Hold Out for Hunger: HJ107

Virginia House Joint Resolution #107 would, if enacted, designate a statewide day of collection for local "food banks." Full text:

http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HJ107

Oh, those poor, poor people who don't know where their next meal is coming from, and can't get it "by socially acceptable ways"! The problem is real enough--as long as accidents happen, there'll always be someone whose house burned down, who was laid off from work, who's been too ill to work for six weeks, etc., and there will be a need for emergency food banks. However, I see evidence that the problem is being "marketed" and magnified by people who may receive only emotional paybacks but are, nonetheless, profiteering on their neighbors' foodless situations.

I don't believe for a minute that, as the Feeding America report claims, there are really seven times as many families with at least one working parent who are desperately hungry than there are homeless people who are desperately hungry, in Virginia. (The two groups aren't even completely mutually exclusive.) There are families with at least one working parent who have noticed that a place where food is distributed and few questions are asked can do a great deal to stretch the old budget. In Tennessee I used to know a family with two working parents, and three gainfully employed children, whose claim on the local food bank was that they kept young, unemployable foster children. They did, and also they were able to feed and shelter the people the gainfully employed adult children were dating...who, since this wealthy family were using the food bank, felt no compunctions about eating everything in the house that looked edible.

As a self-supporting writer, I've been in a few foodless situations in my lifetime. During the past year there've been days when I had money to buy food but didn't take the time to go out and buy it; there've been days when I didn't even have the money. I had a general idea of where the next meal was coming from, and a reason to expect that I could wait that long. Let's just say that I had no serious intention of mortgaging the house because I had a few other emergency plans, such as selling smaller things I would have preferred to keep, if I'd had to fall back on those...and I didn't.

I think most foodless people do have an idea of where their next meal is coming from. Ask them, "What would you do if there were no food banks, no food stamps, no soup kitchens?" and, if they're willing to share it with you, they'll have a reasonable answer. "I'd bum a meal off a relative. I'd sell my car. I'd check the dumpsters behind the supermarket."

Sometimes people who allow themselves to become foodless have more sense of shame than the social workers and would-be social workers who want to "help." I've been asked, in reproachful tones, "Why aren't you on food stamps?" Duh...because food stamps are not an alternative to wages, and what I'm interested in is wages, so please don't waste your time on unproductive distractions.

But I've seen people who are qualified to earn wages, and are in fact earning wages, who never seem to think twice about taking the "helpers" for all they can take. Once in the 1980s I was invited to dinner by a co-worker. "I know the people who run the place. It won't cost anything," he said. I was expecting to go to a nice ethnic restaurant; there were a few of the appropriate flavor in the city neighborhood he'd named. He took me to a soup kitchen! If do-gooders were willing to feed anybody who showed up there, why shouldn't he take dates there, and why shouldn't he take home donations of fruit and canned goods to distribute to people to whom he was sub-leasing snack wagons, too. He told the urban mission staff that he was still poor. They believed it, because everyone saw him working long hours. But I happened to know that he had a sizable unofficial business going and was saving up money to go back to his native country in style. He did go back, in style, in 1995.

Yes, even in countries that are literally choking on food, hunger is possible. Hunger takes many forms. As a child I participated in after-school activities, not all of which began immediately after the three o'clock bell rang at school. One social club used to assemble at a store that had a lunch counter. Although our parents were sending money to buy each child one junkfood treat per day, and some kids inevitably thought it would be cool and clever to see whether we could smuggle a few extra snacks out without being caught. I had "cleverly" sneaked out with several chocolate bars before I was caught. "Are you hungry after school?" the adult leader asked. Well, I'd eaten breakfast before school, and had probably eaten lunch at school, but when children are exposed to chocolate and soda pop and salted peanuts two or three hours after lunch, what child isn't "hungry"? Of course I was hungry; the fact that I was allowed to buy one snack item didn't keep me from feeling an appetite for two or three. Or six, if I had enough cash--I didn't have to eat them all at once.

I outgrew the idea that there was anything clever about shoplifting, in the natural course of things, without any particular punishment. Some people never do figure out that money does not spontaneously grow out of the lint in the pockets of "grown-ups" or "richies." Some adults cling to that eight-year-old's idea that they're not allowed to earn their own money and make their own decisions, so by way of compensation they're entitled to take whatever they can get their little hands on. This is why there is still a market for socialist or large-scale communist ideas, even in a world that has seen countries that adopted these ideas collapse.

Social workers may not be aware that they encourage this form of moral retardation among teenagers and adults. They may think that giving people handouts based on their "needs" can be done in a way that does not encourage a morally underdeveloped relationship with the rest of society. They are probably wrong. So long as the way people get food is to tell someone else how "needy" they are, that sense that they don't need to take responsibility for themselves will persist. When the handouts are provided, they'll take them; when the handouts are cut off, they'll be angry. Either way, if the "needy" don't steal, it's more likely to be from fear of punishment than from any mature understanding that the storekeeper came by the merchandise honestly and should be honestly paid for it. The "needy" are encouraged not to identify and empathize with the storekeeper, much less to consider becoming storekeepers themselves; they're encouraged to put themselves in a special category as licensed social parasites.

So what's the solution? How can we stock food banks for situations of genuine need, without creating a culture of "neediness"? How can we avoid laying false guilt on the family whose house burned down and, at the same time, avoid enabling the shameless grifters who wave signs advertising that they'll work for food but snarl and curse when offered anything but drug money? I'm not sure. I think the prickliest part of the problem is that, as long as the "we" managing the food banks and other emergency resources are non-"needy" people with steady jobs, whatever decisions are made will be top-down decisions, made for poor people by rich people, and thus inherently tending to reinforce the sense that the "needy" are permanently trapped in a sort of  extended childhood. All the different "policy decisions" have been tried, and none has really satisfied anybody.

We could try this: Give to food banks when you feel like it--when you've received a bonus, or heard of a disaster. Don't bother trying to find out how hungry people really are. Understand that rich capitalists have been known to deprive themselves of food in order to do other things (rational things, or otherwise) with their time and money. Understand that, if food is served in a social context, some people are going to be motivated to come back and claim to be hungry no matter how much food they have at home, because they're "hungry" for the company of friends they've made at the soup kitchen--and, like my unfortunate "date," they may even bring other people who have food at home to the soup kitchen, just to show their friends that they can get a date. Understand that, if social workers try to oversee how much money someone is earning at work, the person may work less or report less work or less earning, and in fact be stockpiling donated food for resale. Just detach your emotions from all these little fun facts about human nature. You give food because you might someday need a food bank. Try not to worry about who's taking it.