With its threats to stop SNAP funding, the Trump administration is trying to rip apart the long-standing marriage of convenience between food assistance and the government-created market for some of the surplus food from our fantastically (over)productive food system.

Most people writing about this in the media have absolutely no idea that these are two halves of the same thing. The tendency is to report only on the hunger piece, or only on the farmer subsidy piece. So it’s great to see Heather Cox Richardson knitting things back together in this recent piece. 

She’s illuminating one of the most confusing things about how the US has addressed food insecurity. We try to counter the effects of tying the food supply so tightly to capitalist markets, but without actually challenging market logic. How do you feed people who can’t afford to buy food themselves, pay farmers for what they’re producing but can’t sell at a profit, and not compete directly with retailers? That’s the impossible riddle that policy-makers have been beavering away at for nearly a hundred years.

HCR is a big booster of the mainstream liberal vision of prosperity and democracy, and she doesn’t really challenge anything about this whole crazy structure. But she’s also a good historian, and it’s useful to have the history set out clearly like this. I dunno, maybe there are a few folks out there who will be outraged by the pain of retailers even if the stark reality of hungry people doesn’t move them?