Income inequality in the US is the highest it’s been in half a century, and while there is debate over the impact of deregulation, job automation, immigration, or the declining power of labor unions, it’s been increasingly recognized in recent years as one of the most damaging forces affecting the United States. But while income inequality has been explored from a variety of angles in the 2020 Presidential election, when we talk about inequality, we should be talking about food.
“Putting food on the table” is one of those idiomatic phrases in modern political speak that is so ubiquitous and cliche that we rarely think about the true meaning of it. “Kitchen-table political issues” is shorthand for domestic issues that impact a family’s day to day life, the kind of thing they might discuss over the dinner table — health care, education, and taxes. It’s rolled out by politicians whenever they want to bring a conversation back to issues that “matter” to American voters, not Washington insider speak.
“Putting food on the table” is an attempt to connect with voters whose primary concern is day to day life — how are they going to eat? How are they going to pay the bill that you can’t unsubscribe or haggle with the bill collector about? Yet for all of this recognition of food as a necessity for voters, and for all of our talk about income inequality, there’s very little discussion on actual food policy and how it relates to income inequality in mainstream political discourse.
Food is a major part of people’s lives, and when we talk about income inequality, we should be talking about food inequality. Food makes up a significant portion of a US household’s spending, and the lower a household’s income level is, the larger that portion of spending is. US households in the lowest 10–20% of income brackets spent around 15–16% of their annual budget on food, while for households in the top 10–20% of income, food accounted for 11–12% of their spending. This may not sound like a dramatic difference, but for households making less than $30,000 a year, hundreds of dollars in spending on food can have a significant impact on their ability to pay for other necessities. Lower-income households also put a larger portion of their income and spending toward other necessities like transportation, housing, and healthcare, and these larger costs have a cumulative effect that can become overwhelming.
We could take a more radical view of food and look at it through the lens of “preferential options for the poor”, a concept championed by people like Dr. Paul Farmer. In food systems, chronic disease and inadequate access to healthy food have a preference for the poor. What if we designed our food systems to actually provide better food at a lower cost to the poor?
But while healthcare is discussed extensively in politics, and housing and education less so but still prominent, food policy is often neglected wholesale.
This isn’t to argue that those other issues should be discussed — but a discussion of those issues is incomplete and inadequate unless we also talk about food. (A complete summary of the overlap between food and other public policy areas will be explored more in a later entry). If we are going to talk about putting food on the table, and how families are supposed to afford it, we have to start by actually talking about food.
The fact remains that for lower- and middle-income families, food is a significant, uncompromising, and continuous expense, and no discussion of income, class, or wealth inequality in America is complete without including it.
So, if food is such a key concern for so many families, and it makes up such a significant portion of household income, especially for lower- and middle-class families, why don’t we talk about it more?
We could look at a couple of theories for why this is the case. Food is wrapped up in our culture and identity, and discussions around food tend to be fraught. Although many policy ideas from left thinkers may be distorted or argued in bad faith by media commentators on the right, food seems to sit in a unique space around public policy and cultural issues. Perceived attempts to police what people are eating or instill values from on high are met with derision and contempt. After a supplementary document for the resolution known as the Green New Deal was released in 2019 and included a line about “farting cows”, there was an immediate and predictable backlash against the left trying to take away people’s hamburgers. Even a politician like Sen. Cory Booker (D — NJ), widely known to be vegan, refused to state in town halls that he believed others should adopt his lifestyle for ethical or environmental reasons. He might have felt it politically unwise to do so. This sensitivity around signaling toward influencing food choices or food availability may be one reason why politicians aren’t eager to talk about food policy in general.
Another theory? Some of the most effective food policies we’ve tested and know of can unflatteringly be described as handouts. SNAP benefits reach millions of low-income households and have been shown to be effective at improving outcomes for families who receive them, especially children. But while the public rightly came to SNAP’s defense when the Trump administration proposed changes to make it more difficult for states to waive work requirements for receiving benefits, food stamps and handouts to the poorest Americans aren’t politically advantageous to talk about. Politicians, even on the left, tend to focus their public remarks on middle-class benefits.
However, we also can’t take this lack of public discussion around food policy as evidence of food just not being considered in public policy circles. People are reminded of housing laws, regulations, and policies because they see apartment buildings being built or they know the price of rent in their city. They know the government is involved in healthcare regulation and the increased focus in the last few years. Food’s policies are by and large invisible. For many of us, the price of goods in the grocery store or on the menu at restaurants is the extent to which we interact with food, as a consumer making a transaction that’s (relatively) small, even while it makes up a significant portion of our spending, on average greater than healthcare, and with a host of both market and government forces behind it.
Contrary to the simple consumer transactions we typically associate with food purchasing, politicians and policymakers have made countless intentional choices about food policy. These choices are all rolled up into the single price we pay for an apple, loaf of bread, package of chicken breasts, or candy bar at the grocery store. One example on the local level is zoning laws. These impact which, how many, and where food establishments and grocery stores can exist in a community, affecting residents’ access to different types or qualities of food. For a resident without a car, who relies on public transportation to or from work, the location of a grocery store on their route home can mean the difference between being able to pick up fresh groceries or having to rely on a corner store or prepared food establishment.
The federal government has made a number of choices around which crops and which kinds of farming operations to subsidize, the terms of foreign trade agreements, and the types of regulations and incentives for large farms. All of these decisions have profound impacts on the type, quality, and quantities of crops grown throughout the country, the price and cleanliness of animal products, and the quality of our soil, water, and climate.
Helping to formulate these policies in conjunction with the federal government are the large institutions that are currently at the top of the food power structure: big agriculture conglomerates and corporate food producers. These institutions’ main priority is the continued success of their bottom line. They have the wealth, power, and know-how to effectively influence these policies day to day, to lobby for those that work in their favor and block those that would threaten them
Those people with lower wealth and power in the current system have the least say in the full decision-making apparatus and are, at the same time, the ones who suffer most from food shortages, undernutrition, and higher costs.
Simply talking about food policy isn’t enough, of course. The public sector needs to take concrete actions to improve access to healthy and sustainable food. We can start by looking to and following the lead of communities that have been working on this problem for decades and formulated solutions that work for them. Solutions that don’t rely on new innovations from private enterprise, but rely on the people, places, and ideas that have grown food for generations. These are a few places we can start:
A public option for grocery stores?
Boston’s Eastie Farm Builds Community and Resilience on the Front Lines of Climate Change
How Baltimore Is Experimenting Its Way Out of the Food Desert
