of more than one vehicle, or more than $2,750 in assets. In practice, a family with two adults who drive (or an adult and a teen who drives to school or work) would be then faced with a choice: go hungry, or sell your transportation. Go hungry, or deplete the savings you may need to cover medical or utility bills. On Jan. 24, less than a week after its introduction, Health and Human Services Committee chair Rep. Ann Meyer announced that the bill would undergo significant amendments — specifically eliminating the proposed food restrictions.

In defense of the original proposed bill, Grassley described SNAP as an “entitlement program” that is “growing within the budget and … putting pressure on us being able to fund other priorities.” With the great resignation and COVID-era expansions of food assistance programs fresh in our minds, it stands to reason that the number of people who rely on SNAP to put food on the table might have swelled to an intolerable mass.

However, when I charted the households enrolled in the program since 2012 by month this did not appear to be the case. The plotted data peaked at just a hair under 200,000 households in August of 2013 and had decreased to 136,408 in November of 2022. The COVID spikes in enrollment are certainly present, but they only briefly interrupt the overall trend downward.

On the national level, the GOP is also eyeing cuts to the Farm Bill that would impact SNAP recipients. A Republican Study Committee report specifically points to conservative concerns about “able bodied adults without children, unwilling to work.” However, the USDA’s annual report regarding SNAP households indicates that 4 in 5 SNAP households included “either a child, an elderly individual, or an individual with a disability.” Further, although more than a quarter of these households had earnings, 81 percent were still living at or below the poverty line. Most of the beneficiaries of the SNAP program are white, and more than 90 percent are U.S. born citizens. Less than 4 percent are noncitizens or members of a refugee population. Most participants do not receive the maximum benefit, and are expected to use the assistance as a supplement as opposed to the only food source.

All of this talk about restricted dietary options and entitlement reminded me of another report. Back in 1965, the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States released “Hunger USA,” with an introductory comment by Robert F. Kennedy.

The report included hundreds of interviews with individuals from all over the United States describing their experiences with hunger. This report was released before SNAP, before Meals on Wheels was widely available, before WIC. It reads, in part:

“In Des Moines, Iowa, Mark Arnold, a reporter for the National Observer, found cases of hunger, sickness, and deprivation that seems inconceivable, especially in a state in the heart of the nation’s breadbasket and in the state on which national standards of satisfactory nutrition and physical development are based. His stories tell of people digging in the dump for food, sick people unable to afford the diet required to control their illness, and infants dying for lack of milk.”

The text describes pregnant women in Georgia who ate clay to survive. Elderly women in Iowa who were unable to comply with doctors’ pleas for them to eat a diet that would help them to maintain their quality of life. Children who went weeks eating only grain mush and water, and regularly starved to death in American homes. The consequences of malnutrition and starvation are a tangible, visible, real crisis that could be witnessed with the naked eye.

Hunger USA was published while U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley served in the Iowa Legislature. The spirit of the heavy-handed bill his grandson introduced betrays an attitude of contempt toward those experiencing hunger. This contempt threatens to repeat a history the GOP seems to have forgotten.

Sofia DeMartino is a Gazette editorial fellow. Comments: sofia.demartino@thegazette.com

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