A scene from Rock Center with Brian Williams.

A couple pulls into a grocery store parking lot at exactly midnight on the first of the month. They are well-dressed and middle-class looking, but their faces are tense. The woman takes out her cell phone and dials a hotline that will report, in an automated voice, the total in their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) account. When they hear the voice say, “Your balance is 691 dollars and zero cents,” a wave of relief washes across their faces. They can now go into the store to buy groceries. The young man describes how he’s feeling for the camera as he lets out what he says is “a great big aaah.”

This was a scene from a recent episode of Rock Center with Brian Williams, which featured seemingly normal, middle-class food assistance users who often find themselves waiting outside of the grocery store at midnight on the first of the month. These families shop in the middle of the night — we are told — because fridges are empty, and a less-crowded store allows them to shop without persecution. A Walmart executive then tells us they have had to add extra staff on the first of the month to accommodate the increase in families using their benefits.

I caught this episode of Rock Center by accident the other night, but it just happened to highlight an important paradox I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. More people are using public benefits than ever before (according to the show, the number of people using EBT to feed their families has gone up nearly 37 percent in the last two years, to nearly 46 million people!) and yet there has been no correlating increase in EBT visibility.

The holiday season is historically the time of year when Americans are most likely to get involved in charitable food donation or distribution programs — by dropping a can of gravy in a food drive bin, or serving meals at a local soup kitchens. For many Americans, the ideas of hunger and food insecurity become most salient in the face of their own excess, from elaborate meals to exorbitant spending on gifts. 

Earlier this semester, I read the essay “Hungry City” by Janet Poppendieck and J.C. Dwyer (featured in the collection Gastropolis: Food & New York City) and it stayed with me through Thanksgiving. I’m still thinking about it now, as we move into December.

In the essay, Poppendieck and Dwyer examine some of the differences between private food assistance programs and public ones. “Private” programs, like soup kitchens, food banks, and charitable organizations, are often the most visible way that hungry or food-insecure people receive help. They are visible because they accept volunteers, engage celebrity sponsors, and have huge advertising budgets.

In the meantime, public food assistance programs generally fly under the radar. By the end of this summer, 45.8 million Americans were receiving SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits alone. That figure doesn’t include crucial government programs like the school lunch program or the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC). Poppendiek and Dwyer point out that public food assistance workers prepare and serve food as well as provide administrative services to produce “about 1.1 billion more meals than the private emergency food system.” Unless you are part of the food assistance system or know someone who is, those providing and using benefits are pretty much invisible. That is, until lawmakers do something totally absurd like try to pass pizza off as a vegetable.

Average people who volunteer to work in soup kitchens and celebrities who pose for ad campaigns are a key to their success, but also seek visibility as a way to reinforce their good deeds. The recipients of private food assistance are also more visible than those using public assistance. I have seen lines of people outside soup kitchens and churches, leaving with a Styrofoam container of hot soup or a bag of groceries. The only times I have ever seen people using public assistance was as a cashier at Whole Foods, and as a farmers market stall worker. Only as an insider in the exchange of goods for benefits was I able to discern who used government assistance.

This isn’t unintentional. Food stamps have gone from being pieces of paper to EBT cards that look, feel, and function like debit cards, in an effort to eliminate the stigma around using them. Free school lunch programs mandate anonymity for the children that need them to shield them from embarrassment in front of other students. 

But what do we lose when the hungry and food insecure are neither seen nor heard? It certainly makes the need less visible. We should be put off by the staggering number of food insecure people in America, which the USDA estimates is around 17.2 million. But by and large, for those of us with loaded Thanksgiving tables, hunger doesn’t enter our consciousness. Aside from the way a lack of visible hungry people distorts our view of American demographics, it’s downright dangerous. Lack of visibility of public programs and the ensuing lack of awareness means that political candidates hear almost no public resistance when they put government food assistance programs on the chopping block.

Photo: Krystian Olszanski

I’m in a food systems class this semester that is focused on the complex way that food moves from farm to plate (which in reality looks something more like from patented seed, to dirt treated with patented fertilizer, to harvesting by undocumented laborers, to processor, to manufacturer, to wholesaler, to a grocery store shelf with a paid stocking fee, to consumer, to plate). So far, our focus has been on consumer behavior, from the impact of food deserts to the ways that psychology and the economics of behavior effects food choice. (Did you know that putting out a bowl of multi-colored candy can increase consumption by well over 50 percent, compared to candy that’s a single color, for instance?) As we move on, economist and professor, Carolyn Dimitri, is helping us to understand the way that intermediaries like wholesalers and distributors factor in to the food chain.

