These distortions fuel the punitive programs that President Trump and his Republican allies have pushed throughout his administration. Most recently in December, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue outlined a new rule that makes it more difficult for states to obtain waivers for able-bodied SNAP recipients who need extra time to meet the current workfare requirements. His news release, titled “USDA Restores Original Intent of SNAP: A Second Chance, Not A Way of Life,” panders to negative stereotypes of poor people as willingly dependent on government handouts.

The new rule — set to take effect in April — will remove approximately 700,000 current SNAP recipients from the program, making it likely that people will go hungry and reinforcing harmful narratives about the program’s recipients. Rather than addressing the deeper social and economic issues that make food insecurity a consistent problem, the rule instead threatens to undo over half a century’s worth of efforts to eradicate hunger and malnutrition in our country.

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That the program is vulnerable to punitive rule changes today is rooted in its origins which came from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 Food Stamp Act. Never intended as a welfare program — and not part of the 1960s War on Poverty legislation — the USDA’s original food stamp program had multiple objectives. It aimed both to relieve farmers of their surplus crops and, as the legislation stated, to “provide for improved levels of nutrition among low-income households.” The program’s structure encouraged building sustainable habits of consumption for people pursuing a path out of poverty, in part by allowing recipients to make their own food choices and shop in any participating grocery store.

Passed during an era of widespread prosperity, many people found it hard to believe that any Americans could not afford food. As a result, the 1964 Food Stamp Act required recipients to first purchase a portion of their stamps before receiving the full aid. Until 1977, when this requirement was abolished, many of the country’s poorest people could not afford to receive food stamps, or had to choose between paying for food stamps or paying for other necessities like medical prescriptions, rent, utilities or child care.

Policymakers’ assumption that poor Americans could never be totally destitute was grounded in gendered stereotypes about what counted as work. Social welfare programs created in the 1960s were built on the idea that the welfare check or food stamp coupons would replace the male breadwinner whose income supported a “traditional” nuclear family (a heteronormative formula consisting of a husband, wife and two kids). This conception of family informed the addition of work requirements for “able-bodied adults” in the food stamp program beginning in the 1970s.

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The problem: many food stamp recipients didn’t conform to this expectation. Single parents — often mothers — could not meet the unrealistic demands of holding down one or multiple jobs while also finding ways to care for their children. They were either criticized for receiving federal aid and remaining out of the workforce to care for their children, or seen as irresponsible for going off to work without securing proper child care, which they could not afford. Either way, they were perceived as deviant or second-class citizens for failing to live up to the idea of a traditional nuclear family.

It wasn’t only single mothers and their children who suffered.

In the 1970s, there was backlash over college students and striking union workers’ having eligibility for food stamps. Critics charged that they could afford food if only they worked and taxpayers shouldn’t support such “irresponsible” choices. An irony lay in the fact that union workers who went on strike often did so precisely to earn wages sufficient to be a breadwinner, trying to live up to the ideal underpinning the food stamp program, not because they were shirking work.

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The debates around food and work undermined the initial intentions of the food stamp program. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman — the primary architect of the program — among others, reiterated that it determined eligibility based on financial need, not on the reasons an applicant lacked financial resources. But the public silenced these pleas by expressing widespread sentiment that government aid should go only to those deemed “deserving.” This, for example, excluded college students, because if they had the luxury of putting off work to pursue higher education to increase postgraduate income, they did not deserve federal food assistance.

The interplay between public ideas about food rights and the political agendas of lawmakers shaped the development of food stamp legislation. In 1967, activist and lawyer Marian Wright Edelman testified before Congress about starvation in the Mississippi Delta. When Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) witnessed the deprivation firsthand, he pushed for expanding the food stamp program, and the public rallied behind these calls. However, by the late 1970s and into the 1980s, both the public and politicians shifted their views on feeding hungry Americans, thanks to cases like the striking union workers and the eligible college students. They became more concerned with policing the stereotypical lazy welfare freeloader than supporting Americans going hungry.

Conservative politicians fueled this sentiment by conflating food stamps with welfare and characterizing it as an expensive and wasteful program. The solution: ever more stringent work requirements and tightening eligibility. But these provisions misinterpreted unemployment and punished it, instead of tackling systematic political, social and economic inequalities that keep poor people in a perpetual state of dependency. In reality, most people receiving federal food assistance — then and now — are actively in the workforce. They make wages that are too high to receive cash assistance but too low to cover basic living necessities, which leaves them hungry and suffering.

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Even food stamp recipients without jobs should not be framed as lazy freeloaders. They, too, are simply trying to find ways to survive as they confront other financial challenges like inadequate or too expensive child care — even not being able to afford diapers that day-care centers often require — or the need for more education or job training to secure work. Many who require waivers from work requirements are staying home to care for a sick family member or child or struggling with illiteracy or language barriers.

But rather than recognizing their humanity and needs, President Trump and his administration continue to assume and project the worst about SNAP recipients. This was best exemplified by his February 2018 proposal to replace SNAP benefits with what acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney called a “Blue Apron-type program.” The idea of boxes with prepackaged meals in lieu of SNAP benefits advanced the assumption that low-income people lack the capacity to make good nutritional choices simply because they are poor. It also advanced the idea that poor people were unworthy of gaining access to fresh produce and other healthful foods.