Have you heard about this thing called the Farm Bill?

For the past year or so I have been following this piece of legislation with utter outrage most of the time. The Farm Bill authorizes funding for most federal farm and food polices and it is supposed to be reauthorized every five years. The Farm Bill is Big Ag's playground to secure subsides for certain crops over others and it's a big reason why crappy food is some much cheaper than real, fresh food. It is also how programs like S.N.A.P (formerly known as Food Stamps) is funded.

 In the past year I have heard every thing from huge fast food chains fighting to accept S.N.A.P benefits to funding programs that increase access to locally grown food being thrown in the mix to see what will end up in this bill. In fact, I could probably dedicate a whole blog to the Farm Bill and how it impacts us. But, one aspect actually made it into the bill that I cannot stand for and I want to talk about it and some about the intersection of Racism and Food Access.

If you are one of those post-racial America types I dare you to stick around for the rest of this blog because I am about to drop some truth on you. Racism is alive and well in America. Racism is not about individual interactions. You can treat people decent all you want, but it won't change the fact that some structures are set up to screw people of color, especially if they happen to also fall in the category of the working poor. It also won't change the fact that these structures hurt everyone, not just people of color, and we all have a stake in forcing them to change.

Now I'll explain my reason for jumping up on my soap box today. The Senate just accepted a deal that would kick the formerly incarcerated off of food assistance programs. They are trying to gut, I mean cut, funding for food assistance programs like S.N.A.P. because they are rubber band programs. This means that when the economy is doing well and people have jobs less people need this program so it shrinks and we spend less on it. When the economy tanks, like it did in 2008, more people become eligible for the program and we spend more on it to cover the new folks. People have been fighting for years to make food assistance programs static. We would only spend this amount of money on programs a year and when it runs out of money it is good luck to you good kind folks that need it. But, please do try again next year.

Some folks may be saying, "Well, if they are going to cut the program it only seems fair to give benefits to people that haven't landed themselves in jail, right?"

Yeah, I have a problem with the "deserving poor" argument. A big one.

Food is a basic need for survival, therefore food access should be a right. Deciding that some people are more deserving of assistance than others is ludicrous, unfair and completely unjust. As a Food Justice advocate I will not stand for someone to starve because they got put on the cradle-to-prison pipeline

Secondly, The Prison Industrial Complex is RACIST and guaranteed to punish the poor far more harshly than any other class.

Robert Greenstein the founder and President of the Center of Budget and and Policy Priorites said:

" The amendment would bar from SNAP (food stamps), for life, anyone who was ever convicted of one of a specified list of violent crimes at any time — even if they committed the crime decades ago in their youth and have served their sentence, paid their debt to society, and been a good citizen ever since.  In addition, the amendment would mean lower SNAP benefits for their children and other family members.

So, a young man who was convicted of a single crime at age 19 who then reforms and is now elderly, poor, and raising grandchildren would be thrown off SNAP, and his grandchildren’s benefits would be cut."

How is this just? How is it helpful? But, most importantly, how is this amendment going to effect people in real life? 

I can tell you it is going to hit the poor and people of color hardest. People like the good folks in Petersburg, VA that I spent last Summer working with to promote food security and health in their neighborhood and learning a ton about what Racism and Food Access looks like in real life. 

Petersburg residents are 90% African American. The entire city is a food desert/ food swamp. They are still effected by the outcomes of the resistance to integration with  many older folks being unable to read  because back in the day the Governor shut down the school system for five years instead of allowing black students to attend white schools and they missed those critical years of learning. Petersburg has the eighth lowest life expectancy in the the U.S. And the city likes to try children as adults to show they are super tough on crime. 

Folks that I care about are in danger of losing absolutely necessary benefits. People are elderly, they don't have any health care, experience a lot of pain, they can't work and self medicate with alcohol and drugs. Say somebody gets drunk and gets into a fight and lands themselves in jail,  which is not an uncommon story, what is this amendment going to mean for them and their family? 

They already lived in a city that had low food access. Now they won't be able to even buy the crappy cancer-causing food at the corner stores. And we already have a long history in our country revolving around what food certain groups of people have access to buy and eat as an extension of Environmental Racism.

In Kate Meals paper on Food Access in African American communities she writes:

"Nationwide, 38.1 million people, or 12.4 percent of the population, identify as African-American (or Black). When compared with the U.S. population as whole, African-Americans experience “hunger, poverty, unemployment, and income disparity” at disproportionate levels. In 2010, rates of food insecurity in African-American households were higher than the national average, at 25.1 percent. In 2008, 27.2 percent of African-American families had difficulty getting enough to eat, compared with 11.6 percent in Caucasian households overall."

Add on top of this disparity the problems people of color face with our justice system and this amendment means a lot of folks and families could lose their benefits. For some people this will mean another ticket back to jail either for falling into dangerous, high-paying, illegal work so they have enough money to buy food or because in jail they will at least get three meals a day. 

When the system is set up for people to fail it's hard for folks to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Especially when their bootstraps were cut up a long time ago. 

This amendment is wrong. This amendment is unjust. This amendment will pass if we don't do something to stop it and to stop it will take a lot more than just calling our representatives.