When we think about the social safety net in the United States, we often focus on its deterioration. As with many other liberal democracies, welfare-state infrastructure in the US has been shrinking steadily over the past forty years. Feeding the Crisis draws attention to an often-overlooked countertrend; namely, that federal food assistance in America has actually expanded rapidly since the mid-1980s. How do we reconcile the massive growth of US food assistance with the broader erosion of the welfare state, and the growing poverty and income insecurity that has accompanied it? Feeding the Crisis tackles this question and, in doing so, shows how food assistance has become the primary infrastructure supporting and managing growing numbers of people living in poverty today. By combining evocative stories from two years of ethnographic research alongside food pantry clients and volunteers with a detailed history of US food and labor policy, Feeding the Crisis...

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