Why?
And it all has to do with farmers.
Now, I love farmers and farms. The highlight of the summer for my daughter is going to farm camp (which I'm pretty sure is me paying the farm to use her as free labor, but I'll let that go). We love our CSA, and farmers markets. Farms are great!
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| Farming runs in the family. |
So what do farms have to do with the food stamp program?
I’m glad you asked.
Or, I’m glad I pretended that you asked, for rhetorical purposes.
Starting during the Great Depression, Congress created the Farm Bill, designed to help farmers by protecting them from instabilities in crop markets. This help has taken different forms over the years, including low interest loans, crop insurance, subsidies, etc. The original Farm Bill wanted to also help farmers by guaranteeing consumers would buy their food, so it had built into it subsidies for people who couldn't afford to buy the food farmers were producing. This was the beginning of the Food Stamp program, which would later become SNAP. And every five years, SNAP is reauthorized and refunded as part of the Farm Bill.
The last Farm Bill was from 2013, and it is set to expire in September.
Congress in writing the new Farm Bill right now. And they have some ideas about how to "improve" it.
Because SNAP is aimed at
helping people with little money to spend, it is seen as a welfare program, a
way for lazy Americans to live off the government’s dime, when they should be
starving in the street like characters from a Dickens novel.
The biggest challenge to SNAP from the Republican-controlled House is
a massive budget cut, coupled with an increase to work requirements. All of which is aimed at
kicking people off of the program for being lazy. Except most of them work
already. And don’t get me started about work requirements for food benefits.
Oh, see, too late. You got me started.
Picture it: Ireland 1845.
Beautiful country. Full of farms
that grew wheat and barley, raised cattle for dairy and meat. Irish butter was
prized over in Britain, tons of the stuff exported every year. And those big farms were almost all owned by
English landlords, who employed Irish laborers to work the fields. The English
had learned some decades ago that a curious vegetable the Spanish had brought
back from South America, the potato, was the perfect thing to encourage the
Irish to grow for their own food.
Because it required very little land, but provided enough yield for Irish
families. Which was good for the
English, who wanted to keep as much land as possible to themselves.
Let me repeat one part of that:
The potato came from South America, through Spain, before it made its way to
Ireland, pushed on them by the English so the could be kept (barely) above
starvation, just healthy enough to work the fields. There is no traditional
Irish food involving potatoes.
Like to be clear about that. That
point gets lost on lots of Americans.
So 1845 rolls along and something
odd happens to the potato crop. Part of it fails on account of some kind of
fungus. Darn shame, it’ll be a tough winter, but next year will be better. Except next year wasn’t better. This was the beginning of what we now call
the Irish Potato Famine, because we’re not in Ireland. In Ireland, it is called simply the Great Hunger. And it caused great hunger indeed for the
Irish, up to a million of whom starved to death during those years, with
millions more fleeing Ireland to other places where food was more available, most
notably America.
But calling it the Irish Potato
Famine is just the right description, because it gets across the necessary
information. It was a potato famine,
which affected the Irish. Exclusively. The only crop that failed was the
potato. And because of English policies
to make the potato the staple of the Irish diet, the only people who suffered
were the poor Irish, who could not afford to buy any other food.
Because make no mistake, there
was PLENTY of food being grown and produced in Ireland during the entire period
of the famine, almost all of which was being export to England, to be sold for
profit. While the Irish starved to
death.
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| This is the picture of a real person named Bridget O'Donnell, with her children, during the famine. It is not, as you might think, part of a Walking Dead prequel. |
There were, early on and to the
credit of certain English government officials, attempts to help the Irish,
mostly by importing American corn to feed the hungry. Yeah, I’m not sure why, either, but that’s
what they did. They exported Irish food
and imported American food. But at least
they tried to help. But then, there was
an election, and as sometimes happens in election, the balance of political
power shifted. And the new
administration in London banned further imports of food and refused to give
food to the people who were dying from a lack of it.
Instead, they demanded that food
should only be given to those who could work for it. Put in a day's worth of labor,
receive just enough for a day’s meal.
But so many people showed up to work that there weren’t enough jobs, so
starving men were set out to the middle of nowhere, to build roads that served
no purpose, just to force them to work so they could be justified in being paid
enough to not starve. And if they
happened to not have the money to pay the men immediately? Too bad for the
laborers, who would continue to starve, but still be forced to work, now for no
pay. Men died on these roads, owed a weeks wage and without any food in their
bellies.
Those roads, built by starving laborers, and serving no purpose whatsoever, are the Famine Roads, and you can still find them all over Ireland.
Those roads, built by starving laborers, and serving no purpose whatsoever, are the Famine Roads, and you can still find them all over Ireland.
No one of Irish descent (which,
according to everyone on St. Patrick’s Day, is EVERYONE), who knows anything of this dark
chapter in Irish history (which is now all of you) can possibly support work
requirements for a food program without abandoning your morality and your
humanity.
Food is a human right. Saying you can’t have it because you’re not
working hard enough to deserve food is, at best, a crime against humanity.
And that is what the Congress of
the United States is debating. Seems
like it should be a short debate.
Instead, you get this: “No more loopholes that create disincentives to work.”
I can almost hear the esteemed
Senator Ebenezer Scrooge, pronouncing, “Have me no prisons? No workhouses? Those who are badly off must go there. And if they would rather die, they had better
do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
You want to get people
working? Great! Have a nation-wide, well-funded job training
program. But don’t tie it to getting
enough food to not go hungry. Don’t
punish people who are poor for being poor.
And don’t blame them for it, either.
You want more people lifted out of poverty? Great!
So do I! Raise the minimum
wage! But don’t blame poverty on
laziness, demand work for the right to eat, all the while doing nothing about
the fact that no one can survive on low wage jobs, even working full-time.
The Farm Bill is trying to force
the debate in the wrong direction, and we need to speak up about the right
direction it needs to be going in. And that is what the SNAP Challenge is meant help do. To remind us that we all have a voice, and we all have stake in this, and we're all, all of us, in need of some help every once in a while. And most of all, food is a human right.
(It really is. It’s even in the Declaration of Independence. “And are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit
of Happiness.”)
(No, I’m not talking about the
Pursuit of Happiness, though food does make me happy. I’d stick it more in the “Life” category.)
So enough with the history lesson. Call Congress. #SupportSNAP.And #hashbrowns.
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