There is a general resistance to analyzing food businesses the way we analyze other businesses, not only because food is our most primal need, but it’s also is fraught with cultural, nutritional, environmental, and political debate. At the base of it, though, large food businesses exist for the same reason large power companies do: to provide fuel and to make money. Like power companies, there are a few large food companies controlling the vast majority of the market. Take Coke and Pepsi. Tyson and Cargill. General Mills and Kellogg. Monsanto and Monsanto.

The idea of food monopolies isn’t new. In 1873, the Supreme Court heard the Slaughterhouse Cases, in which a monopoly had been given to Crescent City Livestock, a New Orleans slaughterhouse chain. Even then, food safety and environmental safety were concerns, as tons of animal waste from the slaughter process contaminated local drinking water.

Today, many of these same concerns remain, as huge companies like Smithfield dominate the slaughter and meat-packing market. The number of food producers (farmers) has been declining in the United States for decades, but it’s the production and wholesale sector, which turns raw food products into processed food, that has been most consolidated.

Here are some reasons that the current food environment makes large food monopolies possible, and how we can challenge them.

1. Same old, same old. In the United States, federal and state laws make it nearly impossible for new, medium-sized meat processing companies to enter the market. Everything from the building of the physical space to food handling certification needs to be done in accordance with the federal and local authorities. In most cases, farmers are forced to have their meat processed at large, tech-savvy plants — even if they are miles away from their farm. Mobile meat processing, which was only recently approved by the USDA, is one way to connect certified processors with smaller scale farmers for convenient, safe meat production.
2. Keep the technological playing field uneven. Corporations like Monsanto and Nabisco fund huge research projects at universities, which help them gain and maintain the most up-to-date science. By better funding sustainable food research at universities worldwide, we can ensure that science that promotes sustainability takes priority over science that promotes profits for processors and input suppliers.
3. Let processors pay to play. There is no scarcer resource in a supermarket than shelf space. New products essentially can’t access shelf space unless an old product falls off. Thus the “slotting fee” which wealthy processors pay to supermarkets to gain or maintain access to premium shelf space. This system actually encourages mergers between organic and conventional farms, so that organic farms can rely on wide distribution channels to gain access to shelf space. By putting an end to paid real estate for processed foods, we can open space from produce bought directly from farmers.
4. Keep the middle men around. While intermediaries add value to raw food products by storing them, transporting them efficiently, labeling them, and distributing them, they also seek out the lowest prices possible for goods. By buying directly from farmers, and going to restaurants that do the same, we put money in the pockets of farmers and not in those of huge wholesalers and processors.

I don’t mean to brag, but this week, I had a particularly awesome reply to the inevitable question about what you actually study in a Food Studies program: “Well, this week, I graphed and analyzed data on organic livestock in New Jersey from 2000 to 2008, read and discussed the history of anorexia nervosa, and styled and photographed an Oktoberfest editorial.”

Of those three, though, it has been reading Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, by social historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg, which has (unexpectedly) captured my interest. The book maps out the history of food refusal by women, from saintly religious figures like Catherine of Siena to the anorexia “boom” of the early ’90s with a focus on the “fasting girls” of the Victorian era. Our class discussion, with professor Krishnendu Ray, focused on the intense way that morality has been, and still is, wrapped up in eating — and, consequently, in not eating.

There is a rich history of public displays of food refusal centered around questions of piety and morals, from hunger strikes to religious fasts. Girls like Sarah Jacob , Mollie Fancher, and Ann Moore, who were said to abstain totally from food and to miraculously “live on air,” became celebrities in the 19th century for their supernatural gift, as clergymen, doctors, journalists, and curious onlookers (often with gifts and cash) gathered round their beds in awe. These women existed in moral limbo, as religious leaders praised their otherworldly devotion to the fast, and a growing medical field worked to scientifically disprove their perceived fasting and reveal the girls as money-hungry imposters.

