This week in The Contrarian, the astute anti-hunger advocate Mariana Chilton frames the SNAP cuts in the Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill as a manifestation of Wendigo psychosis, that insatiable, cannibalizing hunger that Algonquian-speaking peoples recognize lurking “in the shadows of famine and want.”
SNAP assistance is designed to ward off hunger, of course, but Chilton sees a more monstrous form of hunger in the greed of those who want to keep endlessly accumulating capital and who will readily plunder the scarce resources of the poor to do it, as this bill does.
She clearly lays out how SNAP feeds the profits of big food retailers who are able to keep wages low in part because the government picks up the tab for some of the groceries that their own employees buy at – no surprise – their own stores. Walmart, America’s largest grocery seller, is also the largest redeemer of SNAP benefits, to the tune of $20 billion in 2022.
Chilton presents this as a case of rich metaphorically devouring the poor, but I think it goes even further than that.
One of the things that most Republicans don’t seem to recognize about SNAP is that it also benefits the big food producers and manufacturers who for more than a century have been making far more food than the domestic American market can absorb.
One of the reasons food assistance has long enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress is that it lets one hand wash the other. It supports continued overproduction (because heaven forbid we should question those engines of endless growth) by creating secondary or shadow markets in the form of food aid at home and abroad.
In cutting SNAP and destroying USAID and all the other damage that Republicans are currently doing to safety-net programs involving food, it seems as though the rich are now starting to devour the rich. They’re literally undermining their own interests, in a way that feels blind and uninformed and yes, psychotic.
That’s crazy enough that it gives me a kind of weird hope that we’re finally at a moment when it might be possible to set the whole food system on some kind of more human-centered rather than profit-driven foundation. A girl can dream.
