STORYTIME
My best friend tells a story about being on tour when someone in the van said “hey! Let’s go around and talk about our favorite lunches as a kid!?”
Almost immediately, all the working class people in the group went to sleep. If you grew up without secure access to food, you understand why.
For those of you who didn’t: if you want to figure out who has scarcity trauma from childhood, ask about food experiences. If there wasn’t enough to eat – even if only sometimes – people don’t forget how that felt, and might not remember enough to contribute an answer.
Recently, a sweetie asked me what my favorite food was as a kid. I went quiet, looking internally for the answer: a haze swirled in my mind, blurred at the edges with school lunches skipped because the shame of using the subsidy ticket instead of money burned too much, my mom carefully carefully portioning box noodles with tuna trying to stretch the servings across all of us, a woman my dad had an affair with calling herself “the ice cream lady”, the year I lived on food bank toast while my mom mourned her divorce, the grey blue color of powdered milk. Food troubles loomed, and food pleasure was absolutely not coming to mind. “I really don’t know” was my final answer. I kind of wanted to go to sleep and never return to the question.
CHILDREN AND FOOD INSECURITY
Food insecurity is defined as, “at times during the year, these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food,” [source] and very low food security is “Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.” [source ODPHP]
IN In 2020, 13.8 million US households were food insecure at some time during the year [data source ODPHP]; in 2022 that was 17 million households, and in 2023, 18 million households (13.5% of all 128.7 million households) were food insecure. The scope rises to 17.9% of households with children in 2023 being food insecure (data source ERS, USA).
Over 1 in 6 kids aren’t sure where meals are coming from sometimes, or go without.
The impacts of food insecurity are vast: a U of Toronto study found that many negative individual health outcomes correlate to it: “data indicate that food insecurity puts adults at greater risk of developing serious chronic conditions…Food insecurity makes it difficult for individuals to manage existing health problems, adhere to therapeutic diets, and forgo necessary medications because of expense.”
Feeding America describes the impacts on physical health, mental health, well-being, and school/work performance. They also identify the cause as “poverty, unemployment, and low wages” – which is technically accurate, but does not dig deep enough.
We need to ask: what is the cause of poverty, unemployment, and low wages? to get to the heart of the matter.
We need to ask: Why does the richest country on Earth not prioritize nutritional health over weapons?
Why does our economic model output punishment for those not successful in it?
Food insecurity in the US feels like: uncertainty about where food is coming from, skipping meals, stress from micromanaging how much food everyone gets, fights about using too much food or having too little food, decisions about whether to buy food or medicine or other needed items, and shame. So much shame.
SCHOOL LUNCH
Since it’s Back to School time, let me tell you another story, about school lunches in the 80s and 90s when I was but a wee free-lunch receiver.
Federally, the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) was the result of a 1930s WPA program on the recommendation of Margaret Mead that crystallized in the postwar era as an anti-communist public health measure [read a brief history of school lunches in the US from Pacific Standard magazine here]. By the mid-80s, the combination of Reagan-era budget cuts to agricultural commodities and shiny new corporatization of school food contracts lead to a decline in the nutritional value and increase in cost of the program. If you wanted an increasingly mediocre lunch at school – ketchup was classified as a vegetable – you needed to pay for it, or submit to the investigations required to determine you could get Subsidized Lunch through the CEP program, represented by a little stack of tickets you used to pay at the counter.
In 1993, research came out showing that providing crappy corporate food like Little Caesars and Chick-Fil-A was unhealthy, culminating in the 1994 Healthy Meals for Healthy Americans Act, which changed nutritional requirements for school lunches.
But for me in 1988 – 1990, pulling out the ticket for my bad thick pizza and milk, I remember the feeling, shame, clearly. It felt as if I was shouting across the cafeteria “I’m poor, everyone! My family is a mess!” It correlated to my old clothes, the school trips I never went on, the weird things that made it into my packed lunch when I brought it. I ended up skipping lunch by age 11, to avoid the feeling. The very thing that was supposed to be alleviating my food insecurity was making it all worse.
By 2010, policymakers had realized that providing Little Caesars and Chick-Fil-A was unhealthy after all, and making some kids use money and others use tickets that confirmed They Were Poor was awkward at best and painful and disincentivizing at worst, and Obama’s Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act set new nutritional standards, and funded school lunches. Programs began to change – back to 1940s standards – to universal access: everyone gets food, AND that food has high nutritional value.
Now, that access is changing again.
There’s a new set of US nutritional standards coming out this year from the current administration leadership, and impact to lunch-eaters’ health is to be seen. The funding for lunch is still very much up in the air, with a federal funding program from 2021-2025 partnering farmers with schools now cut, congressional proposals to raise the threshold for access to the Community Eligibility Provision [CEP] program [which provides free lunch and breakfast to schools based on need], the NSLP only paying about $4.25 per subsidized lunch served, and states not all able to make up shortfalls or facing budget cuts of their own.
Some states are filling in the gaps the CEP and NSLP leave, with nine states funding free-for-all programs. For example, New York State has funded free breakfast and lunch for all students – including during the summer! – starting in 2017, and making it a state mandate starting this school year. Colorado where I live now has a Healthy School Meals for All program designed to reduce the stigma associated with needing free lunch by simply distributing it to all families. It’s funded by a tax on families making over $300k/yr, but still faces funding shortfalls due to demand, so expanding funding for it will be back on the ballot this fall.
As for kids in the other 41 states, paying for lunch is back: in places where students pay, they shell out $2.95 on average [source]. $60 a month per kid, which may not seem like a lot – unless you’re choosing between giving your kid that money and paying a different bill.
THE COGNITIVE IMPACT OF SCARCITY TRAUMA
Why did the folks on the tour go to sleep? Why could I not think of a favorite food as a kid?
Those of us who’ve experienced scarcity – and in our current socioeconomic model, that would be most of us at some time or another – are shaped by the experience.
Scarcity trauma is “the psychological and emotional impact of experiencing a lack of essential resources, such as food or money, leading to persistent fear and anxiety” [source]. Scarcity trauma is why grandparents who survived the great depression never throw away a rubber band, and why a van half full of people who grew up food insecure avoided the topic instead of volunteering information about a time in their lives that created intense fear and anxiety about the lack of their basic needs being met. It’s why I could not picture in my mind a food I enjoyed as a child.
I want to differentiate here between scarcity trauma and a scarcity mindset; the former can certainly trigger the latter, but a scarcity mindset is the FEAR of scarcity, whereas scarcity trauma is the IMPACT OF THE EXPERIENCE OF scarce resources.
A scarcity mindset creates a bandwidth tax. The term is from Shafir and Mullainathan’s 2013 book Scarcity, and describes how preoccupation derived from scarcity limits one’s cognition. Whether the scarce resource is food, money, time, love, rest – the result is that someone whose cognitive bandwidth is taxed has less executive function available for other things: job or school performance, relational development, listening, memory-making, social connections, and so on.
CLOSING
School lunches are one way that the US has in the past attempted to address food insecurity for kids, in better and worse ways.But in America, there’s a maxim that there’s no free lunch, so please do not ask about it.
Notes:
- There will be about 133 million households in the US in 2025.
- The US NIH analyzed food diruption in 2023 and concluded that, across the variables of cause [climate, conflict, recession, or pandemic] cost of living crisis all impact food availability
- Even more school lunch history