For middle and upper-middle class Victorian families, diet was a moral issue. Government imperatives pointed to the importance of eating a balanced diet of clean foods, and as mothers were freed from the labor of cooking by smaller families, food abundance, servants, and technology, meals themselves became increasingly complex and important. The family table became the moral center of a home, as a place to impart etiquette, to regulate the family, and to serve good healthy meals. Girls were encouraged to eat light foods, sparingly, in accordance with their perceived delicate physiology and the era’s “cultivation of fragility.” Meat, fatty foods, and overeating were associated with sexual carnality, and so they were restricted from the diets of Victorian girls. Because of the importance of family meals, girls who refused to eat, as well as girls who ate too much of the “wrong” foods, had the power to disrupt entire households.

All of these moral questions are still tied up in what and how we eat.

Our morals can be — and are — judged by whether or not we think eating meat is acceptable, and, if it is, how it was raised. The literature of the “obesity epidemic” is fraught with questions of morality and responsibility. Obese people are vilified as lacking self-control and characterized as a strain on their community due to the rising costs of health care for obesity-related disease. Doctors accuse parents of obese children of child abuse. A healthy diet is not only a moral responsibility to ourselves, but something we owe our country, according to First Lady Michelle Obama, speaking at the launch of her Let’s Move initiative: “The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.”

Most recently, New Jersey Governor and potential presidential hopeful Chris Christie is feeling the squeeze of the moral assumptions bound up in eating and weight, as pundits ask, “Is Chris Christie too fat to be president?” In his controversial op-ed in the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson argued that his discussion of Christie’s weight is not due to a superficial cultural bias against fat people, but rather a legitimate concern over a health issue that could render him unable to lead.

As a student in a program that is so tightly focused on the obesity epidemic as an issue of socio-economics and public health, reading Fasting Girls has been a helpful reminder to me to take a step back from the data to think about the language we use to frame food and eating, and the way that language of morality has been harmful in the past. If there is one thing that all of my studies in food have taught me, it is that problems like obesity in America are complicated. The more I learn, the less the moral imperative of “thin is good, fat is bad” is a satisfying response. If we are going to work towards a better-fed, healthier nation it seems that there is little room for moral binaries, stereotypes, and shame.

Supermarket need in NYC from Going to Market: New York City’s Neighborhood Grocery Store and Supermarket Shortage.

Food Studies features the voices of 11 volunteer student bloggers from a variety of different food- and agriculture-related programs at universities around the world. You can explore the full series here.

I packed a salad with Jersey white corn, roasted sweet potatoes, and goat’s milk feta for lunch on the first day of my second year of graduate school in New York University’s Food Studies Program. (Don’t we all mark important days with something equally special to eat?)

My concentration at NYU is in food systems – that is, the way that food travels from field to plate. I am working to find ways to make food businesses that are doing the right thing for the planet and their customers as financially sustainable as they are environmentally sustainable.

The delivery of my first CSA distribution in my junior year of college was the beginning of my obsession with the state of the American food system. My love of all things American extends from food to novels (my undergraduate degree is in American literature) and music as well: Melville, bourbon, barbeque, and surf rock. I have worked on an organic farm and tested recipes in restaurant kitchens, and it took me a few years to realize that just because I want to work in food doesn’t mean I have to work with food.

As I start my second year, I think that my professors can sense my and my fellow graduate students’ generalized anxiety. All of us — including, it seems, my fellow Food Studies blogger Erin — are grown ups who are trying to navigate the question of what to be when we grow up. How do we make this love of food really work for us?  Fortunately, our professors have picked up on this, and are promising to impart plenty of real-world skills alongside their food-related insights.

This semester, I’ll be focusing on one practical skill in particular — business-oriented food writing — as well as getting grounded in food policy, which is something I’ve felt was lacking in the program so far. Meanwhile, my professor for Food Systems I: Agriculture is determined to give those of us who are not math inclined (hand-raise) the basic tools to use statistics and data to back up our ethics. In practice, this means we’ll be collecting and analyzing data to better understand food deserts in New York.

And finally, I am taking an overview class that promises to introduce us to current issues in food culture and systems globally. I’m anticipating discussions about commercial fishing, immigrant labor, global hunger, and the consequences of over-nutrition — and I’m looking forward to keeping you posted on all of it, from my most successful packed lunches to the most interesting readings!