Every year, tens of millions of Americans struggle with food insecurity, many not knowing where their next meal will come from.
Their ranks could grow even higher over the coming months as the current administration threatens SNAP benefits for people in need, even as wages lag behind rising costs of living.
But as Dr. Stacey Patton and Adam Serwer point out, keeping people hungry and in a state of trauma is the point of oppressive systems, not a flaw in them.
Our own Gregory Ball delves into the history of how hunger is used as a means of controlling populations and limiting resistance—and how we can break the cycle of starvation.
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Hunger is the point
By Gregory Ball
A population stuck in survival mode cannot organize, cannot protest and cannot imagine an alternative.
When hunger becomes normalized, it becomes far more insidious. It teaches children to shrink their needs. It trains families to expect less. It conditions whole neighborhoods to move through life with a tightened jaw and a guarded heart.
This is what generational hunger steals: not only meals, but imagination, stability and the basic belief that you are worthy of care.
We’ve seen these dynamics play out in Boston. Embrace’s Harm Report maps out how centuries of policy design have disadvantaged Black Bostonians. Zoning laws and land-use patterns have quietly blocked major grocery chains from entering low-income areas. Business tax incentives lure supermarkets to wealthier zip codes while starving Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan of investment. Public transit decisions create “transportation deserts,” where getting to healthy food requires multiple buses or costly rideshares. Housing policies push families into neighborhoods with higher food prices and fewer options.
Treating hunger as an individual failure does not just punish; it costs the city millions in avoidable healthcare expenses and the downstream effects of poverty-driven illness, as seen in statewide analyses of food access and health.
When so many people lack consistent access to nutritious food, the overall health of our economy and society declines. Rates of preventable illness rise. Healthcare costs soar, driving up insurance premiums and increasing public spending for everyone.
Schools and workplaces feel these effects too: children who come to class hungry fall behind, and parents miss work to care for sick kids, reducing productivity across industries.
Even businesses and those never at risk of hunger spend more. Higher prices, lost consumer spending and less innovation are inevitable in an economy weighed down by inequality and poor health. Ultimately, widespread food insecurity weakens communities and economies, costing every citizen more each year and limiting our collective potential.
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A girl prays before eating a school lunch of soup, sandwich, milk, and an apple
during the Great Depression. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) |
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And once the physical burden of hunger takes hold, communities become more vulnerable to psychological and cultural forms of control. The policing of Blackness in public spaces. The surge of “Karens” who weaponize fear. The trolling aimed at young Black leaders and HBCU students on campus.
These are not random eruptions; they are performances meant to exhaust spirits already strained by deprivation. Serwer gave us the jewel on this already: cruelty is a signal. It tells people where they stand in America’s racial hierarchy and undermines their sense of belonging. It drains the energy that might otherwise go toward collective action or imagining something better.
That is why the shift happening among Black organizers, particularly Black women, in the wake of the presidential election matters so deeply. They are taking a much-needed break, stepping back from roles that demand self-sacrifice and rejecting the machinery of depletion. They remind us that our bodies are not public utilities for political exploitation and that rest is a tool of resistance, a declaration that being alive and whole is a right.
Let’s challenge the policies that starve communities into obedience and fund programs that feed families without conditions. Build a culture where every person has enough nourishment, time and freedom to dream.
And when we do, we will also be renewing our social contract, as a living agreement to care for one another. We will be rebuilding our empathy muscles that have atrophied in a culture of scarcity, choosing connection over suspicion and shared fate over zero-sum thinking.
A nation that refuses to let anyone go hungry is a nation that remembers who we are to each other. That is the culture of care we deserve and the future we can choose to build together.
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